The start of the second quarter of 2022 has so far been characterized by negative price movements that saw Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the majority of digital assets fall to their multi-week lows. After roughly two weeks of a notable pullback, the bears appeared to have loosened their grip over the market in the second half of Week 15. As a result, numerous coins have been posting modest gains in recent days, which helped the total cryptocurrency market cap recover from the 30-day low of $1.88 trillion recorded on April 12th. With the short-term outlook of many investors turning cautiously optimistic, let’s take a look at the top three coins that are worth following this week.
3. Kyber Network Crystal (KNC)
Founded in 2017, Kyber Network is a decentralized finance infrastructure provider with the mission of making the process of transferring liquidity across the broader crypto ecosystem simple and efficient. The project’s DEX aggregator and liquidity protocol, KyberSwap, facilitates digital asset transfers between numerous decentralized exchanges (DEXs), including Uniswap, Curve, PancakeSwap, and Pangolin, to name a few.
Beyond decentralized cryptocurrency payments, the Kyber ecosystem is governed by the KyberDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which allows KNC token holders to participate in the decision-making process involving key network parameters. In addition to the community governance use cases, KNC can also be used for staking purposes, which gives its owners the ability to earn a share of trading fees generated by the protocol in the form of crypto rewards.
Kyber Network integrates with Uniswap v3, now supports trading across 10 separate blockchains
The native token of the DeFi-focused blockchain network, Kyber Network Crystal (KNC), has gained close to 50% since mid-March. The reason for investors’ interest lies largely in a multitude of major ecosystem milestones the Kyber Network team has reached in recent weeks.
In the first week of Apil, the team announced integration with Uniswap v3 on Ethereum and Polygon to give users the ability to make use of market rates generated by the leading decentralized exchange protocol. Following a theme of multi-chain operations, the project has partnered with Avalanche to unlock $1 million in liquidity mining rewards as a part of the Avalanche Rush Phase 2 program.
The Kyber Network team’s top priority is the expansion of its “DeFi liquidity hub” to as many blockchain ecosystems as possible. The project’s KyberSwap now supports trading on ten leading platforms, including Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Aurora, Arbitrum, Fantom, Oasis, Velas, and Crypo.com’s Cronos. With the total value invested across all services tracked by DeFi Llama growing past $200 billion in April 2022, Kyber Network’s ability to access liquidity from different sources via a simple and efficient interface bodes well for the project’s short-term and long-term prospects.
2. Kava (KAVA)
Kava is a high throughput Layer 1 blockchain developed by Kava Labs. It is designed to use an innovative blockchain architecture of two co-chains working side by side to create a unified scalable network and facilitate a myriad of decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases. While not yet launched on the mainnet, the co-chain system has been thoroughly tested by the Kava team and is slated to roll out soon.
Kava’s own Tendermint consensus engine combines Ethereum’s smart contract capabilities with Cosmos’ interoperability to facilitate transactions for thousands of supported decentralized applications. To achieve cross-chain communication and asset transfers, the Kava ecosystem utilizes IBC Protocol and Chainlink’s decentralized blockchain oracle network. The platform’s native token KAVA is used to transfer value on the network and plays a key role in the governance of the blockchain network.
Ethereum and Cosmos co-chains to go live once Kava Network 1.0 Mainnet launches in May
The Kava ecosystem is fast approaching one of the most significant roadmap goals – the full launch of the co-chain architecture on the mainnet. The team is currently aiming for a co-chain rollout on May 10th, according to a tweet shared earlier this month.
Once fully deployed, co-chains will give DApp developers the opportunity to build in the Ethereum Virtual Machine and Cosmos SDK environments with seamless interoperability and access to liquidity spanning across two of the biggest DeFi ecosystems. Moreover, KAVA stakers can look forward to the ability to use their digital holdings in tokenized form whilst participating in the process of securing the network and earning validator rewards.
According to data from DeFi Llama, the total value of digital assets locked on Kava has increased from $96 million in January 2021 to $625 million in April 2022. More than 550% increase in TVL showcases the promise of the Kava ecosystem and suggests the network activity is bound to increase even further in anticipation of the co-chain infrastructure going live. In addition, the team has recently launched Kava Rise, a $750 million incentive program designed to boost the development of DeFi, gaming, and NFT projects in the ecosystem.
1. Dogecoin (DOGE)
Dogecoin launched in December 2013 as a joke born out of the Shiba Inu doge meme that went viral that same year. Despite its meme-inspired beginnings, the community quickly took a liking to the slightly inflationary digital currency boasting far lower transactions costs and throughput than some of the leading crypto networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In the 12 months between May 2020 and May 2021, the DOGE token had gone on a historic bull run that saw its price increase by more than 30,000%. The rally was driven mostly by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s publicly shared bullish stance on the memecoin and subsequent exposure the token received from a broader audience of regular investors.
Elon Musk and Robinhood CEO float ideas for new Dogecoin use cases
Although Dogecoin started off as a joke inspired by the Reddit community, the token does offer several perks that should not be ignored. For instance, Dogecoin miners can conduct mathematical calculations that complete and record transactions on the blockchain at a much faster rate, and with much less energy used, compared to Bitcoin.
During last year’s TIME’s Person of the Year Interview, Musk said Dogecoin could be one of the better candidates to facilitate digital transactions, highlighting DOGE’s slightly inflationary nature and high total transaction flow as its main pros. Last Friday, Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev expanded on the point Musk made last year and examined in a 12 posts long Twitter thread what it would take for DOGE to become the “future currency of the internet.” Tenev believes that Dogecoin developers should focus on block size optimization, since transactions speeds and fees are already competitive enough to easily take on established payments processors, such as Visa.
Another bullish sign for DOGE came last week after Musk floated the idea of his favorite cryptocurrency being used for Twitter’s Blue premium service. For context, earlier this month Musk acquired 9.2% stake in the social media gain that sent its stock to a yearly high. Later on, Musk proposed to buy the entire business for $54.20 per share ($41.4 billion) and turn it private. Following recent developments, the price of DOGE has increased by more than 20%. Despite the significant uptick, DOGE is still trading close to 80% removed from last May’s ATH, potentially leaving a lot of room for further upside movement.
