It's a truism that as goes Bitcoin, so goes the rest of the crypto market. The price of trendsetter BTC is highly correlated with Ethereum and most other cryptocurrencies.
So, when the price of Bitcoin dropped from nearly $40,000 to $30,000 in the past week, just about every other coin and token was a deep shade of red as well.
But one coin has been bucking that expectation of late: Tron.
Of all the crypto assets in the top 50 in market capitalization as of this writing on Tuesday, it was the only one whose price was up for both the past 24 hours and past 7 days. It registered a 3.6% and 11.5% increase, respectively, during those time frames.
To be sure, TRX, the native coin of smart contract blockchain Tron, had its own freakout with the rest of the crypto market on Monday, vacillating from a high of $0.09 to a low of $0.08.
What it didn't have, however, is the same weeklong meltdown that many other coins had. Its low yesterday was its highest floor price since December.
That's right. In a world where Bitcoin, Ethereum, and nearly every major tech stock have posted double-digit percentage losses since January 1, TRX is actually up for the year—by nearly 8%. Even Monday's shakeup didn't put it in the red.
Since its inception, Tron has rarely been the recipient of positive news. Its creator, Justin Sun, was accused of plagiarizing the Ethereum whitepaper and has had several public spats with Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin. More recently, Sun has attracted negative press over his purchases and subsequent management of crypto exchange Poloniex and software firm BitTorrent.
Moreover, Sun's publicity antics—such as buying a seat on Jeff Bezos' rocket into space, bidding on dinner with Bitcoin-hating Warren Buffett, and negging the Ukrainian government for a crypto airdrop to Tron users—have kept him in the public eye even if they didn't endear Tron to crypto users.
Tron's price has remained buoyant for a few reasons. First, it announced plans in April for a new algorithmic stablecoin and reserve similar to the Terra network. Given the collapse of Terra's UST peg on Monday, that news hasn't aged well.
But Tron's use of the Tether stablecoin has been a good play. There's more USDT on Tron ($41.7 billion) than there is on Ethereum ($39.8 billion), according to data from CoinMetrics, adding utility to the network's decentralized applications, which are heavy on gambling apps, asset swaps, and derivatives trading and (which nonetheless lag well behind Ethereum in terms of usage and value).
Tron is currently the 17th-largest crypto asset with a market capitalization of $8 billion.