Synthetix hits one-month high as SNX rallies 25% ahead of layer 2 exchange launch

Synthetix (SNX) prices reached a one-month high on Monday as traders looked for alternative upside bets against a mixed cryptocurrency market.

Bids for SNX/USD achieved an intraday high of $13.76 during the Asia-Pacific trading session, following an approximately 25% price rally that started Sunday. A flurry of technical and fundamental factors contributed to the sudden market demand for Synthetix tokens, including founder Kain Warwick’s update on the project’s much-awaited layer 2 solutions.

A new synthetic exchange underway

Layer 2 refers to the techniques for scaling blockchains by taking computation and transaction load from the parent layer and put them onto a base layer. Synthetix, an Ethereum-based synthetic asset platform, has been testing such scalability solutions since October 2020 to limit its dependency of Ethereum’s higher gas and transaction fees model.

Last Saturday, more than 12 hours before the SNX/USD rate started rallying, Warwick announced Synthetix would launch a layer 2 exchange in the week beginning July 26. He also revealed Optimistic Ethereum (OΞ) has the underlying technology that would back the synthetic asset (or Synths) trading platform.

“The initial Synths supported will be sETH, sBTC, and sLINK. In addition, the price feed for SNX will also be deployed by Chainlink,” Warwick stated.

Optimistic Ethereum, formerly known as Plasma Group, proposes to scale Ethereum blockchain via a unique mechanism called Rollup. Rollups are Ethereum-based Smart Contracts that receive transaction data from the blockchain’s main layer and send it to L2, where the computations take place. It then receives the computational result from the L2.

So far, the Optimism team has demonstrated that it could process more transactions with lower fees than Ethereum. Meanwhile, Synthetix has chosen to become one of the earliest Optimism adopters in anticipation that it would inspire other decentralized finance projects to adopt it as well.

“If other major DeFi protocols can adopt Optimism, all transactions between them will be able to remain on L2,” wrote Will Comyns, a researcher at Messari, in his June 23 report.

“This means users will not have to wait an entire week for their funds to be integrated back on the Ethereum main chain before they can interact with another protocol.”

So far, the “optimistic” fundamental has proved beneficial to raise the Synthetix prices. That is partly because SNX serves as a collateral token to create Synth. In return, stakers receive additional SNX on their staked amount through Synthetix’s “inflationary supply” model. They also receive a fixed amount of fees in SNX on the trading of the Synth.

Golden cross

Synthetix’s latest 25% pump has pushed its 20-day exponential moving average (20-day EMA; the green wave) above its 50-day simple moving average (50-day SMA; the blue wave). As a result, the 20-50 MA golden cross has been instrumental in predicting the price rally from November 2020 to March 2021.

Nonetheless, SNX/USD remains at crossroads with the $13.85-$14.80 resistance area, a range with a history of capping the pair’s upside attempts, and which was also holding as support during its correction period between February and May 2021. Closing above the resistance area would have bulls test the following Fibonacci range of $16.37-$17.69.

Conversely, a sharp pullback from the $13.85-$14.80 would likely push SNX/USD towards the $11.92-$10.74 range. Such a move would also risk invalidating the 20-50 golden cross setup.

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