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.
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.
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.
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.
