Again, the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market was virtually the same at the beginning of Week 10 ($1.76 trillion) and at the end of Week 10 ($1.77 trillion). While the increased volatility is not evident in the big picture, there were, of course, several coins that made big moves in the previous week. With its over 50% gain in the course of last 7 days THORChain’s RUNE (#1 Coin to Watch in our last week’s article) was the most profitable coin to hold last week from the group of Top 100 cryptocurrencies. Therefore, make sure to read through and take advantage of the valuable information concentrated in this week’s “Top 3 Coins to Watch” article as well.
3. Mines of Dalarnia (DAR)
Mines of Dalarnia (MoD) is a play-to-earn (P2E) action-adventure blockchain game. The players’ objective is to mine minerals and use them to upgrade their characters by equipping them with various in-game items. Players roam the MoD universe’s and use the acquired skills and gear to fight enemies and claims rare relics and artifacts. DAR acts as an in-game medium of exchange. The tokens can be purchased on the market or earned by renting or trading your equipment at an in-game marketplace. Players can stake their DAR to earn oxygen and level-ups. The developer of Mines of Dalarnia is Workinman Interactive. The game runs on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and it was the 23rd project to launch through Binance Launchpool. The game is a direct competitor to more established blockchain gaming projects such as Axie Infinity and The Sandbox.
MoD seeks new game testers and initiates the second Mining Plot Sale
Mines of Dalarnia launched its Testnet 2.0 on March 4. Since than the team has already added a few new features and fixed plenty of bugs in a patch deployed last week. But to gain even more feedback from the player community and find more bugs and glitches the MoD team has decided to expand the tester base by sending out the next round of invitations. Interested players should visit the game’s official Telegram channel for more information. The MoD developers have also recently initiated the second Mining Plot sale, in which 500 mining plots will find their rightful owners. According to the announcement, the users eligible to buy a mining plot will be determined based on a lottery. To participate in the lottery, users must deposit at least 100 DAR (BEP20) tokens and hold one of the 10,000 Mining Ape NFTs that were given out to the early explorers on the Dalarnia planet. In case you were not among the early adopters but are still interested to play, the Mining Apes are also available for purchase on OpenSea (minimum price at the time of writing is 0.34 ETH). The MoD team will be collecting account snapshots from March 14th, 2022 to March 21st, 2022 to determine eligibility and number of lottery tickets for the Mining plot raffle. Additional lottery tickets can be earned by depositing more DAR and staking it in the DAR-ETH Liquidity Pool on Uniswap V2 Staking or DAR-WBNB Liquidity Pool on PancakeSwap. Note that the staking process must be done through the MoD land sale portal!
2. Theta Token (THETA)
The Theta Token is the native asset of Theta, an end-to-end infrastructure for decentralized video streaming and delivery that provides both technical and economic solutions. Arguably the best way to describe Theta by calling it a blockchain alternative to video streaming services like YouTube and Twitch. The Theta platform incentivises various network participants via the use of cryptocurrencies. Several big players from the crypto and IT industry, including Sony, Samsung, Google and Binance, are participating in Theta’s consensus algorithm by running enterprise Theta nodes. In addition, the project underwent significant upgrades in February, including the launch of a DEX platform ThetaSwap in February and the roll-out of the TDROP token, which is used to incentivize usage of Theta’s NFT marketplace.
Theta hard fork, slated for March 14, will lower the staking requirements to become a Theta node validator
Theta project has recently announced that ist developers will deploy the next network upgrade, Theta v3.3, through a hard fork. The upgrade is going to execute at block height 14,526,120, which is estimated to be confirmed at 12:00 PB PT on Monday, March 14. The upcoming Theta v3.3 will lower the staking threshold for becoming a validator node from the current 2 million THETA to 200,000 THETA. This will allow many more community users to run VNs and lead to a greater decentralization of the Theta protocol. While certain crypto exchanges, including Binance, have already announced they will be supporting the hard fork, make sure to check that with your current exchange or wallet provider in case you are a THETA holder. The features rolled out in February combined with the expectations of Theta v3.3 and the fact that most investors and users are optimistic about Theta’s future success, resulted in the increase in Theta’s TVL. According to Defillama, the TVL in Theta increased from merely $3 million in mid-January to over $230 million today.
1. 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 a 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 a growing number of users and use cases. In fact, the team behind the Dogecoin-inspired memecoin launched several new features over the past couple of months, including ShibaSwap DEX and NFT marketplace.
Turkey’s Minister of Economy met with key members of the country’s SHIB community to discuss Shiba Inu adoption
According to a tweet from the Turkish Shiba Inu community published on March 9, key members of the Turkish “SHIB army” had a face-to-face meeting with Mustafa Elitas, Turkey’s Minister of Economy. Reportedly, they were discussing the use cases of the Shiba Inu ecosystem and its growing adoption. It remains unknown, whether an integration of SHIB within the Turkish legacy financial system was also on the table. Nevertheless, a meeting with the country’s key decision maker is, itself, good news. It is also important to mention that the meeting took place in the time that Turks are increasingly turning to cryptocurrency, which has resulted in a tremendous growth in interest for SHIB as well as other digital assets. Quite possibly, the reason that people living in Turkey are turning to crypto is the accelerated weakening of the country’s national currency – the Turkish lira has lost nearly half of its value against the U.S. dollar over the last 12 months. While the Turkish discussions can have speculative influence on SHIB, we also recorded a SHIB integration that has materialized last week. Leading digital payments platform Wirex, which is regularly utilized by more than 4.5 million users, has added support for four new tokens, including the meme-inspired SHIB. In fact, even Ethereum whales seem to be confident in Shiba Inu’s success. According to WhaleStats, SHIB briefly flipped FTT token to become the second-largest token position (right behind ETH) by dollar value among the top 1000 Ethereum whales. At that time, top 1000 Ethereum addresses by ETH amount owned more than $1.4 billion worth of SHIB tokens.
