Although the cryptocurrency market ended week 34 with roughly the same total market capitalization as it has started it several altcoins managed to post gains significantly above the sector’s average. Projects that posted high gains within the past 7 days include Solana (SOL), Tezos (XTZ), Terra (LUNA), and Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA). Bitcoin and ETH, on the other hand, both lost a few percent. Since it seems that the altcoin season is in full swing, we went on the lookout for new altcoins with rally potential in this week. Here is what we found out.
1. Solana (SOL)
Solana is a smart contract enabled blockchain platform developed with a focus on scalability. Due to its top throughput of 65,000 transactions per second and absurdly low transaction fees (an average transaction on the blockchain costs just 0.00001 $), Solana is considered one of the strongest Ethereum competitors. Such a high blockchain efficiency is made possible by utilizing an innovative proof-of-stake consensus mechanism combined with proof-of-history (PoH) timestamping mechanism. Because of the reasons, Solana is very popular among various non-fungible token (NFT) projects and decentralized finance applications of all kinds. Solana’s popularity reflects in the SOL token’s total market capitalization, which has recently surged above $30 billion, making it the 8th largest cryptocurrency by market cap. In addition, the project also backed by major investors such as Alameda Research, Polychain and Andreessen Horowitz. With $314 million raised in a private token sale in June 2021, Solana Labs have more than sufficient funds for further development of the Solana blockchain.
Even VISA’s executives have eyes on the highly efficient blockchain platform after its amazing rise to 8th place by market capitalization
SOL’s price rally is largely driven by the increased usage of the Solana blockchain and frequent media exposure due to several popular NFT sales, such as the Degenerate Ape NFT sale two weeks ago that garnered a massive amount of interest and netted the creator more than 100,000 SOL (around $6 million at the time). On the tailwind of being in the centre of crypto community’s attention, Solana soared towards new highs. At the time of writing, Solana is trading at its ATH price of $109 and is very likely to set new ATH prices before publishing. It has to be noted however, that it is far more than just NFTs and hype that are driving SOL to new and new highs. For example, Solana Labs developers have recently deployed Chainlink Price Feeds to Solana Devnet. With the launch of this feature on Solana mainnet, which is expected to happen in this year, developers will be able to feed accurate and reliable price data to their Solana-based smart contracts and dApps. In addition, Solana seems to have captured the attention of some financial industry giants as well. Raj Parekh, director of crypto products at Visa, recently tweeted, saying that people come to Solana for NFTs but stay for its gas efficiency. In another tweet, he shared his opinion about the NFTs being a “critical building block for the future of commerce and consumer experiences”. Visa has also established a partnership with FTX exchange, whose CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is a huge supporter of Solana. Should this links with Visa ever materialize into integration of Solana into one of Visa’s products, SOL will, without a doubt, surge even higher.
2. Sora (XOR)
The DEFI SORA Network is specialized at providing blockchain services to enterprises, universities, and governments. Soramitsu, the company that leads Sora’s development also issues its own crypto wallet service and operates Polkaswap decentralized exchange. XOR token, Sora’s governance token, is also used for providing liquidity to Polkaswap trading pairs and for transaction fees.
Soramitsu to co-develop a VR NFT gaming platform for ANA, Japan’s largest airline
In a recent press release, ANA Holdings, the holding company of Japan’s largest airline All Nippon Airways (ANA) revealed that it has partnered with a game studio JP Games to develop an interactive virtual reality platform called ANA NEO. Users of ANA NEO will be able to experience virtual travel and do online shopping among other things. So what is the big news, you may ask? Well ANA Holdings revealed that, in-game transactions will be processed on a blockchain and the virtual world will also include some NFT-based items. While there are plenty of reputable institutions and companies participating in the project, the only blockchain project listed among partners is Soramitsu, the creator of SORA Network and XOR token. Besides the new venture into the world of blockchain-based gaming, Sora developers are currently also working on redesigning the SORA mobile application and launching the Polkaswap mobile app module.
3. Monero (XMR)
Monero is the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrency. It that is designed to provide as much privacy and security as possible to its users. The Monero project is fully open-source and run by volunteers. Nevertheless, the project enjoys a high reputation within the cryptocurrency community. The Monero whitepaper was created in 2014 by an unknown developer using the pseudonym “Nicolas van Saberhagen”. Monero has recently made mainstream news when John Oliver attacked it due to XMR being used by hackers to collect the ransom to avoid being caught. While it is sad that the technology is being used for illegal purposes, the story is a testament that Monero’s privacy features work as intended.
The launch of Monero Atomic Swap triggered a smaller (+20%) XMR rally
Monero Project recently rolled out an Atomic Swap implementation, aiming to simplify trades between Monero (XMR) and Bitcoin (BTC). The trustless way to exchange between the two coins is facilitated by a cross-blockchain protocol COMIT Network. After the implementation of Monero Atomic Swaps on August 20, XMR saw quite a notable surge in price – it went up by more than 20%, from $265 to more than $330. While XMR has since dropped back blow $300 and the Atomc Swaps-induced rally seems to be over, it is for sure worth keeping an eye on this top-notch privacy coin in the long run, as the projects developers likely have some more aces up their sleeves. Moreover, in a world where one’s each and every click, let alone transaction, can be monitored, privacy is becoming a feature of high importance for a significant chunk of the world’s population. XMR is up by more than 80% in this year, and technical analysts believe that it could near in on $400 towards the end of the year, as it is still trading within the ascending channel pattern.
