Under-the-Radar DeFi Altcoin Outpaces Overall Crypto Market This Week Amid Testnet Rollout of New Feature

One under-the-radar decentralized finance (DeFi) altcoin is outpacing the overall crypto market this week as the project launches the testnet of a new payments feature.

In a new announcement, cloud-focused DeFi protocol Akash Network (AKT) says it has rolled out the testnet of its Stable Payments feature, which will allow traders to settle payments using Circle’s stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC).

As stated by Overclocked Labs, the creators of Akash Network,

“Stable Payments on Akash just successfully passed initial testing. This key feature of AKT 2.0 will enable users to settle deployments in USDC. It’s live on the public testnet right now, and it will be included as part of the upcoming Akash GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) mainnet upgrade.”

News of the new feature sent AKT skyrocketing, as the digital asset went from a price of $0.577 on August 6th to a peak of $1.17 on August 11th, an increase of over 102%. The altcoin is trading at $1.12 at time of writing.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire gave a shout-out to the collaboration with Akash Network, describing the partnership as a decentralized cloud infrastructure with globally available settlement currency.

According to Cheng Wang, CFO of Overclock Labs, adding USDC to Akash Network will help alleviate the issues associated with only having AKT as the only supported form of payment over the protocol. Wang says the issues include a lack of price stability and the process users have to go through to acquire AKT.

AKT, which also focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), launched AI testing on its testnet in May, which at the time also caused the crypto asset’s price to rise.

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