Solana and a couple of smaller Ethereum competitors are surging even as Bitcoin edges lower, something not often seen in the crypto market.

Solana was up 13.7 per cent to US$112.51 at lunchtime, Sydney time, and yesterday hit an all-time high of US$114.43. It has now leapfrogged USD Coin and Polkadot to become the No. 8 crypto.

Meanwhile Bitcoin had trended down 3.4 per cent to just under US$47,000, something that would usually pull down the entire market.

Ethereum was flat at US$3,221, while Cardano had also dipped, falling 4.4 per cent to US$2.75.

Coingecko

But Celo had surged more than 50 per cent to US$6.33 after announcing a US$100 million “DeFi for the People” initiative involving blue-chip decentralised finance protocols Aave, Curve and Sushi, as well as smaller players PoolTogether, 0x, UMA, Valora, Ubeswap and Moola Market.

The No. 65 crypto, Celo is a blockchain ecosystem optimised for smartphone users, with phone numbers serving as public keys.

“DeFi for the People aims to make DeFi accessible to everyone by powering real-world use cases and focusing on mobile-first adoption,” said Celo co-founder Rene Reinsberg.

“We’re excited to collaborate with the biggest projects in DeFi to bring more than 1 billion new users into the DeFi ecosystem over the next five years.”

In the past seven days Celo coins have more than doubled in value.

Fantom was up 22 per cent to US80.77c after the Fantom Foundation announced an incentive program involving 370 million Fantom tokens, worth US$296 million at current prices.

The Fantom Foundation will be doling out FTM token to projects that maintain a total value lock (TVL) of more than US$5 million, rewards they can use to incentivise yield farming, hire more developers or other purposes.

Tokens in the Avalanche ecosystem, which had been surging on the US$180m DeFi incentive program announced by Avalanche a week and a half ago, plunged.

AVAX tokens were down 11.2 per cent to US$41.48; BENQI was down 30 per cent; Pangolin fell 18.3 per cent; Avalaunch was down 24.1 per cent and Penguin Finance and Snowball were both down around 45 per cent.

Both Fantom and Avalanche are Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible, meaning it is fairly easy to transport protocols and tokens from one platform to another.

Harmony, another EVM-compatible platform, was up 21.1 per cent to 12.2c.

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