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.
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.
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.
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.
