[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong] Stellar (XLM) has risen more than 30 percent over the past month, raising expectations that it could return to the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market value.

On June 23 local time, blockchain media outlet Decrypt reported that XLM spent most of this year ranked 17th to 21st by market value. It has recently posted relatively strong gains among major cryptocurrencies and climbed to 13th.

A short-term pullback has emerged. XLM fell 9.72 percent over the past week and 7.96 percent over 24 hours to $0.1953. Still, it has held on to a large share of its monthly gains. Last week it surged 27 percent on a weekly basis and at one point rose to 12th by market value. It later slipped back to 13th as the market corrected.

The market points to network expansion and broader institutional collaboration as drivers of the recent rise. Crypto payments network Mesh integrated Stellar last month as a settlement layer in its global payments ecosystem. Around the same time, Stellar developers applied the so-called Yardstick upgrade, Protocol 26, to the mainnet. The upgrade aimed to strengthen network security and expand institutional participation.

After the upgrade, stablecoin issuer Circle introduced the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, or CCTP, on the Stellar mainnet. That move further strengthened Stellar's interoperability with other blockchains.

Institutional collaboration is also expanding. The U.S. Depository Trust & Clearing Corp is working with the Stellar Development Foundation to pursue a plan to tokenise DTC custodial assets on the Stellar network by next year. The industry rates this as one of the most watched institutional participation projects in the Stellar ecosystem.

Development activity is also continuing. The Stellar network recently released JS SDK v16.0.0 and carried out a Protocol 27 testnet upgrade. Real-world asset tokenisation platform Arkas also launched GOVY, a tokenised U.S. short-term Treasury product, on the Stellar network.

XLM's market value is currently about $6.61 billion. It would need to expand to about $13.0 billion to enter the top 10 by market value. Assuming Dogecoin's market value holds, it would need to rise about 97 percent more, which corresponds to about $0.38 based on the XLM price.

XLM is currently chasing three cryptocurrencies ranked ahead of it. It has given back some of its recent gains, but it is being mentioned as a candidate to enter the top 10 by market value in this market cycle as ecosystem expansion, institutional partnerships and technical upgrades continue.

The market is watching whether broader integration with payments infrastructure, the impact of Circle's CCTP introduction and progress on the DTCC tokenisation project can translate into higher actual network usage. If this trend continues, the potential for shifts in XLM's market-cap ranking is expected to grow.