In a Dec. 2 报告, 10x Research founder Markus Thielen said retail crypto trading volumes reached their second-highest level of the year on Dec. 2, with South Korean traders in a frenzy over a series of “high momentum” altcoins.

Ripple’s XRP token 瑞波币$2.63 witnessed over $6.3 billion in volume on the day in South Korea. Dogecoin 狗狗$0.4191 came in second at $1.6 billion, followed by Stellar XLM$0.5382 at $1.3 billion, Ethereum Name Service ENS$41.10 at $900 million and Hedera HBAR$0.3498 at $800 million.

“These high-momentum cryptocurrencies are being driven predominantly by retail traders, capitalizing on and reinforcing momentum-driven trends.”

XRP, ENS, and HBAR — which belong to a category of older tokens colloquially called “dino coins” by crypto natives — have all been major outperformers when compared with the rest of the crypto market, each respectively gaining 90%, 73%, and 168% in the last week.

Thielen noted that Bitcoin’s funding rate — an indicator of perps activity — was “relatively mild” at just 15% on an annualized basis.

When combined with a recent uptick in trading activity for altcoins, Thielen said this was a surefire sign that an “altseason” is underway.

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“We are seeing one of the largest divergences recorded between a relatively mild Bitcoin funding rate at 15% annualized while retail trading volumes in Korea have ramped up to $18bn.”

“The action is clearly in the altcoin market and everybody needs to have a strategy to catch these waves but still remain disciplined,” he added.

Ripple’s XRP has been staging a historic rally over the last month, surging from a price of $0.50 to a new yearly high of $2.80 on Dec. 2, per TradingView 数据.

The startling run-up has seen the token eclipse both Solana 索尔$225.61 and Tether 泰达币$1.00 in terms of market cap, making it the third-largest crypto asset by total value at the time of publication.