In general, cryptocurrencies that experience a spectacular boom during a crypto market cycle are often unable to replicate that performance later on.
Despite this, they can still experience booms of lesser intensity, and that is what is happening to Dash, or what happened to Stellar in recent months.
Dash and Stellar soar in the crypto market: how long will the rise last?
Dash debuted on the crypto markets as early as 2014, the year after Dogecoin but a year before Ethereum.
The real significant boom in its price occurred in 2017, when in just ten months it went from $15 to an astonishing $1,600, marking a remarkable all-time high.
However, already during the bear market of 2018, it lost a lot from the highs, plummeting to $40.
During the subsequent major bull run of the crypto markets in 2021, it couldn’t quite repeat its previous performance, managing “only” to return to $400 before falling again.
The major problem occurred after the implosion of the Terra/Luna ecosystem in 2022, to the point that the price then plummeted first to $25 and then even to $21.
Although these levels were still above the $15 from which the bullrun started in 2017, they were, however, much lower than even the $40 of 2018.
With the Trump-trade at the end of 2024, it had climbed back above $65, only to plummet to $18 in June of this year.
However, starting from the first of October, when Bitcoin awakened, it marked a sensational doubling in just over a week.
However, this is just a rebound after a bottom marked very low, so much so that the current price of $45 is only slightly higher than where the bull run started eight years ago.
Dash was initially conceived as Digital Cash, meaning a transactional crypto useful for payments, but with the boom of stablecoins, there was no longer a need for this type of crypto.
By now, the market movements of its price should primarily be understood as speculative movements of a crypto project that is likely obsolete, or at least semi-forgotten and decidedly crushed by the competition.
The Boom of Stellar (XLM)
The journey of XLM, the native cryptocurrency of Stellar, is very different.
Stellar is also a crypto project born in 2014, as a decentralized version of Ripple (now XRP), and the price of XLM also had its big boom in 2017.
At that time, in seven months it went from 0.004 dollars to almost 1$, marking a historical record at 0.93$ in early January 2018, which still lasts today.
However, although in 2018 it plummeted to $0.04, by 2020 it had already bounced back decisively, so much so that during the great bull run of 2021 it at least managed to recover to $0.7.
Additionally, during the bear-market of 2022/2023, it fell to $0.07, which is above the $0.04 of 2018.
In late October 2024, it was still worth only $0.09, but with the Trump-trade it soared to $0.57 in just over a month.
What happened next closely resembles XRP.
It should not be forgotten that Stellar from a technical standpoint is very similar to XRP, and indeed the market trend of its native cryptocurrency XLM also resembles that of XRP.
During 2025, in fact, XLM moved sideways in a manner very similar to XRP, although a bit more volatile, always oscillating within a range between $0.23 and $0.49 with rare exceptions.
In parallel with XRP, in July it entered a new phase of lateralization within a more compressed range, between $0.35 and $0.45.
It seems absolutely possible that the parallelism with XRP could last for a long time, and that the price of XLM could fundamentally follow that of XRP.
The Long-Term Trend
It is clear, however, that in both cases, whether for XLM or Dash, the long-term trend is not positive.
In the case of XLM, it turns out to be slightly negative, while for Dash it seems to be decisively negative.
Although there are other cryptocurrencies that have performed much worse, these two are not among the most interesting in the long term, at least for now.
The long term in the crypto markets is literally dominated by Bitcoin, with Ethereum in second place. However, it should be noted that some more recent cryptos, like BNB or Solana, seem to be carving out an interesting role even in the long term.