As we move through the final month of the year, a number of projects are moving ahead with continued development, and this week’s choices are set to benefit from significant updates and announcements that should strengthen their market positions and benefit their communities. The news should also result in increased amounts of attention to each respective currency over the coming weeks.
3. Harmony (ONE)
Harmony Protocol aims to scale blockchain to 10M transactions/second and 100-millisecond latency. Harmony will bring 1,000x speed and capacity to the next generation of the decentralized economy, enabling marketplaces for 10B people and 100B devices.
Why Harmony? Trustless Ethereum Bridge Launch Coming Soon
The Harmony team are pressing ahead with implementing full cross-shard composability and cross-shard transactions across the Harmony network. The team are also developing a trustless Ethereum bridge in order to facilitate asset transfers between Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. The bridge will allow applications to access assets on Ethereum while benefiting from fast, low cost transactions on Harmony. The bridge is live on testnet and set to go live on mainnet before the end of the year, and you can keep up with the latest developments here.
2. Stacks (STX)
Stacks is a decentralized computing network and app ecosystem that uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a secure base-layer. The Stacks 2.0 blockchain brings apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin, and enables new ways to earn BTC.
Why Stacks? Two NFT Drops This Week
The Stacks team are staying busy as the year comes to an end and two NFT drops will take place this week. The Project Indigo NFT Drop on December 19 is made up of a collection of 3,000 wasteland NFT avatars with the prices still to be determined. This will be followed by the Magic Ape School NFT Drop on December 21 with 2,500 apes being made available on the Stacks blockchain. In between the two events the Stacks 12 Day Holiday Giveaway will begin on December 20 with tickets going on sale for the event, and as a result it’s another big week for Stacks and all STX holders can keep up to date with events here.
1. Polygon (MATIC)
Polygon, previously known as Matic Network, is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum which aims to provide major scalability improvements for decentralized applications by utilizing a modified version of Plasma with sidechains based on Proof-of-Stake.
Why Polygon? Uniswap V3 To Deploy Contracts on Polygon
The deployment of Uniswap v3 contracts over Polygon are set to take place as the Uniswap community approved the relevant governance proposal. The proposal was brought forward by Polygon CEO Mihailo Bjelic on November 20 and closed for voting on December 18. Over 72 million Uniswap users voted in favour of deploying contracts on Polygon and a $15 million fund has already been put together for a long-term liquidity mining campaign. The Polygon team also recently acquired the ZK knowledge proof Ethereum scaling solution Mir for $400m and look set to close out the year very strongly. MATIC was one of 2021’s best performers and a lot of eyes will be on Polygon to see if the team can continue to perform into 2022.
How did the coins perform last week?
The seven day period generally led to poor results across the market; and NEAR fell by 11% and is currently trading at around $9.44. GALA fell by 21% and is currently trading at $0.45, and ETH fell 3$ over the week, and is currently trading at $3,945. Over the course of the week, the market moved from an overall valuation of $2.33T to $2.26T, a drop of 3.00%.
