A new announcement from leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance has helped the price of a little-known cryptocurrency, Ravencoin ($VN), surge. The move comes during a cryptocurrency bear market that has seen Bitcoin ($BTC) drop to a $15,000 low.

After the Ethereum mainnet merged with Ethereum’s Beacon Chain to complete the widely-anticipated Merge upgrade on September 15, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization moved to a Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol, which led to surging interest in other digital assets.

As mining hardware is no longer usable on the Ethereum network, cryptocurrencies compatible with Ethereum’s mining algorithm have seen interest in them surge. These include Ethereum Classic, which is seen as the “original” Ethereum blockchain that was forked after the 2016 DAO hack, and Ravencoin.

In a surprising announcement Binance Pool, the mining pool run by leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance, announced it would add support for Ravoncoin mining. The announcement reads:

Binance Pool has officially launched the RavenCoin (RVN) mining service, which utilizes the PPS+ settlement method. Mining fees for the RavenCoin (RVN) mining pool are set at 1%.

Ravencoin is a cryptocurrency built on a fork of the Bitcoin code. It adds additional features designed to allow individuals to issue tokens on its blockchain, and RVN needs to be burnt on the network to issue assets on the blockchain.

Binance’s announcement helped the cryptocurrency’s price jump by nearly 10% in just 24 hours to trade at $0.02 per token. The cryptocurrency’s market capitalization is now around $250 million.

As CryptoGobe reported at the time, Ethereum Classic’s hashrate notably jumped around 300% from around 66.5 TH/s before the Merge to around 270 TH/s after the upgrade, as miners whose equipment no longer works for Ethereum turned to the network. Similarly, $RVN saw its hashrate surge 51% after the Merge.

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