As we move into Q2, a number of projects are moving ahead with continued development, and this week’s choices are set to benefit from significant updates and announcements that should strengthen their market positions and benefit their communities. The news should also result in increased amounts of attention to each respective currency over the coming weeks.
1. Elrond (EGLD)
Elrond eGold is the native currency of the Elrond economy. The company aims to use eGold and eGLD interchangeably where users will be able to use the token for all the native Elrond services such as general staking and delegation, and various DeFi options.
Elrond CEO Beniamin Mincu has confirmed the coming launch of the Maiar Exchange and MEX token airdrop to EGLD holders. The exchange will act as an Automated Market Maker (AMM) and its native governance MEX token will be the first token of the Elrond ecosystem with a 100% distribution to the Elrond community. From the total of 1 Billion MEX tokens, 47.50% will be claimable by EGLD holders in the first year, and 44.95% will be earned by liquidity providers over the next 10 years, with halvings taking place every 2 years. The first snapshot for EGLD holders will begin on April 19, with 52 weekly averages of 7 daily random snapshots to take place over one year. The Maiar exchange is targeted to go live on April 30, and you can found out more about the launch and airdrops here.
2. Theta Fuel (TFUEL)
Theta Fuel is the operational token of the Theta protocol. It is the second token in the Theta protocol that works in conjunction with the Theta Token that exists today. It powers on-chain operations like payments to relayers for sharing a video stream, or for deploying or interacting with smart contracts.
The Theta Edge Network enables the broadcasting and viewing of decentralized live stream videos, and Theta Edge Nodes earn TFUEL tokens for sharing resources via the Edge Compute and Edge Cacher functions. The Theta Mainnet 3.0 upgrade will allow users to stake their TFUEL tokens and also incorporate a new TFuel burning mechanism. This will add a network fee attached to using Theta edge network, and act as a balancing force against the new TFuel supply. The upgrade is set to take place on April 21, and the new features should provide greater value for Theta network participants, and to find out all the details on Mainnet 3.0, you can find the official announcement blog here.
3. Tezos (XTZ)
The Tezos platform supports smart contract functionality and uses a programming language called Michelson, which enables formal verification. The platform uses a Proof-of-Stake model to achieve consensus, and users who maintain the Tezos network by staking their XTZ are referred to as “bakers”, while the staking process is called “baking”. Users can perform baking themselves or delegate it to others.
Tezos Domains are set to launch on April 21 with domain names with five or more characters (apart from the top-level suffix .tez) to be made available via a series of auctions using an open ascending-price auction model. The auctions will take place over three weeks with the bidding process scheduled to end on May 12, after this date registrations will be fully open with names shorter than five characters becoming available for registration during Q3 of this year. To find out more about the auction launch schedule, you can read the Tezos Domains outline here.
How did the coins perform last week?
The seven day period led to mixed results across the market; and ETH fell by 1% and is currently trading at around $2, 120. FIL dropped by 13%, and is currently trading at $152, and OGN fell by 28% over the week, and is currently trading at $1.85. Over the course of the week, the market moved from an overall valuation of $2.05T to $1.98T.
As we move into Q2, a number of projects are moving ahead with continued development, and this week’s choices are set to benefit from significant updates and announcements that should strengthen their market positions and benefit their communities. The news should also result in increased amounts of attention to each respective currency over the coming weeks.
1. Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum is an open-source distributed blockchain that pioneered smart contract functionality. It operates as a decentralized virtual machine which can execute scripts and be used to transfer its native ether token between different nodes. Although ether can be used as a currency, it is more commonly used to execute smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain also hosts a number of ERC20 tokens such as BNB, MKR, USDC, and TUSD.
Why Ethereum? Berlin Hard Fork Takes Place on April 14
Ethereum Core Developers have confirmed that the Berlin hard fork will take place on April 14 at block height 12,244,000. The network upgrade will be deployed on four test networks before going live on mainnet, and includes four Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). EIP-2565 addresses ModExp Gas Costs, EIP-2929 covers gas cost increases for state access opcodes, EIP-2718 deals with Typed Transaction Envelopes, while EIP-2930 is related to optional access lists. The hard fork is one of many upgrades along the way towards ETH 2.0, and you can read more about the Berlin hard fork here.
2. Filecoin (FIL)
Filecoin is a decentralized file storage network that facilitates markets for storing and accessing data. Filecoin miners earn FIL coins in exchange for storing files reliably. Filecoin users can select between different miners depending on their specific storage needs – for example, a user might want to pay a higher price for more reliable storage. Filecoin is built on top of the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) protocol for distributed data storage and sharing.
Filecoin is another platform undergoing a network upgrade this week, and the Filecoin network will commence an upgrade at epoch 665280 which is estimated to occur or approximately on April 12 at 22:00 UTC. The FIL network will actually go through a hard fork in order to upgrade however, no new tokens will be created, although FIL holders are advised to refrain from making transfers in the hours leading up to the upgrade. Major exchanges such as Binance have already announced their support for the hard fork and will take care of any technical requirements involved for FIL holders. The upgrade incorporates a mandatory release of Lotus that upgrades the network to version 11, and implements FIP-0014, and you can find out more about the network upgrade and hard fork here.
3. Origin Protocol (OGN)
Origin is a platform for building decentralized marketplaces on the blockchain. The platform facilitates the creation of decentralized e-commerce stores, and artist based sales of digital products such as NFTs.
Why Origin Protocol? Lupe Fiasco’s NFT Airdrop on April 12
The team behind Origin Protocol have announced the launch of Lupe Fiasco’s NFT drop on their NFT Launchpad on April 12. Lupe Fiasco is a Grammy award-winning multi-platinum musical artist, and will launch five open edition NFTs. Each NFT will provide admission to a live performance of Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor concert, hosted on Futurestream.tv, and will also include access to a live meet and greet for concert attendees. Holders of the five NFTs will also have access to limited edition merchandise and premium digital content. The airdrop will go live on nft.lupefiasco.com, and you can find out more about the NFT drop on Origin here.
With the first quarter of 2021 already behind us we are now already looking forward towards what Q2 2021 will bring. In Q1 2021 cryptocurrencies became a trillion-dollar asset class for the first time, as the total market capitalization of the sector climbed from $777 billion to $1.87 trillion. Will the bull market continue or is a market correction behind the corner? Will the non-fungible token (NFT) hype cool down or will the sector find new, unprecedented use cases for these tokens? And most importantly for the up-and-coming investors, which coins are the most likely to end in the green, perhaps even outperform the industry’s average growth? To answer this question, we advise you to continue following our Top 3 Coins to Watch series.
1. Bitcoin
Although we believe Bitcoin does not need much introduction and that all eyes would be on it even if it were not featured on our list, here is a short summary of the history and key characteristics of the first truly decentralized digital currency. The world’s pioneer cryptocurrency was launched by pseudonymous figure named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and has a capped supply of 21 million coins. The decreasing miner block rewards makes the cryptocurrency scarcer with time, ensuring a deflationary nature.
Bitcoin sees Continued Growth for the Sixth Month in a Row – $100,000 by the End of the Year Now Sounds Pretty Reasonable
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is often referred to as the crypto market health barometer, since Bitcoin’s performance influences the general sentiment across the whole crypto space. This means that altcoins are thriving when Bitcoin is bullish and vice versa, when Bitcoin dips, altcoins are usually hit even harder. Nevertheless, the market barometer is indication very favourable and bullish market conditions. Bitcoin has managed to keep its price above $50,000 since March 6, this is 31 consecutive days or a whole month. In addition, Bitcoin is seeing continued growth for already more than half a year. March was already the 6th month in a row that BTC managed to close in the green.
Furthermore, Bitcoin’s monthly candles continue to stay within a very steep ascending channel. Will Bitcoin end April in the green too? According to historical data, which shows Bitcoin gained 51% on average in April over the past 10 years, and options open interest, which shows that many investors are betting on $80,000 by the end of April, this seems quite likely. If BTC closes April with a green candle, this will be the first time that we would see seven 7 straight green candles, since September 2012, when Bitcoin gradually climbed from $4.30 to $15.4 over the course of seven months. It is unbelievable that Bitcoin was once trading at such a low price less than 10 years ago.
While Bitcoin’s market capitalization, which is currently around $1.1 trillion, continues to grow, quite the opposite is happening to the BTC market dominance, which is just slightly above 55%. According to one analysis this could be explained by the fact that investors are converting their Bitcoin into large market cap altcoins in an attempt to maximize their profits.
In addition to long-term retail investors buying up almost every dip, Coinbase exchange money flow indicates that U.S. institutions are still accumulating. The popular cryptocurrency exchange has lately been seeing increased volumes followed by huge outflows to BTC cold wallets. Cryptocurrency analyst Willy Woo recently speculated:
“Maybe an unannounced institution is buying, maybe it’s a private hedge fund or many of them. But there’s certainly a lot of buying going from Coinbase which tends to be U.S. institutions.”
Finally, the bullish price predictions are getting even more bullish. One year ago, people who claimed that Bitcoin is going to hit $100,000 or more were called dreamers and unrealistic Bitcoin bulls. Today, this number seems well within reach. Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg, recently tweeted that Bitcoin seems to be transitioning to a risk-off digital reserve asset:
#Bitcoin in Transition to Risk-Off Reserve Asset: BI Commodity — Well on its way to becoming a global digital reserve asset, a maturation leap in 2021 may be transitioning Bitcoin toward a risk-off asset, in our view. pic.twitter.com/Ycr1LSqEAJ
The attached picture shows that in the most bullish scenario Bitcoin could end 2021 with a price as high as $400,000. JPMorgan’s analysts remain a bit more conservative, predicting Bitcoin to reach a price of $130,000 in the long-term. The long-term price target has recently been bumped down from $148,000 as the price of gold, which plays an important role in JPMorgan’s projections, dropped. Nevertheless, this price predictions are coming from institutions that did not even approve Bitcoin a bit more than a year ago.
2. ChainLink
ChainLink provides data and price oracles, which are essential for the normal function of smart contract-enabled blockchain platforms. ChainLink’s price and real-world data oracles have seen numerous implementations and their popularity is still increasing. Their oracle service is one of the most reliable and trustworthy services available and the connection with smart contracts is end-to-end secured, leaving very little space for the manipulation of the execution of smart contracts. The platform incentivises providers of good data feeds while the nodes that submit bad data will see their staked LINK tokens slashed. The project launched in 2017, when it also raised $32 million of funding through an ICO.
Substrate module Brings ChainLink’s oracles to Polkadot Network
The popular crypto oracle provider ChainLink recently announced arguably the biggest news from this project for this year – its expansion to the Polkadot environment. The ChainLink team revealed on April 2, that their oracles are now available in the form of a “pallet” on the Polkadot environment:
#Chainlink Price Feeds are now available as an oracle pallet to all #Substrate, #Polkadot, & #Kusama chains. This gives teams building across the Polkadot ecosystem a standardized, easy-to-integrate, & time-tested oracle solution to support their DeFi appshttps://t.co/Ak1vqQxlYk
The ChainLink oracles being available in the form of a native Substrate “pallet” means that developers of any Polkadot or Kusama parachain can now seamlessly and super-easily integrate ChainLink oracles into their blockchains through a simplified library. You could also say that pallets are “like drag-and-drop blockchain building”, like a Polkadot developer Dan Reecer put it in one of his tweets.
While ChainLink nodes regularly publish price data in each block on Ethereum, allowing smart contracts to either use that data or simply ignore it, this will not happen on Polkadot. The choice to integrate the ChainLink Substrate pallet or not is up to each individual parachain, which means that the parachains that do not need price oracles for their operation can save up on blockchain space by not opting in. For those who integrate ChainLink oracles, however, this might enable several DeFi-centric use cases of their Polkadot or Kusama parachain. Nevertheless, experts warn that additional development work will likely be required to adapt the ChainLink pallet for use with smart contracts.
ChainLink is also one of the high market cap altcoins that is starting to see institutional involvement, as Grayscale launched a LINK trust along with some other altcoin trusts in mid-March. The launch of the Grayscale LINK trust triggered a 12% LINK pump the following day, but despite the initial surge things cooled off pretty fast for LINK. If we exclude the initial pump, when LINK was way more volatile (therefore also a riskier investment), ChainLink was underperforming when compared to Ethereum and Bitcoin. While LINK’s price chart closely resembled ETH’s one at the end of March, the gains of the popular oracle provider token are not again a few percent below the gains posted by ETH.
Relative price performance of LINK as compared to the one of BTC and ETH from March 17, when Grayscale Launched ChainLink Trust, to today.
According to data provided by ByBt.com Greyscale bought up 115,570 LINK tokens for its ChainLink Trust from the trust’s launch on March 17 until April 1. The purchase of 65,570 LINK on Thursday, April 1, helped push the price of LINK over $30, where it still trades. Currently LINK is changing hands at around $32.5, but the token is still believed to have a major upside potential.
3. Enjin Coin (ENJ)
Enjin Coin (ENJ) is an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency (ERC1155 token) used to directly back the value of next-generation blockchain assets. It is designed for social gaming as it allows virtual goods to be traded on the blockchain using smart contracts and ENJ as a payment method. The project aims to change the fundamental nature of virtual worlds by providing infinite high-speed transactions between players and game providers at zero cost. More than a million people are already using Enjin’s products to manage, create, and trade these blockchain assets.
A high-speed Bridge Network JumpNet Launched on April 6
JumpNet a high-speed two-way bridge network that facilitates free, swift, and secure on-chain transactions of ENJ and ERC-1155 tokens launched on April 6. JumpNet, which connects the Enjin blockchain with Ethereum and third-party chains is part of the Enjin Coin team’s continued strive to improve NFT compatibility and functionality. It makes minting, trading, and sending of NFTs much easier. In addition, the team have also announced that the launch of JumpNet will be accompanied by the popular GameTalkTalk joining the Enjin ecosystem.
In addition, Enjin is getting ready to launch Efinity, a next-generation NFT blockchain on the Polkadot network. The company recently concluded a private sale which raised more than $18.9 million for the development of the platform, but there is about to be a public sale as well. While JumpNet takes case of compatibility, Efinity, will address the scalability and accessibility as it promises around 700 to 1,000 forever free transactions per second (TPS). In addition, Efinity will bring a new level of utility for the Enjin Coin token: staking – users will receive rewards paid out in EFI for staking their ENJ. Furthermore, the NFTs held in wallets will be auto-staked, allowing their owners to earn a small amount of passive income just for holding Enjin-based items. It should go without saying that passive income coins are extremely popular among cryptocurrency investors and the coins that provide passive income have performed very well during the past bull runs.
To conclude, Enjin is one of the few projects that was the most successful at capitalizing on the NFT hype and the rapid growth of the Enjin ecosystem has also sparked up speculations whether Coinbase will list ENJ or not. While the prominent U.S. crypto exchange already supports ENJ custody, the Enjin Coin is not being traded on the platform yet. The Coinbase team recently accidentally published an ENJ support page, which additionally fuelled the speculations. The influx of new investors and fresh capital after a potential Coinbase listing would without a doubt cause ENJ to surge even higher.
Which cryptocurrency will be the best performer in the recovering crypto market? Will it be the governance token of an established DeFi protocol, a privacy-focused coin implementing DeFi features, or some other asset that we have not included in our this week’s selection of the top 3 coins to watch? Time shall tell, but we think the three assets that you are about to read about have a good shot at posting significant gains.
Outside of the crypto circles, a large amount of media attention was captured by the “Ever Given”, a container ship that ran aground on the bank of the Suez Canal, thereby blocking one of the busiest trading routes in the world. The attempt to refloat the ship finally succeeded on March 29, and the Canal is now open again. The 3rd project on this week’s list is in a way like the diggers and tugboats that participated in the vessel’s rescue operation – it tries to remove obstacles in the international shipping industry. The key difference is that it aims to do this by digitalizing the trade and transport documentation and not by physically removing the sand and pulling large vessels. Nevertheless, make sure to have a look.
1. Uniswap (UNI)
UNI is a governance token of Uniswap – an automated market maker (AMM) protocol. The platform, which facilitates quick swaps between different Ethereum-based tokens, has recently been struggling to keep its users and market share because of high fees on Ethereum. UNI tokens are ERC-20 tokens that allow holders to decide on the future of Uniswap by voting on proposals. The governance token holders also oversee the usage of funds from the community treasury, and the protocol’s fee switch.
Uniswap v3 Ethereum Mainnet Launch target is May 5
After much anticipation and even more speculation, the Uniswap team has finally revealed more details regarding the improved version of the popular DeFi protocol. According to the official blog post from March 23, the team is aiming to deploy Uniswap v3 on Ethereum mainnet on May 5, while layer 2 deployment on Optimism is going to follow shortly after. In fact, this makes UNI an interesting token to watch throughout the whole April and likely May 2021 as well.
Uniswap v3 will feature several important improvements for liquidity providers (LPs), which could result in an up to 4,000x increase in capital efficiency. A new feature called “Concentrated liquidity” will allow LPs to provide liquidity just to a specific price range. Thus, savvy LPs will be able to earn the same amount of fees with just a fraction of the underlying capital, provided the asset pair trades in the range that they are providing liquidity to. The concentrated liquidity could also be used to mitigate the risk of one asset in the pool significantly dropping in value. In addition, LPs will be able to place multiple positions per pair composing their own AMM curve.
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Uniswap v3’s groundbreaking new feature is Concentrated Liquidity positions
Rather than being required to allocate capital across the entire price spectrum from 0 to infinity, each LP is given full control over what price ranges they wish to provide liquidity to pic.twitter.com/AOCm340YI9
Furthermore, Uniswap v3 will also include support for flexible fee tiers and integrate advanced oracles. The Uniswap team also revealed that since liquidity positions are now unique for each LP, they are no longer represented by fungible tokens but rather non-fungible tokens (NFT). Uniswap expects that over time, more complex strategies including auto-rebalancing algorithms, fee-reinvestment and lending will be tokenized, allowing LPs passively copy the strategy of other more experienced LPs.
A detailed technical description of the new features is available in the Uniswap v3 whitepaper. Developers are already able to test the Uniswap v3 smart contracts as they have been deployed to the Ropsten, Rinkeby, Kovan, and Görli testnets.
2. Horizen (ZEN)
Previously known as ZenCash, Horizen is a privacy-focused coin that enables encrypted messaging and utilizes supernodes and Zk-snarks technology. The project’s development is led by a decentralized governance community.
Horizen team is looking to further boost the protocol’s utility and become more than just a pure privacy coin project. Therefore, the project is launching StakendZEN (stZEN), an ERC20 token representing ZEN, which will allow ZEN holders to take part in the Ethereum-based DeFi protocols while staking their ZEN coins to earn Horizen node staking rewards at the same time. The stZEN tokens will be issued and exchanged through StakeHound’s service at a 1:1 ratio compared to ZEN. The feature is scheduled to go live on Horizen mainnet on March 30. More information concerning the novel feature can be found here.
3. CargoX (CXO)
The CargoX Platform is an Ethereum-based blockchain document transfer platform. While the project’s main aim is to digitalize the logistics industry and improve its efficiency, the platform can also be used in financial, manufacturing, trading, energy, services companies, and even governmental agencies. This blockchain solutions enables a fast, secure, and auditable way to transfer original documents as well as ownership of these documents. In addition, it facilitates distributed teamwork even with assets that would normally have to be handled manually in the corporate office environment, which proved to be extremely useful during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CargoX platform to be used by Egyptian Authorities from April 1
The Bill of Lading (BL) is one of the most important documents in the international trade and transport. This hard-copy document is issued by a carrier, may it be shipping line or freight forwarder, and confirmed the receipt of goods, lists contract of carriage and ownership of the goods. Since the manual dealing with the Bill of Lading has already proved to be a bottleneck in the international trade, governments around the globe are looking for ways to digitalize the documentation (develop an electronic BL) and the workflow around it to facilitate even faster and frictionless import and export process. And this is where CargoX, which has developed a proof-of-concept solution that tackles exactly this problem, comes to play.
Furthermore, CargoX’s Smart Bill of Lading platform is already a fully functional product. In fact, in just a few days, Egyptian Foreign Trade authority is launching the pilot phase of an Advance Cargo Information System, which utilizes CargoX’s solution. From July 1, 2021, all Egyptian importers and foreign companies exporting to Egypt will be obliged to use CargoX’s Smart Bill of Lading. In addition, the platform’s utility is not limited to maritime transport but can also be utilized for cargo aircrafts, as well as freight trains. In addition, Indian Port Association (IPA) is also testing CargoX’s platform. Reportedly, more than 60% of Indian ports are favouring integration of the smart Bill of Lading. Given the support of the Indian Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs CargoX will likely make a big breakthrough to the Asian market as well.
Although the news has not been publicized a lot, the CXO is already up more than 40% in the past 7 days and around 140% in the past month. The fact that CargoX already has a fully functioning product addressing a real-world problem means that adoption should not be too big of a problem. In fact, the company has already secured invitations to collaborate from the World Economic Forum and the European Directorate Generale for Mobility and Transport Digitalisation of the Transport and Logistics Forum. To conclude, CargoX and its CXO token clearly have a huge potential to grow.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the hottest categories on the cryptocurrency markets right now. While DeFi has already had its first hype-driven boom during the summer of 2020, the NFT markets have only recently started to see exponential growth. From crypto art and in-game collectable items to digital identity solutions – the NFT’s use cases seem almost unlimited. While this hyped-up subgroup of cryptos might be a bit overheated at the moment, almost every project that has recently implemented a new NFT-related feature has seen the price of its coin skyrocket. The NFT-focused project in this week’s selection is accompanied by a governance token of a famous decentralized exchange and a project that focuses on decentralized governance.
1. Uniswap (UNI)
UNI is a governance token of Uniswap – an automated liquidity protocol and currently the most popular decentralized exchange (DEX). UNI tokens are ERC-20 tokens that allow holders to decide on the future of Uniswap by voting on proposals. The governance token holders also oversee the usage of funds from the community treasury, and the protocol’s fee switch.
Uniswap V3 could Solve the Issue of Extremely High Network Fees Soon
The Ethereum-based decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol Uniswap quickly rose to popularity during the DeFi summer of 2020. However, the unicorn themed DeFi protocol is currently struggling to compete with other, much cheaper forks of the project. The main problem is that a transaction fee on Ethereum can range from $20 to over $100 on a bad day, making Uniswap essentially useless for many of the unconfident DeFi newcomers as well as traders who want to trade smaller volumes. But Uniswap team has hinted that all these issues will be addressed in the next protocol upgrade, called Uniswap V3, which is scheduled to be released later this year. Uniswap’s CEO Hayden Adams tweeted:
“2019: Uniswap V1 proved AMMs can compete with traditional exchanges; 2020: Uniswap V2 will prove AMMs can do things traditional exchanges cannot; 2021: Uniswap V3 will face slippage and capital efficiency head on to prove AMMs can outcompete traditional exchanges on all fronts”.
Reportedly, Uniswap is going to address the issues by integrating a Layer 2 scaling solution since waiting for Ethereum to solve its scaling and congestion issues on their own with Ethereum 2.0 might end in disaster for the popular DEX protocol. Uniswap V3 could roll-out as soon as this May. If the announced upgrade successfully solves at least part of the protocol’s current issues, Uniswap could reclaim its throne of the DEX with the highest trading volume.
In addition, rumors are spreading that Uniswap as well will take a dive into the popular world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Whether the project is just going to lunch tokenized swag, e.g., an Unishirt or Unisocks ($SOCKS), which they have done before, or implement a major NFT feature such as an integrated decentralized NFT marketplace, remains unknown. Either way Uniswap V3 could send ripples throughout the space once it is deployed and could fuel UNI to rally even past the $50 mark.
2. Enjin (ENJ)
Enjin Coin (ENJ) is an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency (ERC1155 token) used to directly back the value of next-generation blockchain assets. It is designed for social gaming as it allows virtual goods to be traded on the blockchain using smart contracts and ENJ as a payment method. The project aims to change the fundamental nature of virtual worlds by providing infinite high-speed transactions between players and game providers at zero cost. More than a million people are already using Enjin’s products to manage, create, and trade these blockchain assets.
Leaked Website Indicates that Coinbase Could be Preparing to list Enjin
Enjin is one of several projects that successfully capitalized on the recent NFT hype. The gaming-based project announced two scaling solutions (JumpNet and Efinity) earlier this month. With the aforementioned solutions Enjin aims to facilitate gasless (free) transactions of both fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from any blockchain. Following the announcement, ENJ has seen a massive rally, causing the token’s price to increase by more than 200% – it surged from around $0.40 to a local high of $1.51 on March 4. The market capitalization also spiked from less than $100 million to more than $1 billion in merely a few days. But the rally did not stop just there as demand drove ENJ to set consecutive all-time highs of $1.94, $2.20, and $3.03, which is the current ATH price, set on March 15.
In light with the increased demand for ENJ several exchanges began looking into the project. While ENJ pairs were supported by Binance and the FTX exchange even before the rally, numerous exchanges, such as Gemini, Huobi and OKEx have only recently introduced the support for ENJ spot trading or futures contracts. Nevertheless, it seems that we are still awaiting one big and important listing – the one from the U.S.-based Coinbase exchange. The good news is, that the listing could be just around the corner, at least according to a leaked EnjinCoin support website which has been published on the exchange’s support section for a few days. Although Coinbase supports Enjin custody already from September last year, many took the accidentally published support page as a confirmation that ENJ spot trading is soon going to be made available on Coinbase. The influx of new investors and fresh capital due to a Coinbase listing and the hype around this event could cause ENJ to ascent even higher.
3. DAO Maker (DAO)
DAO Maker is a blockchain-based platform that is looking to assist start-up companies in the launch, management, and closure of a token sale. The project aims to support several token sales models, all of which will be fully compliant with regulatory requirements.
The DAO Maker is going to launch a multi-investment platform called the Dao Pad on March 25. The Dao Pad will allow DAO token holders to easily participate in the future token offerings. To kickstart the Dao Pad, the Cere Network project will be conducting a public token sale on the freshly launched platform. To be eligible to participate in the Cere token sale, investors will first need to stake at least 1000 DAO tokens on the platform. Besides staking to participate in token offerings, the DAO token can also be used to provide liquidity to Uniswap V2 liquidity pools and participate in the project’s governance. In addition, incentives for users are also paid out in DAO. March has been a very important month for the projects as the DAO Maker team have conducted HAPI Strong Holder Offering (SHO) and the DAFI Protocol SHO earlier this month. In addition, 3,209,535 DAO token worth around $13,088,593 have recently burned. All of this has translated to a good price performance for DAO. The token is currently changing hands at around $8.00, very close to its all-time high price of $8.51 set yesterday, March 22. DAO is also up by more than 40% in the past month.
Another week, another ATH price for Bitcoin as the world’s largest cryptocurrency set its new top price over the weekend by changing hands for as much as $61.662 per coin on March 13. Bitcoin’s price has since faced a readjustment of around 10%. While another BTC breakout in the near future seems likely, our this week’s selection of top coins to watch focuses on coins that have substantially more developmental momentum at the moment. From upgrade and new feature deployments to deflationary changes in tokenomics, all these factors could significantly influence the asset’s future price action.
1. Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform and its native asset Ether (ETH) is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Ethereum features the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute Turing-complete scripts. This gives Ethereum immense flexibility and allows users to deploy a wide variety of smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) on the blockchain. The contracts and dApps operate in a fast, immutable and trustless manner. The speeds and capabilities of the Ethereum blockchain are going to further increase when Ethereum 2.0 is fully launched.
EIP-1559 to Adjust Ethereum Fee Determination and Burn some of the Supply with Every Transaction
The highly anticipated Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 is now officially on track to be included in Ethereum’s upcoming London hardfork in July. The proposal will change how fees are determined on Ethereum as well as introduce a mechanism that will burn a portion of the fee with every transaction. Instead of auctioning gas fees to get a transaction featured in the mined block, EIP 1559 will introduce a standard fee called a base fee. While the network will still be able to adjust the base fee in light with the current demand and users will be given the ability to add tips to their transaction, this change will likely make Ethereum fees lower and more predictable, which was the main aim of the improvement. In addition, when EIP 1559 rolls out a tiny bit of the fee will be burnt reducing the total supply of ETH. According to an analysis conducted by Dune Analytics, around 1 million ETH, potentially even more, could be eliminated from the circulation every year. Research director at Messari Eric Turner even noted that in some cases this could create deflationary conditions and highlighted the importance of this change:
“Now, they’re actually controlling inflation on Ethereum. In some cases, you’re looking at negative inflation so it’s definitely important.”
Ethereum miners are naturally strongly against the EIP 1559 at they will verylikely lose revenue after the change is implemented. Many of the major mining pools have already announced that they oppose EIP 1559 and their combined hashrate surpasses 51% meaning that they could perform a 51% attack. Most likely, we will se a Proof-of-work chain split either post ETH 2 launch or even much sooner. Nevertheless, Ethereum will likely tourn out the winner of this mining war, as it did last time, when Ethereum Classic was forked. While ETH 2 deployment is still far in the future, Ethereum miners will eventually be replaced with stakers, and miners will have to deal with this fact sooner or later.
In addition, Ethereum is apparently on the brink of implementing several Layer 2 solutions. Creator Vitalik Buterin recently stated that the rollups Layer 2 solution is coming very soon and will likely fully address Ethereum’s current scalability needs. Buterin estimates that with Layer 2 and PoS combined Ethereum could effectively handle over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Meanwhile, the Berlin upgrade is scheduled to be deployed on April 14. Compared to the London upgrade, the Berlin upgrade is much less exciting. It will only integrate 4 less important Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs): EIP-2565, EIP-2929, EIP-2718, and EIP-2930.
Pricewise, Ether is currently trading a bit more than 11% below its all-time high price. With a valuation just shy of $1800, ETH is currently down by 2% in the past 7 days. While this sounds like a high price for ETH, $1800 could be considered an excellent entry point a few years down the line.
2. ChainLink (LINK)
ChainLink provides data and price oracles, which are essential for the normal function of smart contract-enabled blockchain platforms. ChainLink’s price and real-world data oracles have seen numerous implementations and their popularity is still increasing. Their oracle service is one of the most reliable and trustworthy services available and the connection with smart contracts is end-to-end secured, leaving very little space for the manipulation of the execution of smart contracts. The platform incentivises providers of good data feeds while the nodes that submit bad data will see their staked LINK tokens slashed. The project launched in 2017, when it also raised $32 million of funding through an ICO.
ChainLink could Surge Due to Supports of Dynamic NFTs
ChainLink has apparently been aware of the fact that non-fungible tokens could prove to be a very popular crypto subgroup already in 2020. In June 2020, during the DeFi summer, when all eyes were on DeFi yield farming protocols, ChainLink posted this guide on creating dynamic NFTs using ChainLink’s oracles. Dynamic NFTs are unique digital collectibles that change their traits or even price based on an input received from a data oracle. This allows NFTs to be connected to real-world data. For example, the value of an NTF representing a football player could change based on his real-life performance. In addition, ChainLink has an integrated Verifiable Random Function (VRF), which allows NFT creators to randomize the creation and the distribution of their collectables, a feature that is especially useful for randomly spawned in-game items. Furthermore, ChainLink has hinted that NFTs could turn out to be a very good blockchain-based identification tool. The article writes:
“Chainlink allows smart contracts to query identity-based blockchains to verify personal credentials, as well as to append data to a person’s identity based on an output from another business process. Interestingly, identity may interplay with cyber-physical systems in the future, wherein a digital identity will give authorized users access to a physical system.”
Last year ChainLink has also established a partnership with the GET protocol – a blockchain-based, transparent, and secure event ticketing solution. The ticketing market is expected to reach a $70 billion of yearly volume and GET protocol’s business would likely be blooming if there were no gathering restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In terms of price performance, LINK has been lagging a bit behind other top 10 coins in the current rally. LINK is currently changing hands at around $27.40 and is down by 5% in the past month and 11.5% in the past week. Despite the red numbers, there is no apparent trend change. The long-term trendline still points to the upside, leaving LINK a lot of space to catch up.
3. WAX (WAXP)
WAXP Token is the underlying token of the Worldwide Asset eXchange™ Blockchain, which is a ledger designed to facilitate faster, easier, and safer transactions for both customers as well as operators of the e-commerce websites. The WAX Blockchain uses Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) as its consensus mechanism and is fully compatible with EOS. The platform features incentive and community voting mechanisms, all designed to boost WAX’s usability in the e-commerce sector. The platform has evolved into one of world’s leading decentralized video game and entertainment networks, specializing in the buying, selling, and trading of virtual items (NFTs).
The WAX team have recently launched WAX’s new tokenomics model, which marks the project’s entry into the DeFi space. The new model, which was unveiled already in January, allows users to swap their WAXP tokens for WAX Economic Activity Tokens (WAXE), which can be staked in the Uniswap’s WAXE-ETH Liquidity Pool. WAXE liquidity providers are rewarded in ETH and WAXG (WAX Governance Token). Users will receive rewards at the end of every two-week period, also called an epoch. The team next WAXE staking epoch will commence on March 17. Anyone can participate and stakers have the possibility to unstake their WAXE at any time. The company is also hiring new employees. In addition, there are plenty of funds in the Wax Lab’s development fund, indicating that the WAX blockchain is in for the long-run.
The cryptocurrency market appears to be turning bullish again with Bitcoin retesting the highs of around $54,000. Nevertheless, this week’s selection focuses on coins that are not among top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap. These three cryptocurrencies all have slightly different use cases, but there is one they all do have at least one thing in common. All three projects could drastically benefit from the recently made announcements, airdrops, or upgrade deployments this week, which makes them a potentially lucrative investment. In must be noted, however, that this is not investment advice and that you should do your own research prior to investing in any of these assets.
1. Enjin Coin (ENJ)
Enjin Coin (ENJ) is an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency (ERC1155 token) used to directly back the value of next-generation blockchain assets. It is designed for social gaming as it allows virtual goods to be traded on the blockchain using smart contracts and ENJ as a payment method. The project aims to change the fundamental nature of virtual worlds by providing infinite high-speed transactions between players and game providers at zero cost. More than a million people are already using Enjin’s products to manage, create, and trade blockchain assets.
ENJ sets its new ATH price following scaling solution announcement and increased adoption in Japan
The Enjin team recently announced that their project is evolving into a multi-chain ecosystem for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The Enjin’s ecosystem will now spread across the Ethereum, as well as JumpNet and Efinity blockchains and support with the support for both fungible and non-fungible tokens. JumpNet is a layer 2 solution, that acts as a high-speed bridge network, facilitating free and instant on-chain transactions of Enjin Coin and ERC-1155 tokens. Efinit, on the other hand is a NFT-specialized decentralized blockchain that will support next-generation token features and assets from any blockchain. Two-way bridges between Ethereum, JumpNet, Efinity, and third-party chains will be established, enabling users to easily mint and transfer tokens onto multiple networks without having to pay astronomical gas fees.
In addition, Enjin has been approved by the Japanese Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA) in January. JVCEA is a reputable self-regulatory organization. which is also recognized by the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA). Following the JVCEA’s approval ENJ has been listed on Coincheck, one of Japan’s largest exchanges. This marked an important step in project recognition and adoption, as ENJ became one of just 15 select assets available for trading on Coincheck and the first specialized gaming token to be made available for trading to Japanese investors on this exchange. On March 3, 2021, another Japanese exchange – the GMO coin exchange, has added support for Enjin Coin, indicating that the project is really gaining some traction in Japan.
These events have also materialized in a very bullish ENJ price action. ENJ is up by 110% in the past week and 330% in the past month. The specialized gaming token set its ATH price of $1.94 on March 9. ENJ has since seen a slight correction as it dropped back to around $1.70, where it is currently trading. Nevertheless, the general uptrend is still evident.
2. NEM (XEM)
NEM smart asset blockchain platform launched in March 2015. The platform utilizes a pioneering Proof of Importance (POI) consensus algorithm to validate transactions and issue new XEM coins. In addition, NEM is written in Java and allows applications written in any programming language run on its blockchain, which is achieved through APIs. NEM is used by several financial companies in Japan and is the cornerstone of the Mijin private blockchain.
Symbol Blockchain to launch on March 15, Snapshot for the Airdrop Scheduled for March 12
The much-anticipated launch of the Symbol business blockchain is finally just around the corner. The mainnet genesis block of the new trusted and secure business environment is scheduled for March 15, exact time TBC. Three days prior to the launch of Symbol the snapshot of XEM blockchain will take place. XEM holders who have opted in for the Symbol (XYM) airdrop will receive 1 XYM for every XEM held at the time of snapshot. The snapshot height will take place at block height of 3,105,500. At the time of writing, a total of 27,666 accounts, holding 3,825,081,007 XEM combined have confirmed their wish to participate in XYM airdrop. More information about the Symbol blockchain and instructions on how to opt in for the XYM airdrop can be found here.
3. Bao Finance (BAO)
The BAO token acts as the governance token of the fully community-run DeFi yield farming project. Rather than re-inventing the wheel Bao focuses on improvement and adding new features to the existing protocols. The project is a combination of Synthetix and Aave protocol, for Uniswap, SushiSwap, and Balancer markets. While the developer claims that the assets are partially backed by the insurance fund where all Bao fees go, the official website notes: “Bao Finance is in alpha, it is unaudited and was originally developed by a one-person self-taught team. While we are in the process of scaling the team, please understand the risks and use this product accordingly.”
BAO to integrate with SushiSwap protocol in Q1 2021
The BAO protocol is considered an altcoin gem with lots of room to grow by many. The anonymous developer posting under the name of @thebaoman is constantly striving to improve the protocol. In light with this high dedication, new, fixed set of xDAI pools has been deployed recently. Users are encouraged to withdraw the assets from the old pool and transfer to the new one, which also features an improved UI. In addition, BAO has recently been featured on SushiSwap’s list of project that will integrate with the DEX and liquidity protocol in Q1 2021. Although the project is still in alpha phase, the FTX exchange has already added support for BAO. Users of the aforementioned exchange can now trade BAO for a USD stablecoin as well as use BAO as a collateral in their margin trading accounts. BAO is currently changing hands at $0.001145 with a 24-hour trading volume of $ 2.89M across 6 exchanges. The project has a $39 million market capitalization, which puts it on the 417th place of biggest cryptocurrencies. However, many DeFi enthusiast believe that the project is set to claim much higher spots on this list, provided that the development of the protocol goes as planned.
Are you finding it hard to swim in the treacherous waters of the everchanging cryptocurrency markets? One week the crypto asset prices rise faster than the tide only to suddenly drop in a market correction the week after. However, corrections like this are completely normal in the cryptocurrency world. Although it might be hard to watch your coins devalue you have to endure through the red numbers too, if you consider yourself a die-hard HODLer. If you are a trader, however, you are probably going to stay out of the game during the bear market, short some coins or find the assets that are the most likely to oppose the general downtrend. And this is where articles from our Top Coins to Watch series come to play, as they showcase selected projects that are more likely to perform well in the week to come.
1. Cardano (ADA)
Cardano is a decentralized blockchain platform focused at creating a smart contract-enabled environment, on which developers can build decentralized applications. Cardano utilizes a Proof-of-Stake consensus model and aims to provide a more sustainable, scalable, and transparent operation compared to other smart contract blockchains. The project was started by Charles Hoskinson, a mathematician, who was once part of the Ethereum developer team. Cardano launched in 2017 and raised $62.2 million for its development through an ICO. The native asset of the Cardano blockchain is called ADA and the development of the project is overseen by three main organizations, the IOHK, Cardano Foundation and Emurgo, who are also aiming to implementing the principles of academic peer review into the project’s development process. The project just launched an update through a hard fork, which enables users to create new Cardano-native tokens.
“Mary” Hard Fork Brings User-Created Tokens to Cardano
Cardano, the most recent addition to the group of top 3 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, conducted a successful network upgrade on March 1. “Mary”, the second out of three planned major network upgrades that must be deployed through hard forks, is now live and it allows users to create new tokens that run on Cardano natively, just like ADA. While enabling token creation is just one step on the path to full smart-contract functionality, Charles Hoskinson, founder of IOHK, has described the upgrade as “historic” in one of his video updates. Now that “Mary” has been deployed Cardano enthusiasts are already looking forward to the next major upgrade dubbed “Goguen” which will likely deploy full smart contract functionality to Cardano mainnet. Plutus and Marlow, the two smart contract languages that IOHK is development are currently still in the playground phase. Hoskinson noted that they will reveal more details regarding the Goguen at a Goguen-focused Cardano 360 event in mid-March. If everything goes well, Goguen could be ready as soon as Q2 2021.
In addition, Cardano is allegedly in a negotiation with a government of an unknown African country for a yet undisclosed substantial commercial deal. Hoskinson revealed that the deal involves bringing 5 million new users to the Cardano environment and that they are just waiting for the government of that country to make their final decision. Leaks and speculators suggest that the deal involves Ethiopia and its capital Addis Ababa, which has roughly 5 million inhabitants. Perhaps even more important than this African deal in terms of the short-term ADA price effect and market liquidity is the anticipated listing on Coinbase. ADA has reached the #3 spot in the ranking of cryptocurrencies by their market capitalization last week, but it is still not being traded on one of the largest U.S. exchanges – Coinbase. Therefore, the listing is merely a question of time. However, the details around it remain non-existent due to an NDA with Coinbase. As if that was not enough, Celsius announced they will be adding support for ADA in Q2 2021 as well.
In the last 12 months, ADA went from $0.05 to $1.47 on February 27, which is the current ADA all-time high price. This is an increase of almost 30x. While ADA has since corrected after reaching the top and is currently trading at $1.26, many believe that the asset is poised to surge higher as full functionality is yet to be deployed to the mainnet. Additionally, Cardano is seeing more and more projects migrating to their blockchain. One of the latest projects to confirm they will be running their services on Cardano too is the world’s first decentralized AI network SingularityNET.
Crypto.com (CRO)
Crypto.com is a Hong Kong-based crypto debit card issuer and cryptocurrency exchange, which aims to increase the usage of cryptocurrency as a payment method for everyday purchases. The company, which started out under another name – Monaco, conducted a token sale between May and June of 2017, which raised a total of $26.7 million. The platform’s native CRO token offers discounted fees on the exchange, higher earnings on Crypto Earn, loans with low annual interest as well as 100% rebates on streaming services (Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime) for the Crypto.com’s card subscribers.
Crypto.com Burns 70 billion tokens amidst the rising anticipation of the CRO Mainnet Launch
The Crypto.com exchange has recently revealed the launch date of their high speed and low fee blockchain dubbed the “Crypto.org Chain”. The fully decentralized blockchain, aimed to facilitate fast and secure payments, serve the DeFi space and allow the creation of NFTs is scheduled to go live on March 25, 2021. Furthermore, not a long ago, Crypto.com conducted a massive CRO token burn with an intention to fully decentralize the Chain network.
Crypto.com burned 70 billion tokens and only kept 5.9 billion, which will be used for mainnet block rewards and further ecosystem development. You can read more regarding the burn here.
As we all know, retail demand for crypto is at an all-time high, hence the demand for services should follow soon. And Crypto.com offers plenty of services that could appeal to a newcomer to the crypto space, such as the retail VISA cards with different tiers, crypto exchange with a fiat on- and off-ramp, easy staking, and plenty of benefits for CRO stakers. In fact, Crypto.com has already managed to double its userbase in the last 4 months, pushing the number of users above the 10 million mark:
🚀 We’ve surpassed 10 million users!
📈 2x our user base in 4 months, 10x revenue in 2020
Thank you to our amazing community 🙏 video credit: @skvillacrypto
To further boost userbase growth and trading volumes the exchange is currently holding a lucky draw, in which they will give away 4 Tesla cars. Users need to trade at least 100 USDT worth of BTC to be eligible to enter the raffle.
3. DODO (DODO)
DODO is the 17th project featured on Binance Launchpool. The DODO team strives to develop an open, accessible, and capital-efficient decentralized exchange. DODO will act as the governance token of the platform and have a few other features within the DODO ecosystem, such as staking.
DODO v2 Beta went Live on BSC but the Team is Already Planning new Improvements
The DODO v2 Beta went live on BSC on February 22, 2021. The improved version of the decentralized exchange features additional liquidity source aggregation, a crowdpooling asset issuance tool, a custom-ratio liquidity market creation machine (DODO Vending Machine), and liquidity pool solutions for professional market makers (DODO Private Pool). Additionally, the team have introduced a liquidity mining rewards program for the BUSD/USDT stablecoin pair on the BSC mainnet and announced that this is likely not the last liquidity mining reward program that they have set up. Furthermore, DODO v2 pushes the project one step closer to becoming a dual-chain solution, as the platform is looking to function on both the Ethereum blockchain and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). You can find out more about the BSC launch in this blog post. In the days following the BSC launch, DODO took advantage of the DeFi and Binance ecosystem hype, which caused the token’s price to increase by over 300% from $1.80 to over $8.00. The token than faces a more than 50% price correction and dropped below $3.50 before slowly recovering above $4.30. The token has seen another smaller drop and a subsequent climb lately and is currently changing hands at $4.67.
The cryptocurrency market has experienced a very rapid growth in the 2021 and while the growth stalls a bit occasionally, there is no trend reversal in sight just yet. This week’s selection consists of three cryptocurrencies that are hopefully going to continue push the total crypto market capitalization further up. Two out of three cryptocurrencies featured in this week’s top three coins to watch provide an alternative to Ethereum and Ethereum-based solutions, while the third on the list is arguably the most established and biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
1. Polkadot (DOT)
Polkadot is a blockchain solution that allows multiple specialized blockchains called parachains to run at the same time and interoperate. Polkadot can connect diverse blockchains into a single, decentralized and highly scalable ecosystem. The network operates using a Proof of Stake consensus algorithm and utilizes a native currency DOT. The project was originally designed by Dr. Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the inventor the smart contract programming language Solidity.
Polkadot Roadmap Release adds Fuel to the rally, Pushes DOT to ATH
The Polkadot team released a more detailed roadmap of the work on their protocol on Monday, February 15. The roadmap, which ends with the rollout of parachains and slot auctions, marking the full launch of the protocol, is divided in three stages. Currently, we are still in the first phase, where developers can play with the interchain communicating mechanisms, such as the Cross-Chain Message Passing-lite, or XCMP-lite. This protocol allows for tokens and generalized messages to be sent between various parachains, Polkadot’s version of shards. In the next phase, parachains will be deployed on Kusama, Polkadot’s “canary network.” Once the parachains on Kusama are stable and all audits completed successfully an on-chain vote will be triggered on Polkadot to launch parachain auctions.
While the official roadmap provides no indications of the precise timelines for these milestones, the release of a more detailed launch plan has apparently significantly contributed to DOT’s price rally. As many other cryptocurrencies, DOT has also set its new ATH pride last week, which now stands at $42.28. While the token is currently changing hands at around $38.80 per DOT, an 8.5% drop from the ATH, the recent rally was more than enough to push the cryptocurrency up the ladder for a few spots. After decisively overtaking Ripple (XRP) at the beginning of last week, Polkadot has recently managed to reach a higher market capitalization than Tether (USDT) and Cardano (ADA) as well. This puts the Polkadot with its market capitalization of over $34 billion on the fourth place – all this before parachains, arguably the protocol’s most important feature, are even fully implemented. Will DOT continue to further grow, or has it maxed out?
2. PancakeSwap (CAKE)
PancakeSwap is a Uniswap-like decentralized exchange (DEX) and yield farming protocol operating on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). The fact that it does not operate on the congested Ethereum network allows for lower fees and consequently more profit. PancakeSwap currently has a total value locked (TVL) of $3.8 billion and boasts with APYs of up to 850%. All trades are executed via an “automated market maker” design.
PancakeSwap Overtook Ethereum-based Uniswap by Trading Volume
PancakeSwap overtook the Ethereum-based Uniswap by trading volume on February 18 and became the world’s largest decentralized exchange by daily trading volume. On that day over $1.7 billion worth of Binance Smart Chain tokens were traded on PancakeSwap, while its competitor Uniswap saw only $1.6 billion exchange hands. It appears that now that a cheaper alternative with a great UI is available, Uniswap is slowly losing its market share, as is struggles with Ethereum network congestion and astronomical transaction fees. To illustrate just how big of a gas-guzzler Uniswap is, the platform’s users paid over $16 million in fees on February 18 alone.
PancakeSwap currently lists 210 “verified” cryptocurrencies across over 799 different trading pairs. The most traded pair is the WBNB/BUSD with over $454 million in volume, with CAKE, BAKE, BURGER, and food-named tokens also raking up big trading volume. PancakeSwap’s governance token is also yummy-sounding – “SYRUP”. Users can receive SYRUP in return for staking their CAKE, which the protocol uses to provide liquidity to the numerous trading pairs on the platform. In addition, users can participate in IFOs and a lottery game as well as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) auctions.
The PancakeSwap’s increased trading volumes have also translated to a price rally, causing CAKE to surge to its all-time high price of $20.98 on February 19. While the token’s price has since dropped by 20%, CAKE is still up by almost 140% in the last seven days. The fact that the PancakeSwap’s market capitalization remains less than a half of the Uniswap’s indicates that there is still a lot of room for growth for CAKE.
3. Bitcoin (BTC)
Although we believe Bitcoin does not need much introduction and that all eyes would be on it even if it were not featured on our list, here is a short summary of the history and key characteristics of the first truly decentralized digital currency. The world’s pioneer cryptocurrency was launched by pseudonymous figure named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and has a capped supply of 21 million coins. The decreasing miner block rewards makes the cryptocurrency scarcer with time, ensuring a deflationary nature.
Bitcoin market capitalization hit $1 trillion after a week of setting one ATH price after another
Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency, and the barometer for the whole cryptocurrency market seems to be just unstoppable in 2021. The asset is currently changing hands at around $57,600 meaning that the price per BTC is up by 110% YTD. The amazing performance at the beginning of 2021 has led many to believe that the bullish Bitcoin price predictions of $100,000 by the end of the year might be achievable. The likelihood of Bitcoin hitting this mark seems even higher if the money printing by COVID-19-struck would continue throughout 2021. Consequently, Bitcoin market is recording a high influx of institutional money as home offices, funds and corporate leaders are copying Michael Saylor’s and Elon Musk’s Bitcoin playbook. In addition, retail investors have woken up in 2021 as well, adding additional fuel to the Bitcoin’s rally and causing every bigger dip to be bought up quickly. Leaving retail FOMO aside, Bitcoin is also not perceived as a strictly store of value asset anymore, but it is also growing its payment utility, as many services are integrating Bitcoin as a means of payment. These services provide a crucial utility as well as attract new users and help grow Bitcoin adoption. And more users roughly translate to a higher price, a positive feedback loop that already Satoshi Nakamoto predicted:
5/ Satoshi built a viral loop into Bitcoin.
“As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.” – Satoshi
Bitcoin broke two important milestones last week. On February 16, Bitcoin traded above $50,000 for the first time in the history. The rally didn’t stop there, however, as Bitcoin continued to set one all-time high price after another. On February 19, BTC pumped from below $53,000 towards the highs of $56,600 and it was this price climb that caused the total market capitalization of Bitcoin to exceed $1 trillion for the first time. Nevertheless, there is much uncertainty as to what lies ahead for Bitcoin. While some bulls believe that the road from $57,000 to $100,000 is pretty much a straight highway, other warn that the road could be much bumpier than the Bitcoin greenhorns are expecting. Analysts are saying that a correction sooner or later is inevitable. Furthermore, at this stage a correction with a magnitude of around 30%, would even be considered healthy and there were numerous readjustments of a similar magnitude during the 2017 bull market. A drop by 85% or more is highly unlikely at this point. Either way, if BTC corrects, altcoin will likely drop even more.
I think we need a 50% correction AT LEAST before #Bitcoin reaches $100,000!
