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Category: Featured

Stay updated with our hand-picked featured news, top market insights, and the most important stories from the cryptocurrency world.

  • Uniswap Ranks #1 as the Project’s Governance Community Unanimously Decides to Create the Uniswap Foundation–Top Coins to Watch for Aug 29–Sep 4

    Uniswap Ranks #1 as the Project’s Governance Community Unanimously Decides to Create the Uniswap Foundation–Top Coins to Watch for Aug 29–Sep 4

    Uniswap Ranks #1 as the Project’s Governance Community Unanimously Decides to Create the Uniswap Foundation–Top Coins to Watch for Aug 29–Sep 4

    During another week of bear market, the cryptocurrency market capitalization dipped below $1 trillion for the first time since the end of July. After a minuscule recovery, the combined market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies is slowly reaching back the $1.00 trillion milestone as we enter Week 35. Both BTC and ETH have incurred weekly losses of around 5%, causing two of the biggest cryptocurrencies to change hands at prices of $20,000 and $1,500 respectively – both of which are very near the coins’ two-year low valuation. Will we see trend reversal this week or will the market cap dive even deeper in the sub $1 trillion levels?

    3. Polygon (MATIC)

    Polygon, previously known as Matic Network, is a leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. The Polygon Layer 2 network consists of several simultaneously run proof-of-stake sidechains that regularly push the data to Ethereum to create network checkpoints. Currently, there two bridges that allow users to move assets between Ethereum and Polygon, the first one being the Plasma bridge and the second one the PoS Bridge. The Plasma bridge delivers supersonic speeds and throughput and allows for an easy and fast exit to Ethereum mainnet at the same time. Together with several other features and tweaks, Polygon provides a major scalability improvement to the biggest smart contract blockchain. By successfully overcoming Ethereum’s most limiting shortcomings Polygon has become attractive for DeFi projects and is establishing itself as one of the key DeFi networks.

    Buy/Sell MATIC

    Reddit is airdropping free Collectible Avatars – Polygon-based NFTs – to its most active users

    We have reported last month about Reddit’s launch of a new feature that lets users create and trade unique profile pictures called ‘Collectible Avatars’. Although the popular social platform completely avoided using the NFT terminology, the cartoon-inspired avatars are essentially exactly that – non-fungible tokens (NFTs) issued on the Polygon blockchain. Reddit sells Collectible Avatars through the site’s own marketplace at fixed prices ranging from $9.99 to $100. Recently a Reddit moderator announced that the platform will start air-dropping Collectible Avatars to its top community builders. Users who have collected enough karma will be able to choose between four avatar styles called ‘Aww Friends’, ‘Drip Squad’, ‘Meme Team’ and ‘The Singularity’.

    If you actively use Reddit, search for this banner in your feed to receive a free NFT. (Source: Reddit)

    Although Polygon blockchain works almost entirely in the background when it comes to Reddit’s Collectible Avatars such implementations still have the potential to introduce blockchain to the mainstream. In addition, Reddit revealed plans to implement more blockchain-based functionalities in the future, which could further benefit Polygon as they are apparently the platform’s blockchain of choice. Furthermore, Reddit is not the only big player that has partnered with Polygon. Other international companies that are involved with Polygon include Disney and Coca-Cola, making it likely for some interesting Polygon use cases to arise from these partnerships as well.

    2. Chiliz (CHZ)

    Chiliz is a blockchain based project aimed to cater the needs of sports and entertainment platforms. The goal of the project is to give sports fans a completely different experience of interaction with their favourite players, clubs, or leagues. The project’s own sports fan engagement platform called “Socios” for example monetizes the fans’ engagement with their favourite clubs through blockchain technology. CHZ is an ERC-20 token with utility within Chiliz and Socios platforms. In addition, the token has good liquidity and can be traded via some of the major exchanges. In addition, the project also operates its own Chiliz blockchain, where CHZ tokens are used as the currency. The project enjoys the support of several Italian Serie A teams, major football teams in Spain, and even the UFC.

    Buy/Sell CHZ

    The CHZ 2.0 announcement sparked activity among CHZ whales

    Chiliz CEO has recently announced that the project plans launch of its own native chain (CHZ 2.0), which will see Chiliz transition from the Ethereum chain to the project’s own blockchain among other improvements. The announcement has apparently sparked considerable activity among CHZ whales as there were more than 100 CHZ transactions worth more than $100,000 conducted through the Ethereum network on August 23. Crypto analytics firm Santiment notes that this is the largest number of such transactions since March 29. At the same time market data showed increased trading activity, indicating that rich investors are accumulating CHZ. The extensive buy pressure sparked by the CHZ 2.0 announcement was identified as one of the key factors contributing to CHZ’s recent price action which defies the bearish sentiment that is currently engulfing almost all other crypto markets. To better illustrate the situation, while all other coins are in the red, CHZ is up by almost 20% in the past 7 days. In addition, Chiliz has been one of the biggest gainers in the past month as its token has almost doubled its price in that time. In addition to fundamental developments around CHZ 2.0, the technical analysis also favours CHZ appreciation. Looking at a daily price chart for CHZ/USD for the past 6 months we can see a formation of a nice cup and handle pattern. Recently, CHZ has been closing above the pattern’s neckline range, which is considered a potential bullish reversal setup.

    1. Uniswap (UNI)

    UNI is the governance token of the automated market maker (AMM) protocol Uniswap. UNI tokens are ERC-20 tokens that allow holders to decide on the future of Uniswap by voting on proposals. Uniswap – the platform, which facilitates quick swaps between various Ethereum-based tokens, has recently been struggling to keep its users and market share because of high fees on Ethereum. In March this year the project released Uniswap V3, a new and improved version of the AMM protocol on Ethereum mainnet. In July 2021 Uniswap tried to reduce the costs of trades by launching on two Ethereum Layer 2 networks: Optimistic Ethereum and Arbitrum. In its 3 years of existence, Uniswap has pioneered several DeFi functionalities and supported more than $1T in cumulative volume.

    Buy/Sell UNI

    Uniswap governance community founds the Uniswap Foundation

    Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) in terms of trading volume, will be governed by a new Uniswap Foundation, which will enhance governance and optimize how grants are distributed.

    The creation of Uniswap Foundation follows the competition of a Uniswap governance vote that ended on August 24. The proposal to create a new organization that will overssee the decentralized growth and sustainability of the Uniswap Protocol was met with almost unanimous support from the community, as only 770 UNI signalled to oppose the proposal. The proposal also predicts $74 million in UNI to be allocated to newly created Uniswap Foundation. While this sounds like big money, it should be noted that $60 million will be used to fund the Uniswap Grants Program, which leaves the team with only $14 million of operating budget. In addition, Uniswap is also preparing to expand its presence in the digital collectibles market by becoming an “interface for all NFT liquidity”. According to Uniswap’s NFT product lead liquidity fragmentation and information asymmetry are big and yet unaddressed problems in the NFT sphere. Luckily, Uniswap has been holding talks with 7 top NFT lending protocols to solve these issues, he wrote on Twitter.

  • EOS Ranks #2 Thanks to Community-Run Web3 Framework “Antelope”–Top Coins to Watch for Aug 22–Aug 28

    EOS Ranks #2 Thanks to Community-Run Web3 Framework “Antelope”–Top Coins to Watch for Aug 22–Aug 28

    EOS Ranks #2 Thanks to the Announcement of Community-Run Web3 Framework “Antelope”–Top Coins to Watch for Aug 22–Aug 28

    Last week marked the end of the brief bullish period, as nearly all cryptocurrencies faced a hefty price readjustment. With leaders like BTC and ETH down by more than 11% and 16% in the past 7 days respectively, most altcoins followed the same trend with even higher weekly losses. Consequently, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization slipped from $1.21 trillion back to $1.06 trillion, which is roughly the same as the total market valuation from four weeks ago.

    3. Aave (AAVE)

    Aave is an Ethereum-based decentralized lending and borrowing platform that started out under the name “ETHLend”, a project launched by Stani Kulechov in 2017. Aave supports almost 20 different tokens and has unique and sophisticated features such as flash loans that make it stand out from its competitors. While Aave initially launched on Ethereum, the protocol has expanded to the Fantom, Avalanche, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and Harmony networks over the last couple of years and is now available on 7 chains. AAVE token is the protocol’s native token, which grants holders governance rights as well as discounts when interacting with Aave protocol. While the protocol is completely open source, its code is regularly audited by third parties and has been repeatedly deemed secure. With the launch of its third iteration – “Aave v3” – the protocol established itself as the third largest DeFi protocol in terms of TVL. According to DeFi Llama, there are currently more than $6.45 billion locked in the Aave protocol.

    Buy/Sell AAVE

    Aave token holders asked to commit to Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake consensus chain after the Merge

    In light with Ethereum’s imminent transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) the Aave (AAVE) tokenholders have been asked to participate in an Aave Request for Comment (ARC) on August 18. The ARC in question calls for Aave users to ”commit” to Ethereum Mainnet running under the proof-of-stake consensus over any Ethereum fork running an alternative consensus as their primary network. Furthermore, after the Merge, the Aave DAO running on Ethereum PoS chain should be considered as the “canonical” governance system. A supporting vote will also give the Community Guardian the power to shut down Aave Deployments on any forks arising from the Ethereum Paris Hard Fork that are not the official PoS Mainnet. The DAO’s position will be determined via this governance vote, which will be launched soon. Nevertheless, Aave builders expect a clear and loud support for PoS consensus as they consider it virtually impossible to sustain a viable Aave Market on any Ethereum fork running on alternative (not PoS) consensus. Since Aave’s commitment to PoS would enable the platform’s continued growth, a positive governance vote on that matter could cause AAVE price to increase. At the same time Aave v3 reached its peak amount of borrows and repayments this month since its launch in March 2022, which exceeded $100 million daily for the first time. Nevertheless, Aave v2 still accounts for most of the protocol’s TVL. While it might take time for v3 to reach v2’s TVL, the novel version of Aave protocol is already surpassing the older counterpart in terms of usage.

    2. EOS (EOS)

    EOS is a blockchain platform that allows users to deploy smart contracts, run decentralized applications (DApps) and issue custom tokens. It launched its mainnet in June of 2018, following a record-breaking initial coin offering (ICO), in which more than $4 billion were raised for the chain’s development. While many other platforms such as Ethereum, TRON, etc., offer the same features, EOS aims to distinguish itself from the competition through its improved scalability and faster transaction speeds. The chain utilizes a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus model and boasts with the capacity to perform over 3,000 transactions per second (TPS).

    Buy/Sell EOS

    EOS price at two-month high following the announcement of a new incentive program

    EOS was one of the rare coins to finish the week in the green. In fact, its 16% price increase in last 7 days was enough for EOS to claim the title of the best performing coin of last week from the top 100 cryptos. Currently EOS is trading at a two-month high price of over $1.50. But what is fueling this uptrend, while all other coins are headed south? Well, for starters, the EOS Network Foundation revealed and opened registrations for its Yield+ incentive program last Sunday, August 14. The program’s aim is to attract decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that generate returns for their users and boost activity and TVL of the EOS ecosystem. Since the announcement of Yield+ there has already been a noticeable increase in demand for EOS tokens, but the real spike is expected on August 28, when rewards to DeFi protocols that have attracted investors and increased EOS’s TVL will be activated.

    In addition, the EOS network will soon rebrand to EOSIO to further distance itself from Block.One, the company that originally designed the network. In addition, the EOS community is currently preparing for the v3.1 Mandel Consensus upgrade, which is currently scheduled for September 21. The upgrade, which will occur via a hard fork will feature a shift to Antelope as the underlying blockchain framework. Antelope is a community-run open framework for building next-generation Web3 products and services that utilizes DPoS, just as EOS does now. Lastly, given its packed roadmap for Q3 and Q4, EOS seems like a good coin to hold also in the mid to long-term. Among other things, the EOS developers plan to introduce new cryptography primitives and add an inter blockchain communication feature in Q4.

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    EOS roadmap for Q3 and Q4 2022. (Source: Yves Le Rose, CEO of ENF)

    Ethereum (ETH)

    Ethereum is an open source blockchain that pioneered smart contract functionality in 2015. The decentralized network operates in a fast, immutable, and trustless manner. Ether (ETH), which is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is Ethereum’s native asset. Although it can also be used as a medium for the transfer of value between different Ethereum addresses, it is more commonly used to execute various smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain has enabled several blockchain-powered innovations, including ICOs, DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs. The Ethereum blockchain also hosts countless ERC20 tokens with different utilities – these include Exchange tokens (OKB, HT, UNI), DeFi tokens (LINK, MKR, COMP, SNX, etc.) and several stablecoins such as USDC, DAI, TUSD, and USDT. Ethereum is currently nearing the end of the process of transition from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake blockchain. Once Ethereum 2.0 is fully launched, the network will be able to perform more transactions at a higher speed than today. Hopefully, this will also lower the network fees, which are a well-known Achilles’ heel of Ethereum ecosystem.

    Buy/Sell ETH

    CME will roll-out Ethereum options trading just days before “The Merge” is set to take place

    Leading our Top Coins to Watch list for the third time in the past five weeks is Ethereum – the network’s long anticipated grand finale of the transition from PoW to PoS slated for mid-September has been the biggest story in crypto for the past couple of months. The anticipation for “The Merge” keeps growing, with the price of ETH briefly surpassing $2,000 earlier this month. In addition, Ethereum has hit its 8-month high price in comparison to BTC in mid-August. Several analysts are citing clearer roadmap and a finally determined Merge date (currently estimated to execute on September 15th) as one of the key reasons why ETH is outperforming BTC lately. In addition, the CME Group, one of the largest derivatives providers in the world, recently announced it plans to launch Ethereum options trading. If the new financial product successfully passes the regulatory review, the options trading will commence on September 12, just a few day before The Merge. The ETH options launch comes after CME introduced micro-sized ETH options in March this year and ETH futures in December 2021. Despite all the development around it, Ethereum is currently in a short-term bearish trend as it fell from $2,000 to $1,640 in one week. Technical analysis shows that ETH would have to reclaim $2,000 for the bull run to regain momentum, while it will enter an even deeper bear market if it drops beneath the 50-day SMA line, that currently lies at the price of around $1,500 per coin.

  • ETH is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of August 15 – August 21, 2022

    ETH is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of August 15 – August 21, 2022

    ETH is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of August 15 – August 21, 2022

    The cryptocurrency market has been moving in an upward trend for the second week in a row as the total cryptocurrency market capitalization has been increasing with roughly the same rate as the week before. Last week it climbed from $1.15 trillion to $1.21 trillion, while the week before that (August 1 to August 8) we have seen the valuation rise from $1.08 trillion to $1.15 trillion. The positive crypto market movements are fuelled by the global macroeconomic conditions (rising inflation) as well as the fact that the Ethereum Merge, arguably the biggest event in the cryptocurrency sphere this year, is right behind the corner. Even though the uptrend will likely continue throughout this week, we believe these few coins and tokens have the potential to outperform the market average.

    3. Huobi Token (HT)

    Huobi Token (HT) is the native token of the Seychelles-based Huobi cryptocurrency exchange. Huobi was founded in China in 2013 by a computer engineer named Leon Li. Since than Huobi has grown to become one of the biggest crypto exchanges, with customers and offices all around the world. HT was launched in January 2018 and initially offered its holders classic exchange token rewards, such as trading fee discounts and rebates. Later, exchange developers expanded the HT use cases by granting HT holders the ability to vote on new token listings and participate in exclusive Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs). Originally HT was an Ethereum-based token but today the token also serves as the native asset of the HECO Chain blockchain platform, where it is needed to pay for transaction fees. Nevertheless, HT can also be staked or delegated to running validator nodes. HT has a capped supply of 500 million, but the Huobi exchange regularly burns HT using a part of its profits, which is gradually reducing the total available supply.

    Buy/Sell HT

    HT price jumps by more than 20% as rumours that founder Leon Li is looking to sell his majority stake in Huobi surface

    According to Bloomberg’s unnamed sources Leon Li, the founder of Huobi Global, is actively seeking to sell his 60% stake in the exchange. Furthermore, he has reportedly already held preliminary discussions with the FTX crypto exchange as well as TRON founder Justin Sun. While Sun denied that any such acquisition talks have taken place in a public statement, the FTX CEO and representatives have remained silent and have nor denied nor confirmed their involvement. The FTX exchange, which is currently in the expansion phase as it has already purchased the Liquid and Bitvo cryptocurrency exchanges earlier this year, therefore seems like a more plausible buyer out of the two candidates. The HT markets reacted very positively to the news and HT price quickly jumped from $4.37 to $5.60 after Bloomberg article was published. At the time of writing, HT is changing hands at the price of $5.30 per token. The reason for the spike could be that Li is seeking to sell his 60% stake for more than $1 billion, which would put Huobi Global’s total valuation at up to $3 billion. In any case, it will be interesting to follow the developments around the acquisition deal and how they affect HT’s price.

    2. 1inch Network (1INCH)

    1inch is a DEX aggregator protocol that connects the liquidity many of the world’s DEXs. When an order is placed on 1inch, the protocol automatically finds the best deal and routs the order through one or multiple decentralized exchange protocols to ensure that the users trade with minimum slippage and gain the most for their money. Furthermore, 1inch also takes transaction fees into account when searching for the best trade order execution. In addition, 1inch supports limit orders, which sets it apart from most of the other DeFi protocols and aggregators. 1inch supports multiple blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain and several other blockchain platforms, which makes it available to almost any cryptocurrency user. 1INCH token also serves as the governance token of the 1inch DAO, which governs the projects by deciding on key decisions and allocating funds from the project’s treasury.

    Buy/Sell 1INCH

    1inch integrates with KuCoin Wallet and adds support for Klaytn network

    1INCH is worth monitoring this week as the 1inch Network has recently established several new partnerships. On August 9, the project announced it is expanding to Klaytn blockchain, a blockchain backed by South Korean internet industry giant Kakao. Klaytn blockchain is a GameFi-ready platform that is capable of handling up to 4,000 transactions per second (TPS) with confirmation time of only 1 second. According to Klaylabs, the network has a TVL of $0.83 billion and operates its native DEX called Klayswap. In addition, 1inch has recently revealed that it is entering a partnership with the KuCoin cryptocurrency exchange. As part of the cooperation, 1inch API has been integrated with the KuCoin Wallet, which grants KuCoin’s users access to swapping tokens on multiple blockchains at the best possible rates. Furthermore, because of the integration KuCoin Wallet users will also be able to place limit orders on decentralized exchanges, something that they have not been able to do before. Last but not least, 1inch has extended and revamped its gas refund program. The gas refunds are now available to even more 1inch users as even traders who have not staked any 1INCH tokens are eligible for a refund of up to 5%. As far as price is concerned, 1INCH is currently trading at $0.84 and is up by almost 30% in last 30 days. Key resistance levels on the way to $1 valuation lay at $ 0.899, $ 0.919, and $ 0.931.

    1. Ethereum (ETH)

    Ethereum is an open source blockchain that pioneered smart contract functionality in 2015. The decentralized network operates in a fast, immutable, and trustless manner. Ether (ETH), which is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is Ethereum’s native asset. Although it can also be used as a medium for the transfer of value between different Ethereum addresses, it is more commonly used to execute various smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain has enabled several blockchain-powered innovations, including ICOs, DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs. The Ethereum blockchain also hosts countless ERC20 tokens with different utilities – these include Exchange tokens (OKB, HT, UNI), DeFi tokens (LINK, MKR, COMP, SNX, etc.) and several stablecoins such as USDC, DAI, TUSD, and USDT. Ethereum is currently nearing the end of the process of transition from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake blockchain. Once Ethereum 2.0 is fully launched, the network will be able to perform more transactions at a higher speed than today. Hopefully, this will also lower the network fees, which are a well-known Achilles’ heel of Ethereum ecosystem.

    Buy/Sell ETH

    ETH approaches $2,000 in expectation of September’s Merge

    In the evening hours of Wednesday, August 10, Ethereum developers successfully executed the Goerli testnet merge. This marks the third and final trial run before the merge of Ethereum’s proof-of-stake Beacon Chain with the Ethereum mainnet, which is expected to take place in September. Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko took it to Twitter to announce the successful Merge on the Goerli testnet:

    In the recent Consensus Layer Call #93, Ethereum devs have agreed to execute the Merge when the network’s Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) hits 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is estimated to happen on September 15 or September 16. But before the TTD target is reached the Merge protocol must be codified and implemented in Ethereum clients. Also due to this, Ethereum will undergo the Bellatrix and Paris upgrades prior to the Merge. The Ethereum and the broader cryptocurrency community has been awaiting this important event with great excitement. The Ethereum markets are also booming of positive sentiment, which has caused ETH to more than double its price in last 30 days. Currently, ETH is trading at $1,900 and trying to break the $2,000 mark again, which is almost definitely going to happen in this week. It will also be interesting to follow ETH price after Proof-of-Stake is fully deployed. Will ETH price face a prominent readjustment, or will it continue to rally on the tailwind of a more powerful and scalable network?

  • BNB is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of August 8 – August 14, 2022

    BNB is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of August 8 – August 14, 2022

    After a relatively uneventful Week 31 the total cryptocurrency market capitalizations sits at around the same valuation of $1.15 trillion as 7 days before. However, we are likely going to see more market shake-ups as the Ethereum mainnet merge approaches. As we have already mentioned that Ethereum should be on everyone’s watchlist for (at least) the whole month in our recent Top 3 Coins to Watch article, we have selected 3 other coins/projects that could rally in the week that’s ahead of us because of the upgrades, announcements and other project developments.

    3. Optimism (OP)

    Optimism is a popular Ethereum Layer 2 network that approaches solving the scalability issue through the use of Optimistic Rollups technology. This also allows the network to operate with low cost and latency of Ethereum transactions. OP is Optimism’s governance token. Optimism’s governance model consists of two groups – the Token House and the Citizens’ House, which together form the Optimism Collective, a large digital democratic governance community that votes on protocol upgrades, directs incentives to projects, and determines the allocation of treasury funds.

    Buy/Sell OP

    Optimism Foundation revealed that the Bedrock upgrade is coming in Q4 2022

    The Optimism Foundation recently revealed their plans to release the Bedrock upgrade in Q4 2022. According to the Optimism team, the Bedrock upgrade will represent an important improvement to their rollup-based Ethereum Layer 2 network as it will than significantly reduce the time needed for crypto assets to be deposited from layer 1 to layer 2. In addition, Bedrock will bring a 20% decrease in the price of submitting data to layer and add support for other proof systems, such as zero-knowledge proofs. Finally, Bedrock will separate the Optimism’s consensus layer from the execution layer, resulting in a network design like the one of Ethereum after The Merge. You can find an in-detail insight in Bedrock here. The team will also answer Bedrock related questions in a dedicated Twitter Space that will open on Monday, August 8th at 4:30 PM UTC. The announcement was very well received by the market, as OP climbed from les than $1.40 to more $2.19 in a matter of two days. Currently, OP is changing hands at $1.93 but is still up by 17% in the past 7 days. OP’s price performance is even more astonishing when looking at a 1-month scale, as the coin is up by more than 230% in that timeframe. Can the coin surge even higher once the announced improvements get deployed?

    2. Flow (FLOW)

    Flow is a gaming and digital collectables-focused blockchain developed by Dapper Labs, the team behind the cat breeding and collecting game Cryptokitties that seized the attention of the cryptocurrency world (and clogged the Ethereum blockchain) in 2017. Designed to be developer-friendly and as simple for the end users as possible, Flow aims to successfully cater the needs of the world franchise owners and attract many mainstream consumers. Flow already hosts several NFT apps officially-licensed from major sports leagues including the NBA Top Shot and NFL All Day. The Flow network relies on a proof-of-stake consensus model, but it is more scalable as well as environmentally friendlier compared to Ethereum.

    Buy/Sell FLOW

    FLOW price spiked following Instagram partnership announcement

    The price of FLOW jumped by more than 40% on August 4 as the team revealed that Flow will be one of the first blockchains supported by Meta’s applications, most notably Instagram, as they begin to roll-out NFT support. The announcement claims that Instagram has started to gradually deploy digital collections functionality backed by blockchain and NFT technology to its more than 2 billion active users. Furthermore, select users may already be able to connect their Dapper Wallet to Instagram and display their NFTs directly on their profiles. Since this partnership has a huge potential to boost Flow’s adoption, it is not surprising that the market reacted the way it did. Nevertheless, it is a bit more unusual that FLOW did not face a readjustment after the hyped-up traders exit their trades. Quite the contrary, the network’s native token is still trading at $2.65, which is roughly around the top of the initial price spike. In fact, the rally could soon continue as Instagram will add the NFT functionality to more accounts every day. However, the mainstream audience has not showed a huge interest in NFTs just yet and even the crypto community’s affinity to these digital collectibles has rapidly cooled of as the crypto space entered the bear market, so we cannot sure that the Instagram integration will actually drive up the adoption and valuation of these NFT-focused networks.

    1. Binance Coin (BNB)

    Binance Coin (BNB) originally launched in 2017 as an ERC-20 token sold through an initial coin offering (ICO). In April 2019, the Binance Chain was launched, and all the existing ERC-20 tokens were replaced with the BNB coin, which became the native cryptocurrency of the new blockchain. Binance Chain is still completely centralized, with Binance having complete control of block management. Binance users who utilize BNB to pay for trading, withdrawal and listing fees enjoy discounts. While this used to be pretty much the only use case of BNB, the coin has a far greater utility now as it allows users to pay for gas fees, earn cashback on Binance Visa card purchases, stake BNB and participate in liquidity pools and other DeFi activities. BNB is also used to determine eligibility to participate in Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs). In addition, the Binance ecosystem keeps expanding, which means that new products and services are regularly added.

    Buy/Sell BNB

    BNB sets a new ATH price in Bitcoin

    BNB was the most successful coin out of the crypto Top 10 last week – while all the other coins ended the week in the red or with minuscule gains, BNB price grew by 11.50%. In fact, on August 7, BNB was changing hands at the price of 0.01398 BTC per BNB which is the highest BNB/BTC exchange rate in the history. This means that BNB is currently trading at its ATH Bitcoin price. By looking at the crypto news headlines we can find a few reasons why the coin is performing so well lately. For example, Binance has recently revealed that it is partnering with Mastercard to launch a prepaid crypto card in Argentina, a 45 million people market. Binance’s Visa card allow its holders spend their cryptocurrency on everyday purchases while earning a crypto cashback of up to 8% at the same time. Binance’s cashback offering is hard to beat and the fact that another popular crypto Visa card provider Crypto.com has been repeatedly slashing rewards is only channelling the cashback-hungry customers to other providers, including Binance. Nevertheless, the growth of Binance’s Visa program is by far not the only reason for the optimistic sentiment on the BNB markets. The BNB Chain’s Total Value Locked (TVL) is also growing. According to DeFi Llama, BSC’s TVL is up by 11.7% in the past 30 days. Finally, Binance is a company with a relatively good reputation that has weathered out the bear market without any major lay-offs or reward cuts. Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao himself recently posted that Franck Muller, a luxury watch manufacturer, is accepting BNB payments. More than anything else, this shows that Binance is a reputable and big enough player in the crypto industry that large companies from other industries are willing to accept Binance’s currency as a form of payment. This is why we believe BNB will not go away easily and will continue to perform well in the future.

  • QTUM is the #3 Coin to Watch for the Week of August 1 – August 7, 2022

    QTUM is the #3 Coin to Watch for the Week of August 1 – August 7, 2022

    We have reported about several important developments concerning the U.S. and global economy last week. In brief, the Federal Reserve (Fed) has announced a second consecutive 0.75%. interest rate increase on Wednesday. By hiking up the interest rated, the Fed aims to battle the raising consumer goods prices and crippling inflation. With higher interest rates money becomes more expensive to borrow, resulting in a lower consumption – people and companies are spending less and saving more. In theory, this slowdown of the economy should result in the return to baseline prices for goods. In addition, we have written about the Bureau of Economic Analysis reporting a decline in the U.S. GDP for the second quarter in a row. Nevertheless, despite the slowing economy both stock and crypto markets posted gains last week – Bitcoin gained 5% in the last 7 days while ETH is up by more than 7%. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization climbed from $1.08 trillion to $1.15 trillion last week.

    3. Qtum (QTUM)

    Qtum protocol features elements from both Bitcoin and Ethereum, including the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and tries to combine the best of both worlds. The Singapore-based cryptocurrency project is designed as the backbone of mobile decentralized apps (dApps) and optimized for blockchain interoperability. Qtum’s native cryptocurrency, QTUM, is used to pay network fees as well as to participate in the project’s on-chain governance system. distribution of newly minted QTUM is based on ownership of the asset. Qtum blockchain utilizes a mutualized proof-of-stake (MPoS) consensus, where anyone can stake their QTUM to receive a reward in the form of a share of newly minted QTUM and share of the transaction fees.

    Buy/Sell QTUM

    Qtum Mainnet Upgrade successfully deployed through the July 31 hardfork

    The Qtum Mainnet underwent a hard fork on July 31 at block 2,080,512. The upgrade is called Qtum Core v22.0 and will introduce the support for Taproot/Schnorr signatures, implement a new Ethereum Virtual Machine evmone that will result in faster EVM processing, and deploy the several bug fixes. You can read the full release details here.

    Because it was a hardfork, all users also needed to upgrade their Qtum Core Wallet to version 22.1. So, just in case you are wondering why you cannot access your QTUM coins anymore, make sure to upgrade and recover access ASAP. Even before the implementation, the upgrade was well received by the investors, who apparently accumulated QTUM in the week before the hard fork, causing its price to grow by more than 25% in just one week. Furthermore, the gains were even higher on Friday, July 29, when QTUM briefly spiked above $5.00. At the moment, QTUM is changing hands at $4.25.

    2. Polygon (MATIC)

    Polygon, previously known as Matic Network, is a leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. The Polygon Layer 2 network consists of several simultaneously run proof-of-stake sidechains that regularly push the data to Ethereum to create network checkpoints. Currently there two bridges that allow users to move assets between Ethereum and Polygon, the first one being the Plasma bridge and the second one the PoS Bridge. The Plasma bridge delivers supersonic speeds and throughput and allows for an easy and fast exit to Ethereum mainnet at the same time. Together with several other features and tweaks, Polygon provides a major scalability improvement to the biggest smart contract blockchain. By successfully overcoming Ethereum’s most limiting shortcomings Polygon has become attractive for DeFi projects and is establishing itself as one of the key DeFi networks.

    Buy/Sell MATIC

    MATIC continues to rally on the tailwind of Ethereum merge hype and Polygon’s high-profile partnerships

    Although we have featured Polygon on our lists on several occasions in the past 3 months, we believe that the project that has defied even the bear market deserves to be on the list once again. In the past 30 days, MATIC has managed to more than double its price, which is now nearing in on $1.00 again. Analysts claim that Polygon has benefited from the hype surrounding the upcoming Ethereum mainnet merge. For example, the recent Goerli testnet Merge announcement has led to a spike in the price of ETH but also the price of coins belonging to projects with a heavy focus on Ethereum, such as LDO and MATIC. Considering the fact that there are still a few more weeks until the Merge takes place on Ethereum mainnet, the hype is only about to amplify, which could result in further growth of Ethereum-connected coins. But of course, the MATIC rally is not purely hype-driven as that would likely be very unsustainable. Polygon has also established several important partnerships with big and well-known companies, such as the partnerships with Disney and Coca-Cola, of which we have written in our Top 3 Coins to Watch article from two weeks ago.

    1. 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 make the cryptocurrency scarcer with time, ensuring a deflationary nature. Bitcoin is also often referred to as the barometer of the cryptocurrency market as other assets usually follow BTC’s price performance.

    Buy/Sell BTC

    Bitcoin rallied after the news of another 0.75% interest rate increase

    As already mentioned, the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC, part of the Fed) announced another 75 bps interest rate hike on Wednesday, July 27, which pushed both the stock market as well as the crypto market into a small-scale rally. Bitcoin gained almost 10% on the day of the announcement and its appreciation continued throughout Thursday despite the Q2 2022 GDP report, that showed that the U.S. economy is technically in a recession, being published. Interestingly, we have already seen this pattern following previous interest rate hike announcements. When the FOMC announced the increase in interest rates last month, Bitcoin gained 10.5%, while Ethereum surged even higher, increasing its price by more than 15%. Nevertheless, last month the rally turned out to be very short-lived as both Bitcoin and Ethereum quickly lost back all their gains. It will be interesting to observe whether this pattern will repeat itself this time around.

  • ETH is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 25 – July 31, 2022

    ETH is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 25 – July 31, 2022

    Last week the total cryptocurrency market valuation climbed from $995 billion to $1.08 trillion. The 8.5% increase in crypto market cap was most likely caused by the hype around the upcoming Ethereum Merge, which is the final step of Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. ETH rallied by more than two times the market average, climbing from $1,365 on July 18 to $1,630 on July 25 (+19.4% price increase). As more developments concerning Ethereum are expected this week, Ethereum is our #1 coin to watch.

    3. Curve DAO Token (CRV)

    Curve is a decentralized trading protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. The protocol aims to provide its users a simple and easy-to-use product for swapping Ethereum-based assets (primarily stablecoins and wrapped Bitcoin) with low slippage and minimal fees. Curve was developed by Russian scientist Michael Egorov. He launched Curve in January of 2020 and the platform quickly became one of the most used DEXes. The protocol uses a native token named Curve Dao Token (CRV) for decentralized governance as well as rewarding liquidity providers on CurveFinance.

    Buy/Sell CRV

    Curve DAO Token jumps by 35% following Curve decentralized stablecoin launch announcement

    The price of the platform’s native Curve DAO Token rallied on Friday, July 22 on the news of an upcoming launch of Curve’s decentralized stablecoin. While not all the details have been revealed yet, the Curve founder Michael Egorov did reveal that the CRV stablecoin $crvUSD will be an over-collateralized algorithmically governed stablecoin. Over-collateralized stablecoins are usually backed by backed by volatile assets like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies of a higher value than the issued stablecoin to defend the USD peg even in times of volatility surges. An example of such stablecoin is also Tron’s USDD, which launched in May this year and already has a market cap of $116 million. However, $crvUSD developers claim that their stablecoin will be revolutionary as it will feature a unique new liquidation mechanism not yet seen on any DeFi protocol. The interview certainly did lift some dust and caused a major hype driven surge. On Friday alone, CRV price quickly increased by 35% from $1.13 to $1.53. In the meantime, the price has already readjusted, erasing more than half of the Friday’s gains – as it is usually the case with hype-driven bull runs. Nevertheless, a launch of a native stablecoin will likely be beneficial for the protocol’s future growth and adoption in the longer term.

    2. Lido DAO (LDO)

    The Lido DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization that manages the Lido staking service protocol by deciding on key parameters such as fees and incentives. Lido is currently the most popular staking protocol for Ethereum 2.0, Solana and Kusama, and the second largest DeFi service in terms of TVL, according to DeFi Llama. At the moment, Lido’s 3.9% APR on staked ETH, has attracted already more than 4,25 million ETH worth over $6.5 billion. For context, the total market cap of all ETH staked in the Ethereum 2.0 contract is around $20.0 billion, according to Staking Rewards. LDO is the governance token of the Lido DAO, granting its holders rights to vote on proposals of changes to the protocol.

    Buy/Sell LDO

    Lido’s stETH will soon hit more L2 Chains

    On Monday, July 18, the Lido protocol announced that the project is committed to making its staked tokens widely available throughout Ethereum Layer 2 chains. According to the official announcement, wrapped stETH was already deployed on Argent and will soon be made available on Arbitrum and Optimism. 

    Lido developers also highlighted that the protocol is network-agnostic and that they will do their best to bring their stETH to every sufficiently proven Layer 2 network with demonstrated economic activity. The expansion to various L2 networks will make Lido’s stETH widely available throughout Ethereum ecosystem, which will ultimately result in higher volumes handled by the Lido protocol. While no launch dates have been revealed yet, the platform’s LDO token already rallied – it is up by 180% in the past 30 days, which makes it the most profitable coin out of the crypto top 100 in this time frame. Nevertheless, much of the rally took place before the official announcement and is likely to be associated with the heavy growth of all Ethereum-focused projects. This could indicate that the effects of LDO’s launch on L2 chains announcement have not been priced in yet.

    1. Ethereum (ETH)

    Ethereum is an open source blockchain that pioneered smart contract functionality in 2015. The decentralized network operates in a fast, immutable, and trustless manner. Ether (ETH), which is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is Ethereum’s native asset. Although it can also be used as a medium for the transfer of value between different Ethereum addresses, it is more commonly used to execute various smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain hosts countless ERC20 tokens with different utilities – these include Exchange tokens (OKB, HT, UNI), DeFi tokens (LINK, MKR, COMP, SNX, etc.) and several stablecoins such as USDC, DAI, TUSD, and USDT. Many Layer 2 blockchains including Polygon, Arbitrum, Loopring, Optimism, etc. operate on top of the L1 Ethereum mainnet. Ethereum is currently nearing the end of the process of transition from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake blockchain. Once Ethereum 2.0 is fully launched, the network will be able to perform more transactions at a higher speed than today. Hopefully, this will also lower the network fees, which are a well-known Achilles’ heel of Ethereum ecosystem.  

    Buy/Sell ETH

    September 19 floated as a potential Date of the Mainnet Merge 

    After months of delays, Ethereum developers have finally outlined a date for “the Merge”, an event that will mark the competition of Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. According to the statements of core Ethereum developers Tim Beiko and Superphiz.eth on the July 14th Consensus Layer Call, the Merge is currently planned to take place on September 19 provided the Goerli testnet merge planned for August 11 is successful. It should be highlighted that these are not official dates yet. The Merge could take place even 1 to 2 weeks sooner if the Dev ACD call is pushed to an earlier date. At the same time, the Merge could also be delayed again if the team stumbles upon bugs and vulnerabilities.

    Nevertheless, the community and investors reacted very positively to the release of this “loose timeline” as they have been awaiting this event for more than 3 years. Consequently, the price of ETH, and native tokens of Ethereum-focused projects like Polygon and Lido DAO, surged on the news. In addition, Ethereum TVL has grown by almost 17% in the last 10 days. While this is most likely just a reflection of the higher valuations of ETH and Ethereum-based tokens, the TVL increase is a very welcoming change following multiple months of a downward TVL trend. Since Ethereum will likely be in the lime light of crypto community’s attention for the next two (or more) months, we suggest adding ETH to your crypto watchlist if you haven’t already.

  • DOT is the #3 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 18 – July 24, 2022

    DOT is the #3 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 18 – July 24, 2022

    In the final hours of last week, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization finally peaked and touched $1 trillion level again. Nevertheless, the cryptocurrency markets entered this week with the valuation of $995 billion, just slightly below the psychological mark. Do you think that this increase in total valuation is the first harbinger of the new upward trend? Surely, we all wish to finally escape the bears and enter the bull market.

    3. Polkadot (DOT)

    Polkadot is a blockchain platform that addresses the scaling issues by using parachains, a network of multiple interoperable blockchains that run in parallel with each other. Utilizing parachains allows Polkadot to connect diverse blockchains into a single, decentralized and highly scalable blockchain ecosystem. The network of chains is interconnected by a central chain called the Relay Chain. Polkadot chains operate using a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm and the platform 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 named Solidity. Along with Cardano, Solana, and several other networks Polkadot is considered one of the potential “Ethereum killers”.

    Buy/Sell DOT

    Polkadot featured in Revolut’s Learn-to-Earn Program as part of the newly established partnership between the two companies

    Renowned crypto analytics and research company Messari recently published a report on the state of the Polkadot ecosystem, which, in brief, shows that Polkadot managed to withstand the crypto downturn without losing a significant chunk of network activity quarter-over-quarter. During Q2 this blockchain maintained the number of monthly active users at around 145,000 and transferred more than 878 million DOT, which is almost the same as during Q1 2022. According to Messari’s data, 131 million DOT or around 11% of the total supply are currently bonded for the two-year lease period as part of the 20 parachain auction procedures that have taken place in the past.

    Acala and Moonbeam were two of the slot wining projects that have caused the bonding of the majority of the currently locked DOT tokens. (Source: Messari)

    Another 54% to 56% of total DOT in circulation are staked. To sum up, the Messari’s report indicates that Polkadot is a healthy ecosystem with sustainable tokenomics. Furthermore, Polkadot’s stats could further improve because of the recently announced partnership with popular fintech company Revolut. As part of the partnership Revolut is featuring Polkadot in a dedicated Crypto Learn-to-Earn campaign and giving away $15 paid out in DOT to participants who complete the course. Given the fact that Revolut currently has more than 18 million personal users, the exposure on its platform could provide a significant boost to DOT adoption in the mainstream.

    2. Algorand (ALGO)

    Algorand is a blockchain platform that can be used for digitalization and tokenization of almost any kind of asset via the creation of so-called Algorand Standard Assets (ASAs). Additionally, the platform supports the on-chain creation of smart contracts and facilitates a secure and immediate settlement of multiparty transactions through Atomic transfers. Furthermore, Algorand has implemented a pure proof-of-stake (PPoS) consensus protocol, meaning that anyone holding ALGO can participate in the consensus process through staking and be rewarded for that.

    Buy/Sell ALGO

    Algorand TVL increased by over 90% in the past month, making it one of the fastest-growing DeFi ecosystems

    According to data provided by DeFi Llama, Algorand currently has a total value locked (TVL) of over $220 million. While that only places Algorand on the 17th spot on the leaderboard of the biggest DeFi ecosystems, it is the relative change in TVL that makes this blockchain stand out as Alogrand grew its TVL by over 90% in the past month. Most of the growth contributing to the almost-doubled TVL took place throughout last week as Alogrand’s TVL is up by more than 60% in last 7 days. The fact that CoinShares launched a physically backed Algorand ETP on Deutsche Boerse last week surely pushed ALGO in the centre of attention and contributed a lion’s share to the TVL growth. The ETP commenced trading on Deutche Boerse’s online platform Xetra on July 14 when ALGO was trading below $0.30 per coin. Over the weekend, the price of ALGO climbed towards $0.35, which is a multi-week high for this coin. Nevertheless, the Algorand ecosystem is also growing its utility and the number of use cases. Among the more recent news is the announced integration with SubQuery, a flexible, fast, and decentralised data indexing solution. The integration will allow developers on Algorand to easily organise and query on-chain data and thereby enhance dApps and protocols running on Alogrand. Do you also think ALGO could climb to $0,40 or even higher?

    1. Polygon (MATIC)

    Polygon, previously known as Matic Network, is a leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. The Polygon Layer 2 network consists of several simultaneously run proof-of-stake sidechains that regularly push the data to Ethereum to create network checkpoints. Currently there two bridges that allow users to move assets between Ethereum and Polygon, the first one being the Plasma bridge and the second one the PoS Bridge. The Plasma bridge delivers supersonic speeds and throughput and allows for an easy and fast exit to Ethereum mainnet at the same time. Together with several other features and tweaks, Polygon provides a major scalability improvement to the biggest smart contract blockchain. By successfully overcoming Ethereum’s most limiting shortcomings Polygon has become attractive for DeFi projects and is establishing itself as one of the key DeFi networks. 

    Buy/Sell MATIC

    MATIC rallies on the tailwind of a series of good news, including Polygon being accepted to the Disney Accelerator program

    Polygon is another blockchain ecosystem that has been seeing noteworthy growth lately. Nevertheless, the ecosystem’s TVL only grew by slightly less than 10% in the past 7 days, while the price of MATIC increased by more than 50% in the same time frame. In fact, MATIC was by far the most successful asset out of the crypto top 20. The reason for this outstanding price performance? Well, actually, there are several. Perhaps the largest and most impactful development was that Polygon was selected to participate in 2022 edition of the Disney’s Accelerator program. This year Disney’s program focused on accelerating companies that are developing “immersive experience” technologies, including augmented reality (AR), non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. While two other Web3 companies were also accepted, it is worth noting, that Polygon is the only blockchain-native company among the six selected companies. The Polygon team shared their excitement about being part of the Disney experience on Twitter:

    In addition, Polygon has lately been seeing an influx of former Terra projects. 

    According to Polygon CEO Ryan Wyatt, more than 48 projects that were previously deployed on Terra Classic have begun the process of onboarding to Polygon. Furthermore, the Polygon team has recently established a partnership with Coca-Cola, which launched released a pride themed NFT collection and a Polygon based NFT marketplace in the beginning of July. As the price of MATIC already confidently surged through the $0.80 level, the next key resistance for MATIC lies at $1.

  • ETH is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 11 – July 17, 2022

    ETH is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 11 – July 17, 2022

    The total cryptocurrency market capitalization seems to be slowly climbing towards the $1 trillion level again. Throughout last week it increased from slightly less than $910 billion to $972 billion and thereby almost completely negated the losses of the week before that. Nevertheless, with no clear trend reversal in sight, this might not be enough to scare off the bears that have been raging through the markets the last couple of months. Bear market or not, you can almost never do wrong if you read our weekly Coins to Watch articles.

    3. Axie Infinity (AXS)

    Axie Infinity is a Pokémon-inspired blockchain-powered trading and battling video game. The game is developed by a Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis and has netted more than $2 billion in NFT sales to date. Axie infinity players utilize Ethereum-issued tokens AXS and Small Love Potion (SLP) to breed, trade and battle with their virtual creatures called Axies, each represented by a one of a kind NFT. The growing userbase and protocol revenue has made Axie Infinity one of the most expensive NFTs collections.

    Buy/Sell AXS

    Axie Infinity launches Land Staking and prepares for the first AxieCon Event

    While AXS has been the CoinCheckUp’s #3 Coin to Watch already two weeks ago, the project developers have since added a few more reasons for monitoring or even acquiring AXS. Since AXS’s last time being featured in the C2W article, the Axies team has successfully deployed the Origin update and also the first Origin update patch. In addition, the Ronin bridge is now up and running again and the game developers launched a new feature called land staking, where players are rewarded with AXS for staking their in-game land plots. This recently rolled-out feature instantly became very popular as it increases the game’s earning potential. Data from the Ronin Chain explorer suggest that more than 87% of plots of land have already been staked. The introduction of plot staking has driven up the price of in-game land plots causing several virtual plots to sell for over 130 Ether (ETH) each, which suggests that the level of interest in the game is still very high. Last but not least, Axie Infinity started selling tickets for AxieCon event that will take place in Barcelona in September. AxieCon will feature three big tournaments with a combined prize pool of $1 million in AXS. The biggest of the three tournaments will be the Axie World Championship where top 16 Axies players will fight for the $500,000 of AXS prizes. As you can imagine, hosting a real-life event of this proportion is an important milestone for the Axie team and even more for the game’s community.

    2. Maker (MKR)

    Maker protocol was one of the earliest projects on Ethereum and remains the cornerstone of Ethereum’s decentralized finance ecosystem. This protocol, which launched already in 2015, allows users to lock up their Ethereum or other Ethereum-based assets as collateral to receive a loan in the form of Dai stablecoin. Dai, which is designed to trade as close to $1 as possible, is issued in a completely trustless manner. Its issuance and peg are governed by a complex system of Ethereum smart contracts. MKR is Maker Protocol’s governance token. Holders of these ERC-20 tokens can propose changes to the protocol and participate in governance polls.

    Buy/Sell MKR

    Maker partners with Pennsylvanian Huntingdon Valley Bank

    On July 7, the Maker community passed a vote to partner with Huntingdon Valley Bank (HVB). The proposal, which passed the governance vote with over 87% of the voting power supporting the proposal, involved creating a vault with 100 million Dai (DAI) for HVB as part of a new collateral type in the Maker Protocol. The partnership with this Pennsylvania-based traditional bank will allow the DeFi protocol to issue cryptocurrency-backed fiat loans in the future. At the launch, the bank will be able to borrow up to $100 million DAI, but the debt ceiling is predicted to grow to $1 billion DAI over the next 12 months.

    In addition, the collaboration with a traditional banking institution lends additional credibility to the Maker protocol and the broader DeFi sector. Nevertheless, even without the traditional bank partnership, Maker is among the most reputable and oldest algorithmic stablecoin issuers. In addition, while many including USDD, and even USDT, struggled to retain the $1 peg in the past couple of bearish months, DAI seems oblivious of the market volatility, retaining its $1 peg throughout the whole time.

    1. Ethereum (ETH)

    Ethereum is an open-source blockchain that pioneered smart contract functionality in 2015. The blockchain operates as a decentralized virtual machine that can execute scripts – also called smart contracts – in a fast, immutable, and trustless manner. Ethereum’s native asset is Ether (ETH), which is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Although it can also be used as a medium for the transfer of value between different Ethereum addresses, it is more commonly used to execute various smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain hosts a number of ERC20 tokens with different utilities – these include Exchange tokens (OKB, HT, UNI), DeFi tokens (LINK, MKR, COMP, SNX, etc.) and several stablecoins such as USDC, DAI, TUSD, and USDT. Ethereum is currently still in the process of transition from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake blockchain. Once Ethereum 2.0 is fully launched, the network will be able to perform more transactions at a higher speed than today. Hopefully, this will also lower the network fees, which are a well-known Achilles’ heel of Ethereum ecosystem.

    Buy/Sell ETH

    Gas fees hit a 2-year low as developers successfully merge another Ethereum testnet

    After almost two years of insanely high Ethereum fees (average fee was above $40 most of the time) the Ethereum fees have recently finally started to normalize. Last week, the average Ethereum blockchain transaction fee fell down to 0.0015 ETH or $1.57 — a number previously seen in December 2020. The record low ETH fees are most likely caused by the dropping NFT sales, which have also hit a yearly low in this bear market, indicating that the NFT fever is starting to cool off fast. Whatever the reason for them, lower fees will allow investors to pursue DeFi investment opportunities more easily on Ethereum. In addition, we are all looking forward to Ethereum 2.0 which would further reduce the blockchain fees and last week developers brought Ethereum another step closer to ETH 2.0 by successfully performed the merge on the Sepolia testnet. Sepolia is now already the second Proof-of-Stake Ethereum testnet, the first one being Ropstein that moved to PoS in the beginning of June. Ethereum developers now only have to complete The Merge on Goerli testnet, before moving on to the Ethereum mainnet. The transition of the Ethereum mainnet to a proof-of-stake blockchain will reportedly be completed before the end of this year, with The Merge taking place in August.

  • XRP is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 4 – July 10, 2022

    XRP is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 4 – July 10, 2022

    XRP is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of July 4 – July 10, 2022

    The cryptocurrency markets have again moved in downward direction as the total crypto market capitalization decreased from $990 billion to slightly less than $910 billion. Almost every major cryptocurrency (excluding stablecoins, of course) depreciated by around 10% last week. As the general downtrend might continue throughout this week as well, we have prepared a selection of three coins that have a potential to surge or at least deliver gains in the following days.

    3. Centrifuge (CFG)

    Centrifuge is a decentralized asset financing protocol that aims to bridge the worlds of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and non-digitally native assets. Through Tinlake, Centrifuge’s lending dApp, businesses can tokenize real-world assets such as consumer credit, mortgages, and invoices, to create blockchain-based asset-backed pools and access financing in the form of digital assets. Investors, on the other hand, can benefit from a stable yield that is unaffected by the volatile cryptocurrency prices. While Centrifuge chain operates on Polkadot, its lending application Tinlake is built on Ethereum due to the ecosystem’s massive liquidity. The CFG token is the protocol’s native asset that serves as an incentive for blockchain validators and grants governance rights to its holder.

    Buy/Sell CFG

    CFG price spikes following the launch of Centrifuge Connectors

    Centrifuge has launched Centrifuge Connectors, a cross-chain solution that aims to bridge the Real-World Asset (RWA) market with the broader DeFi ecosystem. By utilizing Nomad Bridge technology, Connectors allows investors to provide liquidity into Centrifuge pools without having to bridge over to the Centrifuge chain. It is a hybrid solutions that is not a classical bridge nor a chain fork but takes the best features of both worlds. Because Connectors provides a fully native experience for users on any supported chain, both investors and DeFi protocol developers will benefit from its deployment. The launch of this innovative cross-chain solution comes roughly a month after Centrifuge revealed the formation of a strategic alliance with BlockTower, which was set up to accelerate the development of RWAs in the DeFi sector. Centrifuge also raised $3 million through a treasury token sale as part of the BlockTower partnership deal. The latest developments around the Centrifuge project were apparently well received by investors as the project’s native CFG token spiked by close to 50% on several occasions last week. While the price always retraced back to between $0.21 and $0.22 the price spikes have shaken up the CFG market enough for the downtrend to reverse, as the token’s price line now seems to have established a slight uptrend.

    2. Cardano (ADA)

    Cardano is a decentralized blockchain platform focused at creating a smart contract-enabled environment on which developers can build decentralized applications (dApps). By utilizing a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus model, Cardano aims to deliver a more sustainable, scalable, and transparent operation compared to other smart contract blockchains. The project was started in 2017 by Charles Hoskinson, a mathematician who was once part of the Ethereum developer team. Together with a team of co-workers, Hoskinson raised $62.2 million for Cardano’s development through an ICO. Today, the development of the project is overseen by three main organizations: the IOHK, Cardano Foundation and Emurgo. Hoskinson and IOHK stive to follow the principles of academic peer review in the project’s development process. The native asset of the Cardano blockchain is called ADA, but in 2021 the project rolled-out an update, which allows users to issue other tokens on Cardano blockchain as well. In September 2021 smart-contracts debuted on the Cardano mainnet, which was a major milestone for the ecosystem.

    Buy/Sell ADA

    Cardano Mainnet will soon undergo the Vasil Hard Fork

    On June 20, the Input Output Global (IOG) team working on the Vasil upgrade revealed that the hard fork was almost ready to be deployed on Cardano testnet. Nevertheless, the team decided to postpone the hard fork of the testnet as there were still seven non-crucial bugs in the code. Cardano testnet than finally and successfully forked on June 28:

    Consequently, also the Vasil hard fork of the Cardano mainnet, initially scheduled for June 29, 2022, will be implemented with a slight delay. IOHK’s post indicated that the mainnet will fork sometime by the end of July or in early August. Historical market data shows that ADA tends to intensely rally in expectation of important updates but often faces a sell-off soon after the updates are implemented. If the Vasil hard fork will have the same effects on ADA price as previous hard forks, now is the best time to acquire ADA. While technical analysis shows that ADA’s price is poised to drop (it is forming the bear pennant pattern), the Vasil upgrade will make Cardano much more developer friendly. This could end up attracting projects and developers from rivalling layer-one blockchains, leading to a higher demand for ADA and negating the projected downtrend indicated by the technical analysis.

    1. XRP (XRP)

    XRP is a cryptocurrency that was launched in 2012 by Chris Larsen, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto. Ripple’s network uses a unique Ripple Protocol consensus algorithm (RPCA), which is neither proof-of-work nor proof-of-stake, to facilitate fast and cheap transactions. The maximum supply of XRP is 100 billion coins and all the coins were created at launch. Back than 80% of the total XRP supply was given to fintech firm Opencoin, a company that renamed to Ripple Labs in 2015. As of today, Ripple Labs still hold more than half of the total XRP supply. However, most of the company’s XRP holdings are locked in escrow and can only be accessed periodically. In December 2020 Ripple became entangled in a lawsuit with the US SEC, which accuses that the company of selling unregistered securities. The legal battle between Ripple and the SEC remains one of the key factors influencing XRP’s price.

    Buy/Sell XRP

    The legal battle with the SEC is nearing an end

    XRP has been in a more than a year and half long lawsuit with the SEC. With the legal proceedings nearing their end, the court’s decision on whether XRP is a security could play a massive role not only for XRP and the Ripple Labs company, but also for the broader crypto sector. Earlier this year Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse disclosed that he is very optimistic that Ripple will come out as the winner of this long-lasting legal battle. A few months after that, he attracted a lot of attention by saying that the company is looking to explore an IPO after the case with the SEC comes to an end. Although Ripple’s representatives are staying optimistic, they are apparently getting prepared for the worst-case scenario as well since the company is expanding its presence outside the US. In June, for example, Ripple Labs opened a new office in Toronto, Canada, in which they will employ up to 50 new developers. In addition, there is a plan to move Ripple Labs overseas, if the court decides in favour of the SEC and deems XRP a security as well. Although the Ripple network’s fundamentals often stay in the shadow of the developments on the court floor, they must not be overlooked. Just recently, the number of daily active addresses on the XRP Network hit 200,000, which puts this metric on a 2-year high.

    The number of daily active XRP addresses has not been as high ever since February 2020. (Source: Santiment)