The total market capitalisation of the crypto market has continued to increase throughout Week 13. It climbed from the starting $2.07 trillion to $2.22 trillion, even though Bitcoin, the market barometer, lost 3% in the same timeframe. Biggest gainers from the top of the chart were Solana (SOL), Terra (Luna) and Near Protocol (NEAR). But which coins and tokens are preparing for some interesting price action in Week 14 or in the longer run? Continue reading to find out.
3. Zilliqa (ZIL)
Zilliqa is a high-performance blockchain platform which aims to solve the scaling issues that most of the popular blockchains are facing without compromising the security of transactions. Zilliqa achieves that by incorporating sharding technology, which means that nodes are broken down into groups of 600, i.e., shards, that can run many sub-blockchains simultaneously. As more mining nodes join the network, the networks throughput increases. The blockchain utilizes a unique consensus algorithm, a combination of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) and the standard proof of work (PoW) mining algorithm is used. In addition, Zilliqa supports smart contracts and has an active community of both users and developers, which is crucial for the long-term success of a blockchain platform.
Zilliqa’s Metapolis announcement caused ZIL price to spike
On March 27, Zilliqua team announced Metapolis, the first metaverse on the Zilliqa network. But that was not an ordinary metaverse announcement, as Zilliqa has partnered with Agora, a global platform for talented creators, to build the first Metaverse as a Service (MaaS) product. After uploading their content to the Agora app and receiving enough votes from the community, creators will be able to feature their work in the Metapolis metaverse.
The announcement was very well received by Zilliqa supporters and investors, causing ZIL to double its price in the 24 hours following the announcement. The ZIL price than hoovered around $0.10 for a day before entering the second stage of the rally, that carried ZIL over $0.22. ZIL ended the week up by more than +300%. While launching a metaverse project could help drive the project’s growth in the long run, now might not be the ideal time to buy in, as sudden surges often lead to even quicker selloffs. But once the hype around the Metapolis wears off, ZIL could become a good addition to a portfolio of an investor that is willing to take on moderate risk.
2. Zcash (ZEC)
Zcash is an anonymity-focused cryptocurrency that obscures transaction data to hide the sender’s and receiver’s wallets and other properties of a specific transaction. Zcash was the first project to zero-knowledge cryptography known under the name zk-SNARKs. This technology allows one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that a statement is true, without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself. Zcash is therefore a blockchain with one of the strongest privacy features.
Network Upgrade 5 (NU5), largest Zcash Upgrade since 2020, to be deployed mid-April
In April, Zcash will undergo its largest and most important upgrade since 2020. The new upgrade called Network Upgrade 5 (NU5) is set to improve the platform’s privacy and scalability through implementing recursive cryptography, proof aggregation, and blockchain succinctness. The NU5 also features Halo 2 proving system, which will eliminate the need for a trusted setup. In Zcash’s legacy proving system a select group of trusted people is required to clean “toxic waste” – data that could allow a bad actor to independently mint new ZEC. In addition, the Zcash team will also introduce Halo Arc, a suite of solutions that package new features and products with protocol upgrades like NU5 into regular releases.
The price action of ZEC has recently been following a slight upward trend (up by almost 50% in the last month), likely in anticipation of the new upgrade. But ZEC cud surge even higher after the major upgrade is successfully deployed. In addition, rumours are surfacing that the Zcash team is considering switching to proof of stake (PoS) consensus algorithm and implementing the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC), both of which would open up a world of new ZCash use cases.
1. Fantom (FTM)
Fantom is a fast, high-throughput open-source smart contract platform for digital assets and dApps. It is a Layer 1 network competing with the likes of Avalanche, Solana, and Terra to dethrone Ethereum. Fantom utilizes Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus algorithm. The aBFT algorithm promises to solve the blockchain Scalability Trilemma, according to which only two of the crucial three components that include decentralization, security, and scalability, are possible at the same time. It is very likely that this was one of the main factors that made FTM one of the best-performing assets of 2021. The Fantom’s native asset gaining approximately 13,000% last year.
Fantom Foundation seeks to boost blockchain growth with 335 million FTM available through the FTM Incentive Program
On March 31, the Fantom Foundation announced that it is prolonging and expanding its developer incentive program by launching a new FTM Incentive Program. The team plans to distribute up to 335 million FTM (worth around $480 million at the time of the announcement) to teams and projects developing on the Fantom blockchain. Gitcoin Grants, a funding platform for the web3 space, will help in managing and voting on grant applicants. While Fantom is willing to fund any kind of project building in their ecosystem, be it a DeFi protocol, an NFT platform, a game or critical infrastructure, Fantom community will have a crucial role in determining who recieves the grant. Fantom also believes that small projects that are just getting started with smaller teams should be given an equal opportunities as larger teams that have already amassed some TVL. In addition to the FTM Incentive Program, the Fantom developers are preparing for the Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM) upgrade. The upgrade, which is slated to start rolling out in Q2 of this year, will improve smart contracts’ security and performance as well as speed up the Fantom network. The team hopes that the revamped network will attract new users, developers, and perhaps even more institutional investors, all of which will be beneficial if Fantom wants to re-enter the Top 3 DeFi ecosystems by TVL. According to Defi Llama, Fantom is currently at the sixth spot sandwiched between Solana and Tron, far from the company of the largest DeFi chains, where Fantom could be found earlier this year.
