VeChain Up 22% – Binance Competition and Mainnet Swap the cause?

VeChain was the largest market mover this week, jumping over 22% in 24 hours.

Today the business-friendly smart-contract system is valued at $1.31b, with each VET worth $2.58 at 6:00am this morning. In comparison, at the start of the week each VET was worth just $1.81.

Although the price has now come back down to $2.36, the move has put VeChain at the 17th spot in market cap on coinlib.io, above Binance Coin ($1.32b) and bellow NEM ($1.56b).

But why has VeChain experienced this meteoric price rise? In recent change the project has undergone a substantial transformation, with the project launching its mainnet and exchanging user’s old VEN tokens for the new VET (VeChainThor). The conversion rate was 1/100, with 100 VET tokens being issued for every 1 VEN.

Quite often in cryptocurrency markets, mainnet launches are a ‘sell the news’ event – price drops are frequently a result of big project upgrades. It comes as no surprise then that VeChain’s mainnet launch has not been the only bit of good news for the project.

The highly popular Binance exchange announced yesterday that it would be conducting a 100 million VTHO airdrop. (VTHO is the gas for the network, operating much like NEO).

#Binance 100 Million #VTHO Airdrop for #VET Holdershttps://t.co/kYvQvu4XXa pic.twitter.com/R4xEAjudZ8

— Binance (@binance) July 26, 2018

The event will happen on the 1st of August, and will see the company give away VTHO to all VET holders on the trading platform, with the 100 million split proportionally. That is, the more VET users hold, the more they will receive.It seems likely that this competition is responsible for the boom in VeChain’s price – the digital currency had been suffering in the weeks leading up to this announcement.

While Binance’s competition may bring more users to their platform, and spread awareness of VeChain and digital currencies in general, concerns have been aired regarding these types of giveaways.

The worry is that these competitions legitimize the many scams on-going on Twitter that are holding fake giveaways. New users can easily be fooled by the scammers, who masquerade as popular crypto personalities and companies and ask for ether to to register for a fake giveaway.

The scams have seen many lose their hard earned crypto, but the ramifications go beyond individual losses. These scams smear cryptocurrencies, connecting them with scammers, in a similar way that crypto was smeared with connections to the dark web.

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