ELF/USD surged 142% on Thursday as activity around its newly launched SashimiSwap, a DeFi token modeled after SushiSwap, drove heavy buying.
Aelf had remained relatively quiet on crypto social channels due to its low price and limited market movement. That changed dramatically within 24 hours when the token’s price rocketed.
ELF rose from $0.126 to as high as $0.27, gaining roughly $0.14 and recording a 142% increase. That rally propelled ELF from the 165th to the 107th position by market capitalization among cryptocurrencies.
The price spike coincided with the launch of SashimiSwap, a decentralized finance (DeFi) project presented as a variant of the recently controversial SushiSwap.
Aelf promoted the SASHIMI token as a “fair version of Sushi,” emphasizing there was no pre-mine and no team allocation.
On SashimiSwap, traders incur a 0.3% fee per transaction. Of that fee, 0.25% is distributed to liquidity providers, while the remaining 0.05% is earmarked for community governance once it is secured in a DAO contract.
Within hours of launching, SASHIMI’s trading volumes surged, briefly ranking it among the top tokens on Ethereum by volume, with reported liquidity around $200 million. Intraday trading volume reported on CoinMarketCap jumped from about $11.5 million to over $431 million, and was approximately $417 million at the time of reporting. Market capitalization climbed from roughly $54 million to over $131 million.
On-chain analytics provider Santiment noted that Aelf’s address activity reached an 18-month high, suggesting continued interest in the Ethereum-based token and potential for further movement.
ELF/USD price analysis
The ELF/USD pair encountered resistance near $0.28 late Thursday, prompting a pullback as sellers stepped in to take profits.
The pair corrected lower during the early hours of the Asian trading session on Friday, with the decline appearing driven largely by profit-taking. Continued selling pressure could force bulls to defend near the previous day’s opening price.
At the time of writing, buyers were attempting to defend gains at around $0.17, while the upside was capped by the Bollinger Bands upper curve (20-period) near $0.23. The next meaningful support cluster sits near the 20-day and 50-day simple moving averages, converging around $0.13.
Technical indicators on the 4-hour chart show a hidden bearish divergence on the MACD along with a downsloping RSI. If sellers regain control, ELF/USD could retrace further toward the middle Bollinger band near $0.106.