While general cryptocurrency markets have remained sluggish this year, one cryptocurrency is bucking the trend, doubling in price over the last month.

That would be Binance Coin, a coin originally designed to facilitate trades on Binance Ltd., the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, but notably also freely tradable on other exchanges.

Binance Coin is up 42 percent over the last seven days much to the excitement of cryptocurrency investors. By comparison, bitcoin rose only 1.3 percent over the same period while other leading cryptocurrencies report similar price increases of about 1 percent.

“Binance Coin has been able to buck the crypto correlations principally because people buy it as a way of speculating on industry growth,” Mati Greenspan, senior market analyst at brokerage eToro, told Forbes Tuesday. “If the markets are moving it means people are trading, and Binance has a big share of those volumes.”

Binance Coin has surpassed coins and tokens such as Tether, Stellar and Tron to become the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to data from Coin Market Cap.

Now it has better-known cryptocurrencies in its headlights. With a market cap of $2.127 billion, Binance Coin sits just behind Bitcoin Cash ($2.32 billion) in sixth position.

Its constant price growth has some suggesting that there are huge things ahead for Binance Coin. Justin Sun, founder and chief executive officer of the TRON foundation, called Binance Coin “a new bitcoin.”

The hype machine around cryptocurrencies is well-documented and at least some of the price increase in Binance Coin could be attributed to that. But the coin is pitched not only as way to facilitate trades on Binance but as a payment method for a growing number of services.

Parent company Binance is also making it easier for people to buy cryptocurrencies, launching support for credit and debit cards Jan. 31.

Whether Binance Coin can maintain its stellar growth is yet to be seen. As of 9 p.m., Binance Coin was trading at $14.99, its highest level since last June.

Image: Binance