Author: Sam Ouimet 
Updated Feb 4, 2019 at 19:28 UTC
The price of BitTorrent Token (BTT) is closing in on six times the price of its initial coin offering (ICO), which occurred just one week ago.
59.8 billion BTT tokens were sold through Binance’s token sale platform on Jan. 28 at a price of $0.00012 per token, according to sale information provided by the exchange.
Up nearly 40 percent today alone, BTT is now trading at a considerably higher price of $0.000798 – representing a 565 percent increase from its ICO price, Coinmarketcap data reveals.
That sale sold out in minutes, prompting complaints from users who were unable to make purchases due to technical issues. In an attempt to compensate for the technical difficulties, the BitTorrent Foundation completed an airdrop of 5,000 tokens to each user unable to participate in the ICO.
The token sale came months after BitTorrent was acquired by Tron last summer, and weeks after a new cryptocurrency was announced that would be integrated with BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer file-sharing tech. That acquisition led to criticism and some staff exits, and the unveiling of the BitTorrent Token has drawn its share of critique as well.
Since the token sale, a number of cryptocurrency exchanges have listed BTT for trading. The largest markets for the token thus far are UpBit and Binance, which combined account for more than 90 percent of BTT’s $270 million total trading volume in the past 24 hours.
Given the state of the broader cryptocurrency market, BTT’s recent performance is an outlier. The seven-day return for BTT since the ICO accounts for near 600 percent. By contrast, the price of bitcoin reflects a three-percent different from its opening price on Jan. 28, per CoinDesk pricing data.
Disclosure: The author holds BTC, AST, REQ, OMG, FUEL, ZIL, 1st and AMP at the time of writing.
Bittorrentimage via Shutterstock