Throughout Week 46 bearish conditions prevailed on most cryptocurrency markets. This caused the total cryptocurrency market capitalization to drop by over $400 billion compared to the ATH market valuation of $3.03 trillion that was set on November 10. Nevertheless, there was one crypto sub-group that managed to defy the general downward trend. These were the coins and tokens associated with blockchain gaming sector, which is still gaining momentum following Fecebook’s rebrand into Meta. Several tokens, including the MANA (Decentraland) and SAND (The Sandbox), which we wrote about in our previous articles, surged towards their new ATHs. But which coins have the best potential to do the same in Week 47? Well, this might just be the best place to find out…
3. Parsiq (PRQ)
Parsiq is a blockchain-based analytics platform that specializes in connecting blockchain activity to real-world applications and events. In other words, Parsiq offers a blockchain-based version of an if-this-then-that (IFTTT) service. The Parsiq team is also advocating for higher blockchain interoperability, which is why their services are available over a wide variety of blockchain networks including Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polkadot (DOT) and Algorand (ALGO), to mention just a few. The team is also working on integrating with new blockchains, DeFi protocols and apps.
Parsiq’s IQ protocol expands to Solana, records rapid TVL growth
Decentralized data monitoring system Parsiq (PRQ) is experiencing rapid growth in users and traffic as well as a growing number of partnerships, third-party rankings, and an increasing total value locked (TVL). Last week, Parsiq revealed that its services are available on Solana too. While both users and investors were very happy about the integration, this is by far not the only major integration of the project’s IQ protocol. The team managed to score more than 50 partnerships in 2021, including those with major players such as Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT) and Chainlink (LINK). However, the team currently has more than 30 new projects in the pipeline to be integrated with IQ Protocol. The high availability of Parsiq’s services also boosts adoption. From June to November, the number of addresses staking PRQ in IQ Protocol grew from 95 to over 5,000 and the number of PRQ tokens staked has increased from just 3 million PRQ to over 50 million PRQ. Furthermore, BSC News recently proclaimed Parsiq as the top mid-market cap DeFi project on BSC.
2. Crypto.com Coin (CRO)
Crypto.com is a Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange and crypto debit card issuer, which aims to increase the usage of cryptocurrency as a payment method for everyday purchases. Early crypto adopters might have heard of Monaco, which was the name the company used before the rebrand in July 2018. Monaco started out by conducting a token sale between May and June of 2017, which raised a total of $26.7 million. Staking the platform’s native CRO token offers discounted fees on the exchange, higher earnings on Crypto Earn, loans with lower annual interest as well as 100% rebates on streaming services (Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime) and cashbacks of up to 8% for the Crypto.com’s Visa card holders. Today, Crypto.com is a well-known player in the cryptocurrency industry and its CRO token is already the second biggest exchange token by market cap.
CRO set ATH after news about the Staples Center renaming deal went public
Crypto.com has been taking their marketing campaigns very seriously. The exchange’s marketing sector clearly figured out that sports are the best way to promote their services. Earlier this year Crypto.com has struck a sponsorship deal worth $100 million with Formula 1 and another deal worth $175 million over 10 years with UFC. The crypto company has recently upped its game with a $400 million deal with NBA franchise Philadelphia 76ers and a “Future favours the brave” campaign featuring Hollywood actor Matt Damon which likely costed more than $100 million as well. But the biggest deal was revealed to the public on November 17, when Crypto.com revealed they have struck a deal with AEG, one of the world’s biggest presenters of sports and entertainment programming, to rename the Staples centre, an iconic sports and entertainment venue, to Crypto.com Arena. To hold the naming rights for the next 20 years, Crypto.com had to cash out $700 million. While that sure sounds like a lot of money, this means that Crypto.com will be placed at the forefront of the global sports and live-entertainment industry for the next 20 years. The deal also brought the Los Angeles Lakers and the LA Kings teams among Crypto.com’s partners. The renaming deal seems to already be having the desired effect. The number of Crypto.com users is increasing and the price of CRO token surged by almost 50% on the day of the announcement, resulting in the token’s new ATH price of $ 0.594040. In addition, Crypto.com recently launched its own blockchains called Crypto.com Chain and Cronos chain, which will provide a native decentralized infrastructure for Crypto.com users and developers.
1. Avalanche (AVAX)
Avalanche is a highly scalable open-source smart-contract enabled blockchain ecosystem. It relies on its own Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols called the Avalanche consensus protocol and the Snowman consensus protocol, which guarantee blockchain immutability while consuming minimal amount of energy at the same time. In addition, Avalanche ecosystem is also highly interoperable – for example Avalanche applications are compatible with Ethereum’s Solidity smart contract programming language and Ethereum-based tokens can be transferred to Avalanche blockchains via Avalanche Bridge. As such it is most often used for various DeFi applications and enterprise blockchain deployments. Every blockchain within Avalanche is part of a subnet, but validators can choose which subnets they want to participate in. Nevertheless, validators are required to be active on the Primary Network, which consists of three blockchains: the Platform chain or P-Chain, the Contract chain or C-Chain and the Exchange chain or X-Chain.
AVAX defies the general market trend and continues trading at ATH prices
Avalanche’s market-defying rally is partly fuelled by Ava Labs’ new partnership with Deloitte. The “Big Four” accountant firm announced that it plans to use Avalanche’s blockchain for a new project they are working on. In its blog post Avalanche further revealed that their blockchain solutions would help Deloitte in “minimizing fraud, waste, and abuse,” which is a critical feature of disaster management solutions. In addition, USDT has recently launched on Avalanche, bringing the DeFi platform’s users access to the largest and most liquid stablecoin in the industry. Doing so Avalanche (AVAX) has become the ninth blockchain platform to support USDT, the world’s largest market cap stablecoin. In addition, the update to Pangolin, the most popular decentralized exchange (DEX) on Avalanche, also represents good news for the whole ecosystem. The updated smart contracts of Pangolin V2, which will further fine-tune the decentralized trading and yield farming process, are going to be activated on November 21 on the Avalanche mainnet. All these positive news and more have allowed Avalanche’s native token managed to defy the general market downtrend. During last week, when most cryptocurrencies lost 10% of their value or even more, AVAX grew by more than 30%. In fact, AVAX was the best performing crypto asset in the group of top 40 cryptocurrencies by market cap both considering last 7 days and last month. Nevertheless, we do believe that the token still has plenty of room to grow.
