The vechain price (VET) exploded by 30 percent on Thursday, headlining a widespread recovery that raised the cryptocurrency market cap by more than $5 billion over the past 24 hours. The cryptocurrency, which serves as the native token of the smart contracts and supply chain management-focused VeChain blockchain, had traded below $0.008 during Thursday’s early morning hours but began to shoot upwards shortly after 7:00 UTC. By 8:00 UTC, vechain had crossed the $0.10 threshold, and the token ultimately rose as high as $0.012 during intraday trading before settling back to a present value of $0.01 on Binance. Even after the surge, though, VET is still down seven percent against the dollar over the past week. Nevertheless, this makes it one of the better-performing altcoins ranked in the top 100, with seven-day returns comparable to monero (XRM) and ethereum classic (ETC) — the latter of which has embarked on a surge of its own due to its impending listing on cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase. Vechain now has a market cap of $571 million, propelling it to 20th in the cryptocurrency rankings. The token now sits approximately $74 million 19th-ranked zcash. VET/USDT | BinanceVechain trading is overwhelmingly centralized on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. At present, Binance’s VET/BTC, VET/USDT, VET/ETH, and VET/BNB pairs account for approximately 92 percent of all vechain trading, with the remainder distributed between smaller platforms such as LBank, Gate.io, and Kucoin. Source: CoinMarketCapThere does not appear to be any specific organic factor driving the rally. Kucoin reopened deposits and withdrawals following the vechain mainnet token swap, but — given that Kucoin is only the 58th-largest exchange and VET is listed on several larger platforms — this announcement is unlikely to have caused such a profound change in the vechain price. Absent any clear triggers, it’s likely that a significant portion of the rally may be attributable to a pump-and-dump