Are you finding it hard to swim in the treacherous waters of the everchanging cryptocurrency markets? One week the crypto asset prices rise faster than the tide only to suddenly drop in a market correction the week after. However, corrections like this are completely normal in the cryptocurrency world. Although it might be hard to watch your coins devalue you have to endure through the red numbers too, if you consider yourself a die-hard HODLer. If you are a trader, however, you are probably going to stay out of the game during the bear market, short some coins or find the assets that are the most likely to oppose the general downtrend. And this is where articles from our Top Coins to Watch series come to play, as they showcase selected projects that are more likely to perform well in the week to come.
1. Cardano (ADA)
Cardano is a decentralized blockchain platform focused at creating a smart contract-enabled environment, on which developers can build decentralized applications. Cardano utilizes a Proof-of-Stake consensus model and aims to provide a more sustainable, scalable, and transparent operation compared to other smart contract blockchains. The project was started by Charles Hoskinson, a mathematician, who was once part of the Ethereum developer team. Cardano launched in 2017 and raised $62.2 million for its development through an ICO. The native asset of the Cardano blockchain is called ADA and the development of the project is overseen by three main organizations, the IOHK, Cardano Foundation and Emurgo, who are also aiming to implementing the principles of academic peer review into the project’s development process. The project just launched an update through a hard fork, which enables users to create new Cardano-native tokens.
“Mary” Hard Fork Brings User-Created Tokens to Cardano
Cardano, the most recent addition to the group of top 3 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, conducted a successful network upgrade on March 1. “Mary”, the second out of three planned major network upgrades that must be deployed through hard forks, is now live and it allows users to create new tokens that run on Cardano natively, just like ADA. While enabling token creation is just one step on the path to full smart-contract functionality, Charles Hoskinson, founder of IOHK, has described the upgrade as “historic” in one of his video updates. Now that “Mary” has been deployed Cardano enthusiasts are already looking forward to the next major upgrade dubbed “Goguen” which will likely deploy full smart contract functionality to Cardano mainnet. Plutus and Marlow, the two smart contract languages that IOHK is development are currently still in the playground phase. Hoskinson noted that they will reveal more details regarding the Goguen at a Goguen-focused Cardano 360 event in mid-March. If everything goes well, Goguen could be ready as soon as Q2 2021.
In addition, Cardano is allegedly in a negotiation with a government of an unknown African country for a yet undisclosed substantial commercial deal. Hoskinson revealed that the deal involves bringing 5 million new users to the Cardano environment and that they are just waiting for the government of that country to make their final decision. Leaks and speculators suggest that the deal involves Ethiopia and its capital Addis Ababa, which has roughly 5 million inhabitants. Perhaps even more important than this African deal in terms of the short-term ADA price effect and market liquidity is the anticipated listing on Coinbase. ADA has reached the #3 spot in the ranking of cryptocurrencies by their market capitalization last week, but it is still not being traded on one of the largest U.S. exchanges – Coinbase. Therefore, the listing is merely a question of time. However, the details around it remain non-existent due to an NDA with Coinbase. As if that was not enough, Celsius announced they will be adding support for ADA in Q2 2021 as well.
In the last 12 months, ADA went from $0.05 to $1.47 on February 27, which is the current ADA all-time high price. This is an increase of almost 30x. While ADA has since corrected after reaching the top and is currently trading at $1.26, many believe that the asset is poised to surge higher as full functionality is yet to be deployed to the mainnet. Additionally, Cardano is seeing more and more projects migrating to their blockchain. One of the latest projects to confirm they will be running their services on Cardano too is the world’s first decentralized AI network SingularityNET.
Crypto.com (CRO)
Crypto.com is a Hong Kong-based crypto debit card issuer and cryptocurrency exchange, which aims to increase the usage of cryptocurrency as a payment method for everyday purchases. The company, which started out under another name – Monaco, conducted a token sale between May and June of 2017, which raised a total of $26.7 million. The platform’s native CRO token offers discounted fees on the exchange, higher earnings on Crypto Earn, loans with low annual interest as well as 100% rebates on streaming services (Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime) for the Crypto.com’s card subscribers.
Crypto.com Burns 70 billion tokens amidst the rising anticipation of the CRO Mainnet Launch
The Crypto.com exchange has recently revealed the launch date of their high speed and low fee blockchain dubbed the “Crypto.org Chain”. The fully decentralized blockchain, aimed to facilitate fast and secure payments, serve the DeFi space and allow the creation of NFTs is scheduled to go live on March 25, 2021. Furthermore, not a long ago, Crypto.com conducted a massive CRO token burn with an intention to fully decentralize the Chain network.
Crypto.com burned 70 billion tokens and only kept 5.9 billion, which will be used for mainnet block rewards and further ecosystem development. You can read more regarding the burn here.
As we all know, retail demand for crypto is at an all-time high, hence the demand for services should follow soon. And Crypto.com offers plenty of services that could appeal to a newcomer to the crypto space, such as the retail VISA cards with different tiers, crypto exchange with a fiat on- and off-ramp, easy staking, and plenty of benefits for CRO stakers. In fact, Crypto.com has already managed to double its userbase in the last 4 months, pushing the number of users above the 10 million mark:
To further boost userbase growth and trading volumes the exchange is currently holding a lucky draw, in which they will give away 4 Tesla cars. Users need to trade at least 100 USDT worth of BTC to be eligible to enter the raffle.
3. DODO (DODO)
DODO is the 17th project featured on Binance Launchpool. The DODO team strives to develop an open, accessible, and capital-efficient decentralized exchange. DODO will act as the governance token of the platform and have a few other features within the DODO ecosystem, such as staking.
DODO v2 Beta went Live on BSC but the Team is Already Planning new Improvements
The DODO v2 Beta went live on BSC on February 22, 2021. The improved version of the decentralized exchange features additional liquidity source aggregation, a crowdpooling asset issuance tool, a custom-ratio liquidity market creation machine (DODO Vending Machine), and liquidity pool solutions for professional market makers (DODO Private Pool). Additionally, the team have introduced a liquidity mining rewards program for the BUSD/USDT stablecoin pair on the BSC mainnet and announced that this is likely not the last liquidity mining reward program that they have set up. Furthermore, DODO v2 pushes the project one step closer to becoming a dual-chain solution, as the platform is looking to function on both the Ethereum blockchain and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). You can find out more about the BSC launch in this blog post. In the days following the BSC launch, DODO took advantage of the DeFi and Binance ecosystem hype, which caused the token’s price to increase by over 300% from $1.80 to over $8.00. The token than faces a more than 50% price correction and dropped below $3.50 before slowly recovering above $4.30. The token has seen another smaller drop and a subsequent climb lately and is currently changing hands at $4.67.
