The cryptocurrency markets have again ended another week in the red resulting in another $100 million decrease of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization – the market cap dropped from $1.4 trillion to $1.3 trillion throughout Week 28. Very rare were the coins to end the week with a gain. Nevertheless, some coins and tokens are more likely to recover than the others. You can find three crypto assets that have the potential to appreciate in the following few weeks in the following article.
1. Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum is an open-source distributed blockchain that pioneered smart contract functionality. It operates as a decentralized virtual machine which can execute scripts. The smart contracts operate in a fast, immutable and trust less manner, while the speeds and capabilities of the Ethereum blockchain are going to further increase when Ethereum 2.0 is fully launched. Ethereum’s native asset Ether (ETH) is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Although it can also be used as a currency for transactions between different nodes, it is more commonly used to execute smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain also hosts a number of ERC20 tokens with different utilities – these include Exchange tokens (BNB, OKB, HT, UNI), DeFi tokens (LINK, MKR, COMP, SNX, ZRX…) and several stablecoins such as USDC, DAI, TUSD, and USDT.
Is ETH going to reclaim $2000 before the London Hardfork?
Ethereum’s London upgrade mainnet launch has been confirmed to take place at block number 12,965,000. It is estimated that this block will be mined sometime between August 3 and August 5. The upgrade has already been rolled out and tested on the Ropsten, Goerli and Rinkeby testnets, so no major setbacks are expected. The upgrade consists of five Ethereum improvement protocols (EIPs), concernint the fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain, BASEFEE opcode, reduction in refunds, rejection of new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte and a Difficulty Bomb Delay to December 1, 2021. No special actions will be required for Ethereum users and ETH holders following the upgrade, unless otherwise prompted by their cryptocurrency exchange or wallet service providers. Node operators and miners, however, will have to update their Ethereum clients to their London-compatible version. In additon, miners will need to double their gas limit targets following the upgrade.
From a broader perspective Ethereum is in the proceess of transition towards Ethereum 2.0, which will introduce a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism as well as significantly improve scalability through sharding. Despite the genrally good sentiment ETH is down by more than 20% in the last 30 days. Last week the price of ETH has again dipped below $2000. Do you think that ETH would climb back up to (or even over) this psychological level?
2. Binance Coin (BNB)
Binance Coin (BNB) originally launched in 2017 as an ERC-20 token sold through an initial coin offering (ICO). In April 2019, the Binance Chain was launched, and all the ERC-20 tokens were replaced with the BNB coin, which became the native cryptocurrency of the new blockchain. Binance Chain is still completely centralized, with Binance having complete control of block management. Binance users who utilize BNB to pay for trading, withdrawal and listing fees enjoy significant discounts. While this used to be pretty much the only use case of BNB, the coin has a far greater utility now as it allows users to pay for gas fees, stake BNB, as well as participate in DeFi, liquidity pools, and DEX trading. In addition, the Binance ecosystem still keeps expanding, which means that new products and services are regularly added. In June, for example, Binance launched its own NFT marketplace.
Quarterly BNB Burn and a New Binance Launchpad Project Set the Ground for BNB Appreciation
The Binance team has announced that is has completed the 16th quarterly BNB burn, in which Binance regularly burns a part of its quarterly profits. On July 18 (Q2 2021 BNB burn) Binance destroyed 1,296,728 BNB worth approximately $390 million at the time of the burn. More burn transaction information can be found here.
In addition, Binance has recently announced the next project to launch a token sale on their Launchpad. This will be Coin98, a project that aims to build a DeFi platform with a focus on multi-chain support. 5% of the total supply of C98 tokens will be distributed through the Binance Launchpad sale. The sale will follow a Launchpad subscription format, with the recording of user BNB balances starting at July 17 at 0:00 AM (UTC) and ending 7 days later, this is on July 23 at 0:00 AM (UTC). Tha average daily BNB balance over these 7 days will determine the maximum amount of BNB that a certain user will be able to commit to the Coin98 project. In addition to the BNB burn and the new project on the Launchpad, Binance’s stablecoin – BUSD is also growing its market capitalization. The value of BUSD in circulation has recently exceeded $10 billion. This makes BUSD and the 3rd largest stablecoin by market capitalization and the 9th largest cryptocurrency overall.
3. Axie Infinity (AXS)
Axie Infinity is a Pokemon-inspired blockchain-powered trading and battling online video game. The game, which has netted more than $42 million in NFT sales to date, is developed by a Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis. 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 Axie is represented by an NFT, and the growing userbase and protocol revenue has made Axie Infinity one of the most expensive NFTs collections.
Growing Number of Users Pushes Axie Infinity to 1st Place by dApp Revenue
The already popular blockchain-based game Axie Infinity has recently been attracting a large number of new players, resulting in an exponential growth of its dApp users. The growing userbase has also translated to AXS token appreciation. AXS has surged from $3.90 on June 14, to ATH of $28.98 on July 15. While the token has dropped back to $16.00 in the meantime, AXS is still up by 280% in the last month. It is therefore not surprising that the Axie Infinity is among the most successful project to launch at Binance IEO. With the initial price of AXS set at $0.10 the project has granted the early investors a ROI of almost 170x. According to TokenTerminal, Axie Infinity is the dApp with by far the greatest protocol revenue. Over the last 30 days Axie Infinity has generated a protocol revenue of $85.3 million. To put it into a perspective, this is almost 7 times the protocol revenue of the popular DEX PancakeSwap from the same timeframe. The increasing popularity of the game could make both AXS and SLP a lucrative investment.
