Stellar jumps 8% as Bitcoin taps $8,000; what will push XLM even higher?

Bitcoin itself posted 6 percent gains, surging as high as $8,000 on Jan. 6, but it wasn't BTC that was setting the pace, it was seemingly XRP and Stellar Lumens.

In the past 24 hours, XLM rallied by 8 percent, with the price of the popular altcoin reaching as high as $0.0495 as buyers have stepped in en-masse.

It isn't clear what pushed XLM higher on Jan 6, though there are a few theories floating around.

The foremost of these being that XRP's surge led to similar gains in the price of XLM. Earlier Jan. 6, CryptoSlate reported that XRP saw quite the surge as Bitcoin pressed higher, rallying by 12 percent to the current price of $0.22 from multi-year lows around $0.18 established just a week or two weeks earlier.

XLM effectively underwent the exact same bout of price action, strongly rallying higher off multi-year lows in the wake of XRP, described as a "Cousin" of XLM. Add to that the fact that both XRP and XLM have been some of the worst-performing cryptocurrencies over the past few years, implying that they should see stronger relief bounces than other altcoins, and this theory makes even more sense.

While XLM has already seen an impressive performance over the past few days, there may be a confluence of fundamental factors that will push the cryptocurrency higher and higher.

Yes, the fact that Keybase ended its airdrop may seem like a bearish sign-the giveaway's premise was to spread the adoption of the cryptocurrency-though, in reality, it may benefit XLM holders.

With giveaways contributing to cryptocurrency inflation rates, the premature conclusion of the Keybase airdrop may actually result in less selling pressure on the XLM market.

Even if the abovementioned fundamental events don't do anything to aid Stellar Lumens, altcoins as an entire asset class have purportedly room to rally, meaning that everything from Ethereum and Litecoin to XRP and XLM could have legs to move higher from here.

It the chart, the pseudonymous trader is depicting that the aggregate market capitalization of all altcoins has bounced off a key logarithmic support, and is thus poised to rally higher into 2020 and beyond.