It’s the beginning of Week 30 and we have again prepared a selection of top 3 coins expected to benefit from increased attention in the following weeks. May it be releasing new upgrades, burning large amounts of tokens, or even just establishing new partnerships, all these events have the potential to drive the prices of the underlying digital asset up. This week’s selection includes one cryptocurrency exchange native token and two blockchain interoperability projects.
1. Binance Coin (BNB)
Binance Coin is a native token of the Binance Chain, launched and operated by the popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance. If users utilize BNB to pay for exchange, withdrawal, and listing fees they can enjoy significant discounts.
Binance’s 12th Quarterly Token Burn Was the Largest Burn to Date
The Binance Coin team has recently conducted a BNB token burn for the period of April 2020 to June 2020. This was the 12th quarterly BNB token burn and the largest BNB burn in the history of Binance’s coin. The team has destroyed 3,477,388 BNB tokens, worth a total of $60.5 million at the time of burn. The outstanding amount of burned coins was a result of the increased spot, margin, and futures trading volumes.
The company also recently launched Binance Options and Binance Leveraged Tokens, looking to further increase its market share. Furthermore, Binance made two notable acquisitions in Q2 2020: the cryptocurrency prices and exchange volumes data aggregator CoinMarketCap and payments solution Swipe. You can read more on the company’s milestones in Q2 2020 in their quarterly highlights post.
2. ICON (ICX)
ICON is a blockchain technology and network framework that serves as an interconnecting blockchain between various independent blockchains, allowing them to interact with each other. The platform represents the next generation of decentralized applications (DAPPs) and has numerous use cases in the banking, teaching and healthcare sector. The project’s underlying coin is called ICX.
ICON to Release Upgrades to its Governance System
The ICON project has recently deployed the first upgrade in a series of upgrades and updates concerning the platform’s governance system and token standards. The update, which includes changes to features like the number of delegating spots, staking, multiple unstaking periods and P-Rep private key dualizing, has already been released on Pagoda and Yeouido on July 14. The upgrade will hit exchanges on July 20, while the mainnet update is scheduled for one week later, July 27. At that time the team will also release the updated versions of ICONex Chrome, ICONex Mobile and ICON Tracker. More information on the project’s roadmap can be found in their Medium post from July 1.
3. Cosmos (ATOM)
Similarly to ICON, Cosmos is an interconnecting blockchain, that allows its users to interoperate with multiple projects, dApps, and cryptocurrencies hosted on unrelated network environments.
Cosmos Upgrades its Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol
At the heart of Cosmos project is the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, a TCP/IP-like messaging protocol that carries out the trustless exchange of data and tokens between any of the supported blockchains. At the end of Week 30, on July 27, the Cosmos team will release its Stargate Testnet, which includes tweaks to the crucial IBC. According to the developers, the Stargate upgrade is the largest upgrade to date and as such it brings lots of improvements to the platform. They worte:
“Introducing Stargate, the largest Cosmos upgrade yet. Stargate will enable higher transaction throughput, cross-chain transactions, accelerate UI development, and so much more.” An overview of how the network’s upgrade will take place can be found here.
