⚠️ Stellar Trading Volume Spikes 927% - XLM Crypto

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Stella, or the XLM token, is outperforming yet again, and for good reason. Traditional finance is now integrating with the blockchain, and a lot of people are speculating on future adoption. Now, I've already published a video on Stella yesterday, before the big run-up. The market takes its time to digest the news, but we have seen 3.2 times more views on that video compared to the average video on this channel.

[00:00:25]And where there is attention, there tends to be also price increases, right?

[00:00:29]More attention tends to also lead to more purchases. Now, what's going to happen from here? Is this going to stay a fundamentally driven trade, as in people buying because of the DTCC tokenizing assets for Stella, or are we now seeing more more leverage building up in XLM that could potentially deflate again and then crash the price? That's what we're trying to answer in this video. Hi, my name is Gerhard. I've been in the crypto space for the last 8 years. I hit my first million 3 years ago, and I did this mainly through active trading of Bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies. And in this video, I want to share the data that I personally look at in order to outperform the market. I have outperformed buying and holding Bitcoin by on average 2% per month, so that's my portfolio measured in BTC. But unfortunately, this is more or less a trust me, bro graph. The real proof comes in the publicly listed trades that I started to make 2 years ago. And the last trade was here, Luna Classic. Every single trade is published, and on average, a trade made 5.3%.

[00:01:31]Why do I say that that's a proof? It's because every single trade can be verified with its Telegram message. So, just click on the opening and on the closing, and then you can see. This is the message when I started to short Luna Classic on the 12th of May, and here is then the message where I closed that short on the 26th. And so, that's true for every single trade over here. And I don't know any other person here on YouTube that's willing to share all of that data. But let's get back to Stellar and let's have a look at how much higher this price could go from here and also how much leverage is currently baked into the price. Because fundamentally that's always the risk, right? People get bullish about an asset then short-term traders get into the asset using leverage, using perpetual futures, but people are using perpetual futures in order to enter a rally but then also exit. So the more short-term interest there is in an asset the more risky it becomes, the more likely it can potentially crash again. That's the risk that we have to monitor also with Stellar. Now what we see over here, that's XLM relative to Bitcoin and long-term it tended to underperform. And whenever it went up, it tended to go up very, very sharply as it does now, but when the rally finishes, it tends to long-term trickle down. And that's the potential risk. This is a 63% underperformance versus Bitcoin and here is a 55% underperformance. So a rally like this is unlikely going to stay that dynamic very long-term. The number of transactions on the Stellar chain is pretty much flat for the last four to six years. There was no real growth. We saw the peak at the end of 2021. We could make the argument that maybe XLM trades around an equilibrium, right?

[00:03:16]This dotted [clears throat] line over here and we are slightly above that equilibrium with positive momentum. So maybe XLM has the potential to go up by another 180, potentially even 240%. So that's the bullish story. However, this is XLM relative to the rest of the altcoin market. Why did Stellar long-term underperform versus the rest of the alts? The answer is as so often token inflation. More XLM tokens hit the market year over year and that selling pressure, at least long-term, isn't outpaced by the demand. And here is that selling pressure. So over the last three years, the number of XLM that are circulating grew by roughly 25%.

[00:03:57]Yes, there is more usage of the blockchain as in the total value locked is going up. There's more capital on the Stellar chain. But, that's currently close to 200 million. The market cap of Stellar is at 6.6 billion. So, more than 30 times the value on the chain. We also have to look at the source of that TVL increase of Stellar. The largest application on the chain is Spacewalk.

[00:04:22]Now, Spacewalk is not just on the Stellar chain. It's also on Arbitrum and Polygon on Ethereum. Yes, Stellar is the largest of the chains, but still it has direct competition and Arbitrum does see more more usage over time. Now, because of the token inflation, we tend to see lower highs with every rally. We were above 60 cents in 2021. The recent rally only brought us slightly below 50 cents.

[00:04:48]What's not going down over time though is the market cap with every single rally. And again, that's because of the token inflation. It takes more and more capital to achieve the same kind of price because there's more tokens floating around. Now, this market cap over here would imply that if the current momentum prevails, that we could potentially more than double from here, right? If we were to double in the price, if we were to get to 41, 42 cents, then the market cap would be at 13 billion. Very much in line with prior price peaks. And so really, if this is now our base case that Stellar simply rallies very quickly and then over time tends to trend down versus Bitcoin because of the token inflation, the fundamental question is how much longer can the current rally last? Does it still make sense to buy XLM at least for the short term? To answer that question, we have to look at the perpetual futures market at the levered bets. Now, here's the spot market. We had 173 million worth of trading volume on spot in the last 24 hours. On the perpetual futures market, we had 1.4 billion. So, the perp market is roughly eight times larger than the spot market. This ratio is already worse compared to yesterday's video where it was only five times larger. So, clearly leverage has grown faster than spot trading volume in those last 24 hours. Now, the funding rate is still quite neutral. And that might be because of market makers. The open interest though is going up a lot. Now, what does this mean? Open interest is the number of bets on the Stellar price.

[00:06:22]When this is very high, there's a lot of short-term interest. People that buy on the leveraged markets on perpetual futures, they're just in it for short-term speculation. They're buying now with the intention to sell in a few weeks. If you've got the intention to hold an asset for longer, then you're just buying on the spot market. You eat the losses of transaction costs because you can hold it for long-term. If you just hold for short-term, you've got lower transaction fees on the perpetual futures market, but you pay the financing fees. And financing fees are very high. They are expensive. It's not very smart to hold on the perpetual futures market long-term. It's rather good to buy perpetual futures if you're just trading short-term. That's why open interest is so interesting. When open interest is high, that means short-term trading is high. And there is correlation between short-term interest and the price. That's what we're seeing in this graph. Right, open interest is in green. The XLM price is in yellow.

[00:07:19]And when the number of bets on an asset goes down, that's also when subsequently the spot price tends to go down. Now, currently open interest is at around 300 million. And the historical top was at around 400 to 500 million. So, there is more room for potential further expansion of leverage, thus pushing the price higher. But yesterday, it looked like this. There was no leverage expansion at all. Now, in the last 24 hours, we saw a lot of additional leverage. So, the situation has changed drastically. The market is not yet superheated, but it's definitely heating up. The same is true for the trading volume, right? When there's more trading volume on the perpetual futures, that means there's more short-term speculation. The current trading volume is not at historical heights, but it's definitely elevated, and it looks very different to yesterday. We can also see how there's a lot of liquidations. So, there are enough people that doubt this current stellar rally, and the market makers buy up more of the token in order to liquidate those people. And so, fundamentally, this is a question of market timing. Now, there are two ways to trade this. The first one is to just bet on the current rising price, and then have a stop loss and adjust that stop loss. As the rally doesn't continue anymore, then you just exit and take the profit. The second way to trade this is to just wait until the rally has already stopped, and then look for an entry opportunity to bet on a falling price of Stellar over time. That's what I tend to do with my relative valuation trades as well, right? I'm shorting Luna Classic relative to Bitcoin. I'm shorting Pingu relative to Bitcoin. I'm shorting Polygon relative to Bitcoin. It's always after a short squeeze like this where there are very good opportunities. In other words, I'm looking for the current rally to stop. And when it does, I want to enter the short. This could be today, this could be tomorrow, this could be a week from now. But, once the rally isn't as quick anymore, then the overall momentum likely has turned around. Now, I ran the numbers for Stellar, and this is my fundamental approach. I look for two moving averages that give us golden crosses or death crosses that historically made good trading signals for a particular asset. Now, I ran all of those simulations here. Every single data point over here is a single back test. So, we're looking at 200 moving averages on one side, 200 moving averages on another side. So, we've got 40,000 back tests here. And the very best performance is in the very short-term moving averages. And so, what's the best combination? It's shown over here. It's a 2-day versus 8-day simple moving average. Here is how well this outperforms buying and holding Stellar over time. Extremely nice positive performance, very constant as well. And so, this is my personal approach of trading Stellar. I'm waiting for this current rally to finish, and once we get the death cross, right? We got the golden cross over here on the 23rd of May, but once this turns around, when the rally doesn't continue that much anymore, when the leverage is exhausted, and we then see the 2-day moving average going below the 8-day moving average, that's when I will enter a short. And I will have a notification for that setup in my system. And also, premium members of this channel will get that notification as well. And they can then just automatically copy trade, be this based on signals like this, right?

[00:10:43]We did the same for Terra Luna. We didn't short over here, we didn't short over here, we shorted after the rally had been exhausted. And once that happens, once the market makers have to sell off their stack again after manipulation, that's then when we close the position for a profit. And that's in the end what gives those 5.3% average gain per trade. If you don't like manual copy trading, there's also automatic copy trading. We target to make 44% [snorts] per annum with that, but that's only available to the annual members of premium. So, I recommend just starting out monthly, and then see how this goes.

[00:11:18]Most members started out that way, and then switched over later. And so, the momentum for Stellar, for XLM, is still bullish. The 2-day SMA is above the 8-day SMA. We also still have room for additional expansion of leverage, but the asset is definitely getting hotter over time. It's becoming more dangerous over time to bet on a rising price. So, at some point this momentum will turn around. The best is probably, if you're currently holding seller, to just use a trailing stop loss. And then, once the momentum stops, to just exit very, very quickly. If you got some value out of this video, feel free to subscribe. I publish videos regularly. A like would be very much appreciated as well. It helps the channel grow. See you next time on YouTube. I'll see you on premium. Link to premium pops up here on the screen. There's also a 7-day money-back guarantee. In case you don't like it, just message me within the first 7 days and I'll refund you. No questions asked. See you next time.

[00:12:04]Cheers.