The cryptocurrency markets finally showed some much-anticipated hints of recovery during week 25, as the total crypto market capitalization climbed from $940 billion to $990 billion. While $50 billion is a rather small weekly gain, it is the first market cap weekly increase in more than 7 weeks. In addition, the total market cap almost touched $1 trillion last week. We sincerely hope that the crypto market will confidently surpass $1 trillion this week. Whether this will materialize or not, we advise you to read out Top 3 Coins to Watch articles to get some ideas about which coins to follow in the upcoming week.
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.
Axies is launching new creator programs and reimbursing all Ronin hack victims
The Axie Infinity team has recently announced new community-oriented programs, including The Creator Academy and The Axie Creator Program. The team has recognized Axie creators of all sizes as very valuable element of the Axie Infinity ecosystem. However, up to now, these dedicated members of community had no official educational source and had to learn the craft all by themselves. Axie team decided to change that and launch The Axie Creator Program, through which it aims to support contributors who are impactful to the Axie ecosystem. In addition, Axie Infinity is funding 200 fellowships for creators to participate in Nas Academy’s new creator program through The Creator Academy initiative. Furthermore, Axie Infinity is relaunching the Ronin bridge on June 28. But that is not all. Sky Mavis, the company behind the Axie Infinity game, have also announced that all victims of the $600M+ Ronin bridge hack that took place earlier this year will be fully reimbursed by June 28. While the hack itself was a rather negative news for the Axie ecosystem, the reimbursement gives players hope that Sky Mavis will have their backs even in case something goes wrong. Last but not least, the Axie team has recently announced several game improvements and bug fixes, which will be implemented through the Origin update. However, the road to Origin features three-phases of development.
2. dYdX (DYDX)
dYdX is a non-custodial decentralized cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. The same named DYDX token is a governance token for the dYdX exchange. Token holders govern the dYdX Layer 2 protocol to align incentives between traders, liquidity providers, and partners. Aside from governance, traders are eligible for trading discounts of up to 50% when trading on dYdX provided they hold the required number of tokens. dYdX governance token, which launched in early September, was airdropped to protocol users retroactively based on their trading volumes on the platform prior to its full decentralization.
The dYdX decentralized exchange is launching its own blockchain
The dYdX decentralized exchange has revealed it is moving to a standalone blockchain. Called the dYdX Chain, this decentralized exchange’s blockchain will be built on Cosmos SDK and utilize Tendermint PoS consensus. The move comes ahead of the launch of dYdX v4, the dYdX team announced.
The dYdX v4 will run an even more high-throughput fully decentralized off-chain orderbook. Orders will than be matched by the network and trades will be conducted (on-chain of course). The move to launch a standalone chain and the progress being made towards dYdX v4 has apparently been welcomed by traders and investors as the price of the exchange’s native DYDX token surged for more than 20% in the past week. In addition, the decentralized exchange still regularly records more than $500 million in daily trading volume and more than 3000 weekly active takers. We believe that this popular futures DEX could see another boost in adoption and trading volumes with the launch of v4.
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. The protocol also aims to deliver supersonic speeds and throughput by utilizing a modified version of Plasma. 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.
Whales are accumulating MATIC as Polygon goes carbon neutral and launches Polygon ID
Polygon has seen a significant uptick in the past week, gaining almost 60% in the past 7 days. In fact, MATIC was the second most successful coin from the crypto Top 100 last week, with COMP snitching the pole position by a few percent. According to several analysts the reason for MATIC’s recent exceptional price performance lies primarily in the increased rate of MATIC accumulation by whales in the past six weeks. On-chain data shows that holders with between 10,000 and 10,000,000 MATIC in their wallets have collectively added 8.7% to their holdings over the course of past six weeks. While their acquisitions alone could provide a buy pressure big enough to tip the market in one direction, whales accumulating also signal that the biggest (and often better informed and connected) investors are optimistic about the project’s future, which is usually a reliable buy indicator for the small fish. Nevertheless, MATIC rally is not created out of thin air, as Polygon developers are working hard to deliver new features and deploy improvements. For example, the Polygon team has recently announced that they are launching Polygon ID, a self-sovereign identity solution powered by zero-knowledge cryptography. This gives Polygon DAOs access to a whole set of new features, for example, decentralized communities can now issue ecosystem-wide attestations about their members in a fully private and permissionless way. In addition, the project has reached its first sustainability milestone last week as the Polygon’s network officially became carbon neutral. The network’s other sustainability objectives can be found in the project’s Green Manifesto, published in April this year. Apparently, a green blockchain translated to green numbers on the market. Jokes aside, Polygon has a bright (and maybe even green) near future.
