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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.

  • The Graph is the #3 Coin to Watch for the Week of February 21 – February 27, 2022

    The Graph is the #3 Coin to Watch for the Week of February 21 – February 27, 2022

    After another week of red numbers, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization slipped from $1.93 trillion to $1.78 trillion. Bitcoin, the world’s oldest crypto and the largest one by market capitalization, lost nearly 10% of its value in the last 7 days, plunging through a key support level at $40,000. The price movements that took place last week generally validate Bitcoin’s status of the crypto sector’s barometer, as many major coins and tokens followed BTC’s example and ended up suffering similar or even greater losses. 

    3. The Graph (GRT)

    The Graph is an indexing protocol designed for querying networks like Ethereum and IPFS through the creation of open APIs. Within The Graph’s network, these public APIs are called subgraphs. Think of The Graph as a reverse version of Chainlink. While the former makes real-world data available on the blockchain, The Graph makes blockchain data available off-chain. This allows users and developers to quickly search for relevant blockchain data across Ethereum network and feed the results into their apps and smart contracts. Although The Graph currently only supports Ethereum network, the team plans to add support for Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) compatible networks including Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum, Polygon and Moonriver, soon.

    Buy/Sell GRT

    Prominent VCs Join Forces to Launch a $205 million ecosystem fund for The Graph

    It has recently been revealed that several venture capital (VC) firms have joined forces to establish a multimillion fund focused at boosting The Graph’s future progress and growth. Reportedly, investors include Digital Currency Group, Multicoin Capital, gumi Cryptos Capital, NGC Ventures, HashKey, and Reciprocal Ventures. These companies have recognized The Graph’s potential in a world where Web3 is rapidly gaining popularity and has already become a buzzword in the tech space. The thing is that Web3 solutions are heavily dependent on oracle and data providers. Craig Burel, an executive at Reciprocal Ventures, also highlighted the immense importance of The Graph in the upcoming world of Web3. He applauded the establishment of the $205 million ecosystem fund by saying:

    “To expedite that future, we have come together with some of the biggest players in the crypto industry to provide strategic capital and resources to developers aligned with The Graph’s mission to bring Web3 to fruition.”

    Besides supporting teams developing DeFi protocols, NFT applications, DAOs, Metaverses, the fund will also provide funding for developers that are working on creating new subgraphs, indexer tooling, dApp tooling, or in other way helping grow The Graph’s community.

    2. BitTorrent (BTT)

    Released by Bram Cohen in 2001, BitTorrent is one of the world’s largest decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocols in the world by number of users. In fact, almost every torrent client utilizes the BitTorrent protocol. In July 2018 blockchain platform TRON purchased the BitTorrent platform and since than the protocol has ventured in the blockchain world. BitTorrent aims to build a token-based economy for networking, bandwidth, and storage resources on the existing BitTorrent network using BTT. The BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) launched on December 12, 2021. 

    Buy/Sell BTT

    BitTorrent to launch BTFS 2.0 on mainnet on February 22

    The BitTorrent team has announced they are deploying the BTFS (BitTorrent File System) 2.0 to the BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) mainnet on February 22. According to the announcement, the BTT rewards awarded to users participating in the blockchain’s consensus will now be deposited to addresses on BTTC and not TRON addresses any more. In addition, BitTorrent has established a 3-week transitory period, in which they will increase the proportion of rewards being awarded to BTFS 2.0 nodes and decrease rewards for BTFS 1.0 nodes. From March 8 on, the rewards will be airdropped solely to BTFS 2.0 nodes, while BTFS 1.0 nodes will no longer receive any rewards.

    BTT is currently changing hands at a price of $ 0.000002 per token. The incredibly low price is largely due to the BitTorrent token’s recent redenomination, which saw the supply increase by 1000x compared to the old TRC10-based BTT token supply (now referred to as BTTOLD). Nevertheless, the new token (BTT), which is TRC20-based and mapped to the BitTorrent Chain mainnet still manages to net a market capitalization of $1.84 billion because of its enormous circulating supply of 932.5 trillion BTT.

    1. NEO (NEO)

    The NEO project started its journey in 2014 under the name “AntShares” and launched its first mainnet in 2016 following a successful initial coin offering (ICO). Soon after that, in 2017, the project rebranded to NEO. Holders of the NEO token periodically receive GAS, which is used for deploying and running smart contracts and dApps on the NEO blockchain. Both tokens (NEO and GAS) have a maximum supply of 100 million coins. What makes NEO stand apart from other tokens is that it is indivisible, meaning that the smallest amount of NEO one can hold, send or receive is 1 NEO. The NEO blockchain relies on a dBFT (delegated byzantine fault tolerant) consensus algorithm and supports issuing custom tokens, with NEP-5 being the most commonly used standard for NEO-based tokens.

    Buy/Sell NEO

    NEO to be included in China’s state-sanctioned blockchain infrastructure project

    There are several factors that are causing NEO to perform better than other coins in the last month. Besides the launch of the N3 upgrade that took place in the second half of 2021 and the roll-out of several novel DeFi and NFT projects on NEO, there is one more news piece that caused positive sentiment to start spreading among NEO investors. Recently, the announcement made by China’s Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), a state-sanctioned blockchain infrastructure project that is developing a platform for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that is developing that is compliant with Chinese regulations, is driving the demand for NEO through the roof. The aforementioned announcement stated that a NEO-based blockchain will be one of the ten blockchains supported by the network BSN is a blockchain infrastructure project.

    While NEO’s existing blockchain will not be included in this state-sanctioned blockchain infrastructure, NEO will develop a dedicated Jiuquan Chain for the BSN. Nevertheless, the fact that BSN selected NEO as a framework provider itself acts as a huge stamp of approval and reference for the project.

  • Binance Coin is the #2 Coin to Watch for the Week of February 14 – February 20, 2022

    Binance Coin is the #2 Coin to Watch for the Week of February 14 – February 20, 2022

    After another week of rather sideways trading, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization sits at $1.93 trillion. During Week 6, the biggest gainers from the top 20 coins were Shiba Inu (SHIB; +33%), Ripple (XRP; +20%) and Crypto.com Coin (CRO; +13.5%). Biggest losers, on the other hand, were Solana (SOL; -17.7%) and Polkadot (DOT; -11%). But we already have eyes on the next week. And if you are also questioning which assets to add to your portfolio to enjoy the greatest gains in Week 7, this is the best place to be.

    3. Shiba Inu (SHIB)

    Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a meme token that was launched in August 2020 by an anonymous founder known as “Ryoshi”. Shiba Inu aspires to be an Ethereum-based alternative to the more popular and longer-running meme coin project Dogecoin (DOGE). At launch, 50% of the Shiba Inu’s total supply was sent to Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum wallet, making SHIB an unique community experiment as well. Ethereum co-founder ended up donating 10% of the supply to a COVID-19 relief effort in India and burned the rest of his SHIB holdings. His donation was worth around $1 billion at that time. While SHIB began as a fun experimental currency it is now transforming into a decentralized ecosystem with many users and use cases.

    Buy/Sell SHIB

    SHIB jumps by more than 50% after the project announced it is launching its own metaverse

    At the beginning of last week, the Shiba Inu team announced that the project has decided to start its own metaverse. They also disclosed that the auctions for the virtual plots of land inside the upcoming metaverse also called “Shiba Lands” will start soon. SHIB surged by more than 50% and reached the highest valuation this year ($0.000035) on the tailwind of the metaverse announcement. Since than SHIB underwent a slight retracement, but with its 33% in 7D, SHIB still managed to claim the title of the best-performing digital asset out of top 100 last week. However, Doge Killer (LEASH) token holders benefited even more from the Shiba Inu’s metaverse entry as the project announced users will need to amass LEASH to qualify for purchasing virtual plot of land. Furthermore, Shiba Inu developers noted that the land sales event will follow a “queue system”, in which participants be placed in the queue based on the amount of LEASH they hold. Because of this LEASH surged by more than 80%. Nevertheless, the team hopes that the queue system will prevent bots snapping cheap Shiba Lands and reselling these plots of land at a significantly higher price. A metaverse gives the Shiba Inu ecosystem a whole new dimension of in which it can grow, which will undoubtedly benefit the whole project. Shiba Inu developers noted:

    “The Metaverse is set to be one of the biggest areas within crypto for many to enjoy…using it as another great resource to offer crypto communities incentivization, content, and regular royalties.”

    2. 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 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, stake BNB, as well as participate in DeFi, liquidity pools, and DEX trading. 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. In June 2021, for example, Binance launched its own NFT marketplace.

    Buy/Sell BNB

    Binance invests in Forbes and establishes several major partnerships

    A busy week is behind the Binance team. At the beginning of last week, the crypto conglomerate released the announcement, revealing a new partnership with a renowned South Korean entertainment agency YG Entertainment. While the corporate representatives were very scarce with details, they did reveal that the two companies will collaborate on NFTs, metaverse and other gaming opportunities and that they will focus on building an innovative and eco-friendly NFT ecosystem. On the same day, Forbes, the issuer of the same-named iconic magazine, revealed they have received a strategic investment from Binance. The acquisition of a $200 million stake in Forbes made Binance the second largest investor in this media company and the crypto giant is being quite clear about its agenda, which is increasing awareness about blockchain tech in the mainstream media. Last in the series of investments was the investment in Automata Network, a blockchain privacy firm supporting Avalanche, Polygon, and 11 other crypto projects.

    At the time of writing, Binance Coin (BNB) is changing hands at just above $400. Despite Binance making some sound investments and establishing a strategic partnerships, BNB is down by 3.5% in last 7 days. Nevertheless, the effect of these events will likely show in the long run, potentially cementing Binance’s status as the leading crypto trading platform and one of the most important players in the crypto space in general. And what is good for Binance is usually also good for BNB, meaning that the events of last week will certainly bode well for BNB’s future price performance as well.

    1. Gala (GALA)

    GALA is the utility token of the same-named platform, which allows its users to build various games that utilize the blockchain technology. The project Gala Games launched in 2019 and it promised to deliver interesting games, which users would enjoy playing. In addition to that, Gala delivered true ownership of in-game items through NFT technology. Games available within the Gala ecosystem are divided into controlled games (owned and developed by Gala) and ones owned by the players. Gala ecosystem boasts with over 1.3 million monthly active users, over 26,000 sold NFTs, and over 50 developers and experts working on the project. 

    Buy/Sell GALA

    Gala allocates $5 billion to expand its NFT offerings

    Mid-last week, GALA was one of the best performing digital assets in the past seven-day period. GALA price more than doubled, growing from $0.19 at the beginning of the month to nearly $0.40 on February 9. While the rally was mostly a consequence of a massive NFT investment announcement, new games being launched, and new partnerships also may have contributed towards GALA appreciation. The Blockchain gaming studio Gala Games (GALA) confirmed on Monday February 7, that it has allocated $5 billion for the expansion of its ecosystem. Reportedly, the studio will invest $2 billion into gaming, $1 billion will be allocated for the studio’s music ambitions, another $1 billion will go for movies and the remaining $1 billion will be dedicated for Gala theme park NFTs. Furthermore, it is being rumoured that Gala is currently working with Snoop Dogg on a special “NFT album”, that could be available on Gala sooner than on other platforms, giving Gala Gold community members exclusive access to the newest songs.

    While GALA has retraced back below $0.30 levels, the project is clear and ambitious when it comes to their long-term goals. The $5 billion investment into the development of new products is a firm indicator that the studio is more than just a passing fad. In addition, Gala’s gaming venture mostly belongs to the play-to-earn (P2E) gaming sector of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which has proved to be one of the most resilient to the volatility and price declines in the past couple of months.  

  • Solana is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of February 07 – February 13, 2022

    Solana is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of February 07 – February 13, 2022

    After another week of rather sideways trading on the cryptocurrency markets we are entering already 6th week of 2022, which will hopefully bring more green numbers to crypto charts and higher gains of your crypto portfolio. While it is impossible to predict, in which direction the markets will move, we hand-pick 3 coins that have the highest potential for appreciation each week. Find out this week’s selection in the article below.

    3. Ethereum Classic (ETC)

    Ethereum Classic emerged through a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain in 2016 following the controversial debate around how the community should respond to the DAO hack, in which $50 million worth of ETH were stolen. Most of the community voted that the stolen funds should be reimbursed and the chain in which the illicit transaction was reversed lives on as the Ethereum main chain. However, some Ethereum developers and users believed immutability was a crucial aspect of blockchains and that hard forks should not be used to reverse the transactions that happened on the Ethereum blockchain. This camp did not reverse the DAO hack transactions in the hard fork and their chain became known as Ethereum Classic. Widely regarded as the only Ethereum fork of significance, Ethereum Classic maintains the continuity of the Ethereum blockchain using Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm and there are currently no plans to transition to Proof-of-Stake. As opposed to ETH, the total supply of ETC is capped at 210 million ETC.

    Buy/Sell ETC

    Ethereum Classic Blockchain to undergo Mystique hard fork on February 13th

    Mystique is an upgrade that will bring a subset of the ECIPs, similar to the EIPs deployed on Ethereum in August 2021 as part of the London hard fork, to the Ethereum Classic network. Nevertheless, the Mystique hard fork is not exactly a copy-paste of the London hard fork as the Ethereum Classic community decided to opt-out of deploying some of the EIPs from the London upgrade. The omitted improvements include the EIP that implemented the real-time fee burning mechanism to Ethereum because the fee market change conflicts with ETC’s fixed monetary policy. In addition, the Mystique hard fork will not feature the difficulty bomb delay EIP because ETC has previously entirely removed the difficulty bomb. You can find all the details about the protocol upgrades featured in the hard fork in ECIP-1104 description. The Mystique hard fork will be activated on the Ethereum Classic mainnet at block 14,525,000, which is estimated to be mined on February 13th, 2022. All node operators should upgrade to Mystique ready clients, which include Core-geth v1.12.4 or later and Hyperledger Besu v21.10.8 or later.

    2. FTX Token (FTT)

    FTX is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange that offers futures, leveraged ERC-20 tokens, and OTC trading. The developers of the FTX exchange aim to offer a first-class trading experience by constantly improving the platform and addressing the issues that are often left unaddressed on other mainstream exchanges. FTX focuses on developing and offering institutional-grade solutions. The official token and the backbone of the FTX cryptocurrency derivatives exchange is FTX Token (FTT). The maximum supply of FTT is 350 million tokens, but the exchange uses one-third of all fees collected from the trades to buy back and burn FTT. Users of the exchange can utilize FTT as collateral for futures positions use it for earning rebates on trading fees or even stake the coins. Furthermore, the exchange promises to add more FTT use cases in the future. 

    Buy/Sell FTT

    FTX ecosystem grows its user base as well as its valuation 

    The FTX exchange is recently experiencing growth on several counts. Since October 2021, the FTX’s user base grew by more than 60%, which in turn resulted in a 40% increase of the average daily trading volume, which now hovers around $14 billion. In fact, the exchange now claims the title of the third-largest crypto exchange in the world and the largest exchange outside of China. Nevertheless, the crypto conglomerate seeks to further expand its reach and number of users by acquiring a licensed Japanese crypto trading platform, Liquid. FTX is also thinking about the future. To secure its leading spot in the blockchain space in the following years, the company launched FTX Ventures, a $2 billion venture fund that primarily invests in innovative blockchain, cryptocurrency, and Web3 solutions. To conclude, the increase of trading activity on the platform has led to an appreciation of the FTX conglomerate. According to the press release following the latest Series C funding round, in which the FTX exchange raised $400 million, the exchange is now valued at more than $32 billion. The valuation of FTX already surpasses the market cap of some of the biggest publicly traded companies in the world.

    1. Solana (SOL)

    Solana is a smart contract-enabled blockchain platform developed with a focus on scalability. Due to its high throughput of 65,000 transactions per second and absurdly low transaction fees (an average transaction on the blockchain costs just $0.00025), Solana is considered one of the strongest Ethereum competitors. Such a high blockchain efficiency is made possible by utilizing an innovative proof-of-stake consensus mechanism combined with a proof-of-history (PoH) timestamping mechanism. Because of these reasons, Solana is very popular among various non-fungible token (NFT) projects and decentralized finance applications of all kinds. In addition, the project is also backed by major investors such as Alameda Research, Polychain, and Andreessen Horowitz that provide Solana Labs with more than sufficient funds for further development of the Solana blockchain.

    Buy/Sell SOL

    Solana rally almost nullified by the Solana-Ethereum bridge exploit 

    At the very beginning of this month, Solana’s SOL rallied by more than 20%. The price started surging soon after Coinbase announced the listing of two Solana-based assets: Bonfida (FIDA) and Orca (ORCA), which became the first Solana-based tokens as well as the first non-Ethereum or Layer 1 native tokens to commence trading on the popular exchange. The rally was further fuelled by the roll-out of Solana Pay, a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) payments protocol that facilitates low-cost and fast USDC payments to merchants worldwide. Solana Labs, which developed the new service, hope that Solana Pay will help boost Solana’s adoption, especially in the e-commerce sector. Both events combined caused SOL to climb from around $90 in the evening hours of January 31 to above $110 on February 1. However, the price gain was not sustained as SOL began tanking in the night from February 2 to February 3 as news about a major exploit of Wormhole, a bridge between the Ethereum and Solana network, hit Twitter. Reportedly, hackers managed to mint 120k wETH by depositing just 0.1 ETH by exploiting a bug in the Solana smart contract. The hacker soon sold his unrightfully obtained wETH for over 90.000 ETH, worth over $240 million. SOL price dropped by more than 10% falling as low as $95 on February 3. At the time of writing SOL has recovered back above $100, but it is still trading 10% below this rally’s top. It will be interesting to observe whether positive ecosystem developments or negative implications stemming from the attack will prevail in the coming week. Given the fact that Wormhole developers have taken a very proactive approach and have patched the bug almost immediately, suggests that the SOL price trend could soon be pointing back up.

  • Fantom is the #2 Coin to Watch for the Week of January 31 – February 06, 2022

    Fantom is the #2 Coin to Watch for the Week of January 31 – February 06, 2022

    While more than half coins and tokens from the top 100 cryptocurrencies ended Week 4 with green numbers, the recorded gains were far lower than the losses incurred during the most recent notable sell-off. This is resembled also in the total cryptocurrency market capitalization which only rose from $1.70 trillion to $1.75 trillion. While two of the largest and most well-known digital assets both recorded notable gains (BTC is up by almost 7% during the last 7 days, ETH by almost 6%), some coins, especially those belonging to PoS chains, have had a much worse week. Terra’s LUNA (-30.2% in the last 7D), for example, claimed the inglorious title of the worst performing coin among Top 200 cryptocurrencies.

    3. Centrifuge (CFG)

    Centrifuge is a decentralized asset financing protocol that aims to bridge the worlds of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and non-digitally native real-world assets. The project aims to provide DeFi investors with a stable yield unaffected by volatile cryptocurrency prices. Businesses, on the other hand, can tokenize real-world assets and use them as collateral to access financing through Tinlake, Centrifuge’s lending dApp. The CFG token is the protocol’s native asset that provides incentive for blockchain validators and grants governance rights to its holder. Centrifuge chain operates on Polkadot, while its lending application Tinlake is built on Ethereum due to the ecosystem’s massive liquidity.

    Buy/Sell CFG

    Centrifuge secures a Polkadot parachain slot in the latest auction

    The Centrifuge representatives recently announced that the project has successfully secured a Polkadot parachain slot in the ninth Polkadot parachain auction that took place between January 20 and January 27.  Centrifuge team has to thank over 15,000 contributions who staked more than 5.4 million DOT in the crowdloaning phase of the slot auction. While Centrifuge already has a guaranteed itself a Polkadot parachain, several project are still competing for the three remaining parachain slots. At the moment, it looks like HydraDX, Interlay and Equilibrium have the best chance at making it. The Centrifuge parachain will go live on March 11 along with the parachains of all other projects that managed to win a slot in the second batch of the Polkadot parachain auctions. The Centrifuge team noted that the parachain will start out as an “empty shell” and only once its stability is confirmed they will fork the current Centrifuge standalone chain to become the 9th parachain on Polkadot. The team believes that moving the Centrifuge mainnet onto Polkadot will likely result in a significant increase of the project’s TVL. Polkadot users also applaud the onboarding of Centrifuge, as the DeFi project will provide a welcome addition to the Polkadot’s DeFi ecosystem. Besides securing its own parachain, the Centrifuge team have also established two significant partnerships. The project has recently partnered with Acala (to leverage liquidity provided by aUSD stablecoin) and Moonbeam Network, a project that makes Polkadot’s infrastructure EVM-compatible. 

    2. Fantom (FTM)

    Fantom is a fast, high-throughput open-source smart contract platform for digital assets and dApps. It is a Layer 1 network competing with the likes of Avalanche, Solana, and Terra to dethrone Ethereum. Fantom utilizes Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus algorithm. The aBFT algorithm promises to solve the blockchain Scalability Trilemma, according to which only two of the crucial three components that include decentralization, security, and scalability, are possible at the same time. It is very likely that this was one of the main factors that made FTM one of the best-performing assets of 2021. The Fantom’s native asset gaining approximately 13,000% last year.

    Buy/Sell FTM

    Fantom briefly surpassed Binance Smart Chain in terms of TVL

    On Monday, January 24 we have reported that Fantom surpassed Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in terms of total value locked (TVL) on the blockchain and thereby claimed the title of the world’s third largest DeFi chain. Fantom flipped BSC after a week of awesome performance, during which we saw Fantom’s TVL increase by nearly 50%. While Fantom has since slipped back to the fourth spot, the project is not falling far behind. Furthermore, two days before Fantom TVL climbed above BSC’s, Fantom network conducted more transactions than Ethereum (ETH), the most valuable smart contract blockchain by market capitalization. More than 1.24 million transactions were processed by Fantom nodes on Saturday, January 22, while Ethereum validators only recorded 1.20 million transactions that day. While this is not reflective of the transaction volume it does show that Fantom is capable of conducting just as much (or even more) transactions then Ethereum at just a fraction of the cost of its competitor. To conclude, we believe that FTM’s price is currently not reflective of its DeFi performance. While Fantom has a TVL of more than $9 billion, its FTM coin is trading only slightly above $2, which puts the project’s market capitalization to $5.14 billion. Other Layer 1 networks such as Avalanche and Solana, for instance, enjoy much higher market caps despite having a noticeably lower TVL.

    1. The Sandbox (SAND)

    The Sandbox is a user-generated blockchain-based virtual world where players can build, create as well as buy and sell digital assets in the form of a game. Along with other projects from within the blockchain gaming sector, The Sandbox too experienced explosive growth over the course of last year as nonfungible tokens (NFT) and the play-to-earn gaming model are gaining momentum. The Sandbox ecosystem utilizes SAND as its utility token and medium of exchange. SAND is an ERC-20 token and there is a finite supply of 3,000,000,000 SAND. SAND can also be used for staking and governing the Sandbox metaverse. The Sandbox started out as an ordinary sandbox game for mobile phones and PCs, but transformed into a blockchain-based voxel universe after it was acquired by Animoca Brands in August 2018. 

    Buy/Sell SAND

    The Sandbox will invest $50 million in metaverse start-ups, Animoca Brands valuation surpasses $5 billion

    The hype around metaverse projects seems to be becoming more than just a fad as it now lasts already more than three months and features some heavy institutional involvement – both Microsoft and Disney have lately joined the space. The Sandbox is one of the metaverse projects that seeks to make out the most out of this once in a lifetime opportunity. Recently, the project revealed that they have partnered with Brinc to fund The Sandbox Metaverse Accelerator Program. The accelerator will invest $50 million (in the form of SAND and LAND) in up to 100 metaverse start-ups that could contribute to the growth and expansion of The Sandbox ecosystem. The game creators are looking for early-stage projects that will “help build unique experiences and populate the platform with fresh creativity and new content”. But The Sandbox developers are not waiting for start-ups to come up with fresh ideas. They are doing their own part by establishing a partnership with the with international entertainment conglomerate Warner Music Group (WMG). The aim of this partnership is reportedly hosting concerts and live experiences featuring artists and talent represented by WMG in The Sandbox metaverse. The metaverse project could also help at establishing a closer relationship between artists and fans via NFTs, as it did in the case of Snoop Dogg’s “Snoopverse”. With The Sandbox filling news outlets with such positive announcements, it is no wonder that the developer of the metaverse game, Animoca Brands raised another $358 million in a private funding round that concluded on January 18. The company behind The Sandbox metaverse now boasts with a private valuation of more than $5 billion.

  • Bitcoin is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of January 24 – January 30, 2022

    Bitcoin is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of January 24 – January 30, 2022

    Week 3 of year 2022 could be vividly described as a bloodbath in cryptocurrency markets. While the total cryptocurrency market capitalization at the start of the week was solid $2.15 trillion all cryptocurrencies in circulation combined were only valued at $1.67 trillion by the end of the week. Most of the more than 20% decrease happened between Thursday, January 20 and Saturday, January 22. While Sunday showed signs of a minor recovery, several cryptos still ended the week deeply in the red numbers. In the last 7 days, BTC is down by 18%, ETH by 27%, BNB 26%, ADA 23%, and SOL 35%, to name just a few large-cap coins. While crypto holders suffered heavy losses this market move also represents an opportunity to acquire crypto assets at prices not seen during the last 6 months. While this week’s article includes two already established crypto assets that are currently trading at a discounted price, do note that crypto markets are as unpredictable as they can get, which means that an even greater plunge might be behind the corner.

    3. Gari Network (GARI)

    Chingari is one of India’s leading social platforms. Similar to TikTok, the platform enables creators to post short videos. While the platform’s native GARI token is currently being used as a governance token, it will also allow creators to monetize their content through token-gated content and creator pools in the near future. The platform’s GARI token utilizes the highly efficient Solana blockchain. Chingari conducted a GARI token IDO on Solana Launchpad platform SolRazr in December 2021 and their app hit the top spot on Play Store India during the same month. The social platform currently boasts over 35 million active users and more than 160 million content views per day.

    Buy/Sell GARI

    Chingari’s GARI token recorded $100 million in trading volume on the first day of trading

    The Chingari’s GARI token recently got listed on 12 centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, including 6 major CEXs: Huobi, FTX, OKEx, KuCoin, Gate.io, and MEXC. Trading of GARI pairs started on all 12 exchanges on January 18 at 13:00 UTC and the first trading day has been a major success for the token and the social platform as stats show that GARI recorded over $100 million in trading volume on the day of its debut on centralized exchanges. The huge interest and engagement from the broader cryptocurrency community also caused rapid GARI appreciation. The token’s value grew more than 200% in a single day as its price surged to over $0.70 per token at times. For comparison, the price of 1 GARI during its first IDO was $0.25. While the token has since retraced back to around $0.40, it is worth keeping an eye on this project, especially as they already have a working product. Furthermore, the Chingari platform’s popularity is growing day by day and so is the number of its active users.

    2. 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 in 2017 by Charles Hoskinson, a mathematician who was once part of the Ethereum developer team. The team raised $62.2 million for the project’s development through an ICO. The development of the project is now overseen by three main organizations, the IOHK, Cardano Foundation, and Emurgo. Hoskinson and IOHK strive 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 the 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

    Recent dip negated all previous rallies and carried ADA down to a six-month low

    During the last days of 2021, Cardano founder and head developer Charles Hoskinson outlined his Vision for Cardano in 2022 in a 30-minute YouTube video. His vision includes rolling out improvements to Cardano’s DeFi features, the launch of a native web wallet, and a peer-to-peer framework in 2022. While Hoskinson’s appearance caused ADA to rally over 10% that day Cardano users and investors are now reasonably expecting the promises and prepositions from the video to materialize, and ADA could be in danger of losing its high spot among the top cryptocurrencies if that does not happen. ADA then lost some of its value in the first ten days of 2021 but quickly entered a new rally fuelled by the anticipation of the SundaeSwap DEX launch on Cardano. Between January 11 and January 18 ADA was by far the most successful coin from the Top 10 as its price jumped by almost 50% in just seven days. Nevertheless, all that high gains were reversed during the recent selloff and ADA is again changing hands at a price around $1.10. The ADA sell pressure was to some extent intensified by the fact that the launch of the SundaeSwap, which was the main driving factor of the rally, was far less than optimal as users complained about failing transactions due to network congestion. For a brief moment during the selloff, ADA price plunged as low as $0.94, which is not only the new six-month low price but also the lowest ADA price since February 2021. For the ones considering buying ADA now that it is trading at a lower price, it is worth knowing that Cardano stands to benefit from the broader hype surrounding metaverse projects as the first metaverse on Cardano called Pavia is set to hold its final NFT land sale in early February.

    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 a 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 hits a six-month low price – Is BTC trading at a discounted price or will the downtrend continue?

    Bitcoin started the year valued above $47,000 per coin and traded sideways until January 6, when the world’s most popular crypto lost around 10% of its value due to the news about the U.S. Federal Reserve signaling a possible interest rate hike. After that Bitcoin again traded sideways, rarely dipping below or surging above the $40,000 – $44,000 channel. That was until January 21, when Bitcoin price plunged by 20% from above $43,000 to as low as $34,500 in under 48 hours as part of the market-wide selloff. At the time of writing, BTC is trading at exactly $35,000, which is a bit higher than the lowest point, but this still means that Bitcoin is trading very near its 6-month low price. While it might look like a perfect time to increase your BTC stake, be aware that there is absolutely no guarantee that $34,500 was the bottom. However, even if you do not decide to invest more money and “buy the dip” (or at least what looks like a dip), it is worth keeping an eye on Bitcoin this week as this week’s Bitcoin performance might determine the new trendline for not only Bitcoin but likely most of the cryptocurrency markets. In other news related to Bitcoin: the popular Cash App recently rolled out support for Lightning Network, a Bitcoin Layer 2 solution that facilitates cheap and near-instantaneous BTC transactions. While this is not so ground-breaking to reverse the BTC price downtrend, the new feature will definitely come in handy to the 36 million monthly active Cash App users.

  • Stellar Network is the #3 Coin to Watch for the Week of January 17 – January 23, 2022

    Stellar Network is the #3 Coin to Watch for the Week of January 17 – January 23, 2022

    Throughout Week 2 we have recorded slight growth of the cryptocurrency market, which caused the total market capitalisation to recover from $2.02 trillion on January 9 to $2.15 trillion on January 16. As always there were also quite a few coins that managed to outperform the sector average. These include ADA, Terra, DOGE, NEAR and MATIC, which all posted gains higher than 10%. Two of these coins are even featured in this article as we believe that their rallies could not be as short-lived as one may think at a first glance.

    3. Stellar Network (XLM)

    Stellar is a crypto platform that is designed to enable fast, secure, and low-cost multi-currency and cross-border money transfers. In other words, Stellar is a crypto alternative to traditional finance firms such as Western Union and MoneyGram. The Stellar network, which aims to serve the needs of both individuals as well as enterprises, has an average transaction confirmation time of 2-5 seconds. At the same time, the base fee for sending a transaction currently stands at only 0.0001 XLM. Since its launch in 2014 the Stellar network has processed more than 450 million transactions made by over 4 million individual accounts.

    Buy/Sell XLM

    Aquarius could boost Stellar Network’s utility

    Aquarius is a liquidity management layer for Stellar aiming to supercharge trading on Stellar by providing incentives to the market makers. The team believes that doing so they will manage to increase liquidity within the ecosystem. In addition, Aquarius will allow the Stellar community to control the rewards for SDEX traders and liquidity providers through on-chain voting process. The rewards will be trading pair specific, giving XLM holders almost full control over liquidity distribution. Aquarius is developed by Ultra Stellar and powered by AQUA token. It has been announced that 20% of the total AQUA supply will be reserved for airdrops to the Stellar community, since Aquarius governance needs to be aligned with Stellar’s interests. While 5% of the supply have already been given to the early Stellar DEX adopters, another 15% are were distributed through the AQUA airdrop to XLM holders. The snapshot of balances took place on January 15 and users needed at least 500 XLM and 1 AQUA in their Stellar wallet to be eligible for the airdrop. The AQUA tokens will be distributed by February, but eligible users will be given an option to lock up the airdropped AQUA for up to 3 years and multiply their AQUA holdings. 

    2. Dogecoin (DOGE)

    The cryptocurrency Dogecoin was introduced as a joke in December 2013 by Billy Markus. Markus built the cryptocurrency project around the Shiba Inu doge meme that went viral that year, which is why Dogecoin uses the Doge meme as its official logo. Surprisingly, the currency not only survived, but took off and managed to develop a relatively large community on social platforms such as Reddit. Today, Dogecoin is not only used for tipping other members of the community and performing similar micro-transactions but also for conducting larger deals and participating in DeFi activities. The Dogecoin community also raised funds to sponsor their own NASCAR racer for a few races and pay for a physical gold Dogecoin to be delivered to the moon via crowdfunding. 

    Buy/Sell DOGE

    Tesla’s merch store adds DOGE support, causes the price to rally to a one-month high

    We have recently reported that the famous electric vehicle maker Tesla started accepting Dogecoin payments in its online store. Even though DOGE can currently only be used to pay for certain Tesla merchandise (and not for its cars) the price of the world’s first meme coin spiked for more than 14% that day reaching a cycle high of $0.2177. Since the announcement DOGE has retraced back to $0.17 but once the hype cools down the coin might start following the positive trendline that started to form even before Tesla-related news. Let’s remember that in the past one could pay for Tesla vehicles using Bitcoin, but the company discontinued that option in mid-2021 citing environmental concerns as the reason behind their decision. The fact that they are now accepting DOGE is in fact in line with their reasoning as Dogecoin consumes nearly 6000 times less energy per transaction than Bitcoin. Nevertheless, there is no publicly available information whether or when Tesla could start accepting DOGE as payment option for its cars as well. 

    1. Near Protocol (NEAR)

    Near is a highly scalable and developer friendly Layer 1 Proof-of-Stake blockchain competing with Ethereum and alike network. The company behind Near Protocol claims that you can create simple decentralized apps (dApps) on Near in just five minutes. In addition, Near Protocol utilizes Nightshade sharding mechanism to be capable of performing up to 100,000 transactions per second. However, there are currently not many decentralized applications deployed on its ecosystem. According to DeFi Llama, the total vale locked (TVL) in 3 protocols running on Near is only $176 million.

    Buy/Sell NEAR

    Near Foundation raises $150M for its biggest DeFi push

    Near Foundation recently revealed that it closed a $150 million investment round led by Three Arrows Capital. Several other prominent crypto investment firms including Almeida, Dragonfly Capital and a16z, also reportedly participated in the investment round. The foundation representatives stated they will dedicate the raised funds towards the expansion of Near’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, as the liquidity and number of projects running on Near have are apparently not quite up to their liking. NEAR jumped over 10% on the funding round announcement, surging as high $20.42 and setting a new ATH price on January 16. Industry insiders are united in the belief that Near is doing a great job from the technological point of view and that it is a good network, capable of serving more users and protocols. This means that even though NEAR is currently trading very close to its ATH, there is still a considerable upside potential. Furthermore, the team’s ecosystem expansion efforts, including the $800 million Near ecosystem fund announced in October 2021, are only beneficial for NEAR’s long-term price performance.

  • Polygon is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of January 10 – January 16, 2022

    Polygon is the #1 Coin to Watch for the Week of January 10 – January 16, 2022

    The 2022 did not start very well for cryptocurrency investors as we have witnessed first significant market sell off already during the first week of the new year. To provide a little more detail, nearly every cryptocurrency lost more than 10% of its value on Thursday, January 6, following news that the U.S. Federal Reserve is planning to increase interest rates and start selling its $8.7 trillion portfolio. U.S. tech stocks also suffered some losses. Nevertheless, the losses were greater in the crypto sector where more than $790 million worth of long positions got liquidated. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization even dropped below $2 trillion on January 8, which has not happened since the beginning of October 2021. In this week’s article, we list coins that managed to stay relatively unaffected by the sell-off and those that are likely to undergo a speedy recovery.

    3. Phantasma (SOUL)

    Phantasma is a Layer 1 protocol optimized for Smart NFTs. These are non-fungible tokens that can be created on demand, deliver perpetual royalties, and can offer a time-limited access to content. Phantasma has diverse use cases in the GameFi sector, and its developers claim they are building the technological backbone of the future of gaming. Phantasma is a dual token economy that utilizes SOUL as its governance token and KCAL to pay for transaction fees and minting of NFTs. Phantasma’s rapid appreciation is outstanding even for the burgeoning blockchain gaming sector, as SOUL gained around 300% in the last 3 months and 4,300% in the past 1-year time frame.

    Buy/Sell SOUL

    Is Phantasma the future of blockchain gaming?

    The fundamental drive of Phantasma’s rally is the growing popularity of NFTs and their use in blockchain gaming. However, Phantasma has a few more crucial features that attract new project to use Phantasma network. One of the key characteristics of Phantasma is the network’s cross-chain interoperability, as the network can smoothly interact with Ethereum, BSC and NEO-based dApps. Because of the network’s interoperability, high throughput and low costs, several projects including the role-playing card game Blood Rune, the mobile game Ghost Festival and the NFT marketplace GhostMarkets, have decided to launch on Phantasma in the past few weeks. In addition, the Phantasma network is certified as a carbon-negative blockchain, which sets it apart from carbon-heavy networks like Ethereum and helps attract positive attention to the project. Since the interest in blockchain gaming and NFTs is not showing signs of cooling down anytime soon, Phantasma has a lot of room to grow. In addition, the project has recently released its roadmap for first half of 2022, which is packed with upgrades and new functionalities.

    2. Cosmos (ATOM)

    Cosmos is developing a network of blockchains that would facilitate the interoperability of multiple, otherwise incompatible, blockchain applications and cryptocurrencies. The scalable blockchain network built for developers had grown from a small ICO into a thriving ecosystem. At the time of writing, the network’s native cryptocurrency ATOM has a market capitalization of $8.26 billion, which is more than three times as much as it had 6 months ago.

    Buy/Sell ATOM

    The launch of Evmos and the upcoming Theta upgrade are the key drivers of ATOM’s most recent rally

    Rare were the coins that managed to defy the bearish trend that prevailed throughout most of the cryptocurrency market during Week 1, but ATOM was among them. While the majority of other cryptos was still slowly loosing value towards USD on Friday, January 7 ATOM managed to spike above its price from September 2021 and set a new ATH price, which now sits at $44.47. The launch of a cross-chain bridge called Evmos, which makes Cosmos compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) was identified as the main cause of the rally. The new bridge allows Ethereum-based projects to interact with the Cosmos ecosystem will drastically increase the number of projects that can communicate with DeFi and NFT projects from the Cosmos ecosystem. Up to now, only Gravity Bridge enabled the transfer of ERC-20 tokens between the Ethereum and Cosmos blockchains. At the moment Gravity Bridge still operates as a standalone chain, but it plans to transfer to Cosmos Hub this quarter. Another factor that has contributed to the ATOM rally is the upcoming Theta upgrade. Its much-anticipated launch is slated for March 31. Among other things, Theta upgrade will bring support for meta-transactions, inter-chain accounts, NFT modules and liquid staking. 

    1. Polygon (MATIC)

    Polygon, previously known as Matic Network is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that focuses on providing major scalability improvements to the biggest smart contract blockchain. The Polygon protocol aims to deliver supersonic speeds and throughput by utilizing a modified version of Plasma. Its Layer 2 solution consists of several simultaneously run Proof-of-Stake sidechains that regularly push the data to Ethereum to create network checkpoints. 

    Buy/Sell MATIC

    Polygon sees record-breaking activity at the end of 2021 and has a lot more in store for 2022

    Polygon ended 2021 at an all-time high as its MATIC token was changing hands at a record-breaking $2.91 on December 27. However, Polygon did not spike only in terms of MATIC price but also in terms of network activity as this Layer 2 project recorded a record amount of gaming NFTs sold on the network and exponential growth of unique daily active during the last month of 2021. While MATIC was also hit hard by the market-wide sell off that took place last week investors will likely regain faith in the most successful Ethereum L2 project faster than in other cryptocurrencies with less utility. In addition, Polygon’s 2021 Year in review official blog post gives an interesting sneak-peak into what the team will be working in 2022. At first, they will integrate EIP-1559 that will introduce burning of MATIC tokens and better fee visibility to the network. The team is also making everything ready for the launch of two public testnets – Polygon Hermez in Q2 and Polygon Miden in Q3 2022. Furthermore, the Polygon team disclosed that the relatively popular Opera browser will integrate with Polygon in 2022, which could provide a major boost to Polygon adoption, potentially bringing in millions of new users. However, developers first need to tune the protocol to accommodate such a high number of users. As it turned out, the high network activity caused by heavy NFT minting and trading in December acted as a stress test and exposed that even a scalable network like Polygon is prone to rising gas fees in times of network congestion. Amidst NFT craze fees on Polygon increased by more than 16x. Because of this, one project even decided to delay its launch. The upside in this whole story is, that even in times of network congestion fees on Polygon remained far lower than those on Ethereum L1, where one transaction could cost you more than $100.

  • Top 3 Coins to Watch – Week 1

    Top 3 Coins to Watch – Week 1

    The flies and we have already entered year 2022. As usually, the beginning of a new year is time to reflect on the events that the past year had to offer. With countries across the world still battling COVID-19 outbreaks and issuing new restrictions it is a bit difficult to call 2021 a generally “good year”, but when looking just at cryptocurrency markets it was exactly that. Perhaps some would even call it a “great year”. 2021 will go down in crypto history as the year of massive institutional investments, the rise of NFTs and emerging of the GameFi sector. Driven by positive sentiment, the prices of Bitcoin, Ether, and many other coins reached their historic peaks in 2021. While the total cryptocurrency market capitalization stood at just $865 billion at the beginning of 2021, we have entered 2022 with the valuation of all crypto assets in circulation exceeding $2.24 trillion. It is worth mentioning that the total cryptocurrency market cap even exceeded the magical $3 trillion valuation in the beginning of November. We wish that 2022 would be at least as good as 2021 for the cryptocurrency sector and hope that you will continue to find useful information in our Top 3 Coins to watch articles throughout the year.

    3. Kava (KAVA)

    Developed by Kava Labs the Kava blockchain boasts with the title of the first multi-blockchain DeFi platform. Kava currently consists of 3 main projects: Kava Mint, which allows users to use their assets as collateral to obtain USDX, Kava Lend, which allows users to earn rewards by lending crypto assets, and Kava Swap, which allows users to buy and sell tokens on the Kava chain and earn rewards by providing liquidity to the mining pool. The Kava blockchain utilizes the Tendermint consensus and is secured by numerous validators. However, only the top 100 validators are eligible to receive staking rewards. The KAVA token is an asset on the Kava Chain, which is used across the chain as a transport medium and a store of value. Kava Labs have established close partnerships with industry leaders such as Binance, Kraken and Ripple. 

    Buy/Sell KAVA

    Kava 9 Upgrade aims to solve the platform’s problems by providing facilitation interoperability with other blockchains

    In theory Kava is a capable and promising platform, but in reality, the blockchain has never lived up to its full potential. A weak ecosystem combined with an unstable token economy have been dragging the project down. There are not many assets and trading pairs available for lending in the project and there is a general lack of liquidity in the ecosystem. However, developers hope that this will change when Kava 9 upgrade hits the mainnet in Q1 2022. One of the main features of the upcoming Kava 9 upgrade is that it will officially enable Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) and thereby allow Kava smart contracts to talk to other blockchains. This will enable all IBC supporting projects and communities to integrate their products with the Kava chain. Thereby the liquidity of the Kava ecosystem is expected to improve. In addition, after the deployment of IBC, users will be able to use USDX in DeFi projects on Ethereum and other blockchains, which is why Kava’s token economy is expected to become more stable following Kava 9 upgrade. In addition, Kava 9 upgrade will add support for Keplr wallet and include a fully operational Ethereum cross-chain bridge as well as infrastructure for Kava Launchpad. To conclude, the Kava infrastructure is close to being set. It is now time for developers to deploy projects on the protocol.

    2. The Sandbox (SAND)

    The Sandbox is a user-generated blockchain-based virtual world where players can build, create as well as buy and sell digital assets in the form of a game. The Sandbox was initially an ordinary sandbox game for mobile phones and PCs, but transformed into a blockchain-based voxel universe after it was acquired by Animoca Brands in August 2018. As well as other projects within the blockchain gaming ecosystem, The Sandbox too experienced explosive growth over the course of 2021 as nonfungible tokens (NFT) and the play-to-earn gaming model gained momentum. The Sandbox ecosystem utilized SAND as its utility token and as the basis of transactions and interactions. SAND is an ERC-20 token and there is a finite supply of 3,000,000,000 SAND. SAND can also be used for staking and governing the Sandbox metaverse.

    Buy/Sell SAND

    The Sandbox’s Game Maker 1.0 was Released on December 31

    While The Sandbox Alpha closed on December 20 and the project thanked players with rewards in the form of SAND and NFTs, the project’s developers have not been resting. The project recently rolled-out Game Maker 1.0 alpha release, which allows anyone to build 3D metaverse games for free. In addition, The Sandbox promises absolutely no coding knowledge is required to make games using the Game Maker as the product creates games using visual and intuitive scripting tools. Together with the Game Maker, The Sandbox recently concluded a Foundation DAO launch, which will enable SAND token holders to participate in the project governance and allow SAND token staking. At the same time, famous rapper Snoop Dogg is putting in some serios work with promoting The Sandbox and his Sandbox-based metaverse for fans called the “Snoopverse”. Snoop Dogg, who is currently offering two exclusive passes for his die-hard fans, is likely going to attract new players to the game and even show other musicians and creators how they can benefit from creating a fan-targeted metaverse. 

    1. Fantom (FTM)

    Fantom is a fast, high-throughput open-source smart contract platform for digital assets and dApps. It is a Layer 1 network competing with the likes of Avalanche, Solana, and Terra to dethrone Ethereum. Fantom utilizes Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus algorithm. The aBFT algorithm promises to solve the blockchain Scalability Trilemma, according to which only two of the crucial three components that include decentralization, security, and scalability, are possible at the same time. It is very likely that this was one of the main factors that made FTM one of the best-performing assets of 2021. The Fantom’s native asset gaining approximately 13,000% last year.

    Buy/Sell FTM

    Fantom has the potential to outperform Solana, Avalanche and other Layer One Blockchains 

    Analysts from Arcane Research recently noted that while ETH outperformed BTC in 2021 with a gain of 455% vs. 73%, several other layer one blockchains drastically outperformed ETH. The firm firmly believes that we will observe this trend in 2022 as well. And when it comes to layer one smart contract-enabled blockchains, Fantom is, despite its gigantic gains in 2021, considered the most undervalued platform. Its advanced consensus algorithm enables the platform to offer finality in one second, which puts Solana with its 11 seconds and even Avalanche with 3 second block finality far behind. In addition, the network can process over 10,000 TPS and aims to scale up to 300k TPS. And finally, FTM has a relatively small market cap of $6.4 billion, which makes it more feasible to deliver gains of a few 100% as compared to already established blockchain platforms with significantly higher market capitalizations. To put it into a perspective, FTM is currently trading at a round price of $2.50 per coin and its total market capitalization puts this asset on the 29th spot. Nevertheless, if Fantom ever wants to come neck and neck with Solana, one of its competitors, it would have to reach a market cap almost ten times of the one it has today. Do you think Fantom can pull this off? We think that the chances are not that slim.

  • Top 3 Coins to Watch – Week 52

    Top 3 Coins to Watch – Week 52

    The final weeks of a year are usually relatively quiet – most projects use this time to go on a well-deserved break, and typically don’t have major announcements or launches during the period. However, that doesn’t mean that nothing interesting is happening in crypto right now. Here are 3 crypto projects that will be worth following in the coming days.

    3. Terra (LUNA)

    The Terra blockchain platform is designed to support algorithmic stablecoins and a decentralized finance ecosystem built around them. Terra is built using the Cosmos SDK and uses Tendermint consensus. The network also supports the issuance of synthetic assets through its Mirror Protocol.

    Buy/Sell LUNA

    The rapid growth of Terra’s DeFi ecosystem pulls the value of LUNA towards $100

    On December 22, LUNA hit a new all-time high at almost $100. This is extremely impressive if we consider that the token was trading below $1 at the start of 2021. Alongside the LUNA token’s price, Terra’s DeFi ecosystem has also been seeing rapid growth.

    According to data from DeFi Llama, Terra is currently the second-largest DeFi platform in terms of TVL (Total Value Locked). At the time of writing, Terra has a TVL of $19.2 billion, ahead of the $16.7 billion figure on Binance Smart Chain. Admittedly, the 1st spot is currently out of reach for Terra, as Ethereum is dwarfing all competitors with its TVL of $155.4 billion. Currently, the most popular DeFi protocol on Terra is Anchor, which offers yields on Terra-based stablecoins.

    2. IOTA (IOTA)

    IOTA is a project that’s tackling decentralized ledger technology in an alternative way instead of using blockchain architecture. The IOTA network uses the directed acyclic graph (DAG) architecture, which can provide significant scalability improvements over blockchain, although it has proven to be more complex to implement successfully.

    Buy/Sell IOTA

    Smart contracts and true decentralization are coming to the IOTA network

    There are two additional networks being built to complement the IOTA ecosystem: Shimmer and Assembly.

    Shimmer is based on the same consensus mechanism as the IOTA 2.0. DevNet, but instead functions as a truly decentralized network. Shimmer is designed to be upgraded with new features before they make their way to the IOTA mainnet. The role of the Assembly network is to bring smart contract functionality to the IOTA ecosystem. Assembly is anchored to the IOTA network, but also has a pool of decentralized validators.

    Shimmer and Assembly will have their own native tokens called SMR and ASMB, respectively. IOTA is now holding a staking program where users will be able to earn SMR and ASMB by staking IOTA. The pre-staking period began on December 21, and users will start receiving their staking rewards from December 28th onward for a 90-day period. You can learn more about the IOTA staking program by reading the project’s official announcement.

    polkadot

    1. Polkadot (DOT)

    Polkadot is a blockchain platform focused on interoperability, scalability and on-chain governance. Polkadot is designed as a network where customizable blockchains called “parachains” can connect to the main Relay Chain, providing significant security and interoperability between parachains. Polkadot is secured through a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

    Buy/Sell DOT

    The second batch of parachain auctions is bound to bring additional interest to the Polkadot ecosystem

    The second batch of Polkadot parachain auctions is currently underway, and the Polkadot ecosystem is poised to enjoy some additional attention in the coming weeks. The 6th parachain auction started on December 23, and auctions will be taking place on a weekly basis until March 10, 2022.

    Polkadot currently supports a limited number of parachain slots, which means that projects that want to connect a parachain to the network have to win a parachain slot auction. To get the necessary amount of DOT to win an auction, most projects organize “crowdloan” campaigns where users can lend their DOT to the project. If the project wins, crowdloan contributors are typically rewarded with the project’s native tokens (for example, ACA in the case of Acala). The DOT contributed in crowdloans is locked and automatically returned when the project’s parachain lease expires, or if the project fails to win an auction.

    Some of the more interesting projects currently competing for a parachain slot are Efinity, Manta Network, Litentry, Crust Network and Centrifuge.

    To view the full schedule of the second batch of parachain auctions, you can check out this official announcement from Polkadot.