After a sluggish start to the year, bullish sentiment is back to cryptocurrencies. The recent outperformance of alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) points to a greater risk appetite among traders.

Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) both fell 1% in 24 hours yesterday, compared to an 8% rise in Cardano ADA token and a 3% jump in Dogecoin (DOGE). LRC, the native token on Ethereum's scalable Loopring network rose as much as 34% after the blockchain project shared an update on its partnership with GameStop (GME).

Some analysts believe that cryptocurrency prices will remain high in the near future, but that may not last long. The previous range, which was at the beginning of the year, was between $30,000 and $40,000. Open interest, or the total amount of outstanding contracts in the bitcoin futures market, has stabilized over the past few months. According to a report by Arcane Research, this could indicate fewer liquidations as bitcoin trades in a narrow price range.

Liquidation occurs when an exchange forcibly closes a leveraged trader's position as a safety mechanism due to partial or total loss of the trader's initial margin. This happens mainly in futures trading, which only tracks asset prices, as opposed to spot trading, where traders own the actual assets.

Funding rates, or the cost of holding long BTC positions in perpetual futures quoted on major exchanges, have been neutral over the past few months. This means that sentiment among traders is neither bullish nor bearish, despite Bitcoin's 30% rise from its January 24 price low of around $33,000.

LRC Loopring is up 34% on GameStop's NFT trading platform beta. LRC, the Ethereum Loopring scaling network's native token, rose sharply on Wednesday after the blockchain project shared an update on its partnership with GameStop, a video game seller whose volatile price and sometimes coordinated action in early 2021 made it a favourite with meme exchange traders. In the last 24 hours, the price of the LRC token has risen 34%.