Cryptos have crashed in the past several months. As a result, the market is wondering if most digital currencies have any upside left. Some investors are looking at companies like Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN) or Square (NYSE:SQ) for crypto exposure without buying altcoins. Yet, others consider buying the dips in these digital assets as the market attempts to build traction. Therefore, today, I’ll discuss seven cryptos that deserve your attention in August.
When we talk of cryptos, Bitcoin (CCC:BTC-USD) and Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD) typically get the headlines. With respective market capitalizations of $635 billion and $250 billion, the two make up close to two-thirds of all digital coins. That is a remarkable size given that there are currently over 6,000 altcoins. In 2013, that number had been 66.
For new investors, the terminology of cryptos can feel confusing. First, let’s provide some background information. In crypto discussions, you will hear of “smart contracts,” which run on blockchains and are used to build various decentralized application (dApps) such as games, insurance claims and financial platforms.
Ethereum is possibly the most widely used smart contract platform for building dApps. It supports Solidity as an object-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts. When it comes to the execution of these contracts, we see the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
In other words, despite the hype around these blockchain platforms and the fact that there are currently hundreds of tokens, what makes a digital coin valuable is how its platform can be utilized. So potential investors need to appreciate what makes a blockchain network and its native token unique.
With that information, here are seven cryptos that deserve to be on your radar:
- Axie Infinity (CCC:AXS-USD)
- Celo (CCC:CELO-USD)
- Elrond (CCC:EGLD-USD)
- Filecoin (CCC:FIL-USD)
- FTX Token (CCC:FTT-USD)
- Klaytn (CCC:KLAY-USD)
- Monero (CCC:XMR-USD)
Crypto investing has become a global phenomenon. As we get ready to wrap up July, most cryptos are still in a large slump from their all-time highs (ATHs) reached earlier in 2021. However, many digital assets have recently seen some price stabilization. Nonetheless, investors should remember that altcoins may not be appropriate for all portfolios.
Cryptos: Axie Infinity (AXS-USD)
52-Week Range: $0.205 – $46.31
Created in 2018 by the Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based cryptogame. Tanja Sihvonen of the University of Vaasa, Finland suggests, “Even if cryptogaming may still be an emerging — and currently over-hyped — trend, some games … have in the past year garnered significant financial interest.”
Axie Infinity was in part inspired by Pokemon. The game is partially owned and operated by its players. The network allows players to collect, breed, raise, battle and trade token-based creatures known as Axies.
Like other blockchain platforms, the ecosystem also has its own unique governance token, known as Axie Infinity (AXS-USD). It is based on the Ethereum blockchain. ASX-USD allows users to participate in key governance votes and gives holders a say in how funds in the Axie Community Treasury are spent.
AXS-USD started 2021 around $0.587. Now it trades at $43. That is an eye-popping return of about 7,225%. In the past month, it is up 984%. With a market cap of $2.3 billion, it is among the top 50 altcoins.
Cryptos: Celo (CELO-USD)
52-Week Range: $1.3559 – $3.3076
If you are looking for a platform that makes financial dApps and crypto payments accessible to mobile phone users, then you should put CEP-USD on your radar. Research points out that dApps, which are becoming increasingly popular, “can have clients, mobile apps, servers like original applications, but the key data and operations are kept in smart contracts in a blockchain. Dapps interact with smart contracts by transactions, namely contract requests, and provide services based on them.”
Launched in April 2020, Celo wants to increase cryptocurrency adoption among smartphone users. Based on the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, it uses phone numbers as public keys.
The Celo blockchain automatically calculates transaction fees and allows users to pay the gas fees that power transactions in any currency. Holders of CELO-USD can participate in elections by voting for groups of validators.
CELO-USD started 2021 around $1.43. Now it trades at $2.70. That is a return of about 88%. However, in the past month, it is down about 20%. With a market cap of $578 million, it is among the top 100 altcoins.
Cryptos: Elrond (EGLD-USD)
52-Week Range: $6.52 – $81.4795
Launched in 2017 by Beniamin Mincu, Lucian Mincu and Lucian Todea, Elrond seeks to offer extremely fast transaction speeds by using sharding, which is seen as a solution to the problem of blockchain scalability.
Sharding is an important concept in the crypto space. Research led by Mohammad Javad Amiri of University of California Santa Barbara, California, highlights, “Data sharding strategies mainly try to improve the performance of systems in terms of throughput and latency.”
Elrond suggests its smart contract execution platform is capable of 15,000 transactions per second, six-second latency and a $0.001 transaction cost. It claims to bring “a 1000x improvement in blockchain speed, scale, cost and user experience.”
EGLD-USD started 2021 around $26.92. Now it trades at $85.48. That would mean a return of about 217%. In the past month, it is up about 16%. With a market cap of $1.6 billion, it is among the top 60 cryptos.
Cryptos: Filecoin (FIL-USD)
52-Week Range: $13.97 – $237.24
Our next token focuses on the cloud storage market, which is “projected to grow from USD 50.1 billion in 2020 to USD 137.3 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.3%.”
The past decade has seen the expansion of cloud storage offered by tech giants like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Alibaba (NYSE:BABA).
Launched in July 2017 by Juan Benet, Filecoin is a decentralized storage system that aims to protect the integrity of a data’s location, making it easily retrievable and hard to censor.
The network “uses Proof-of-Replication, Proof-of-Storage algorithm which allows a host (H) or storage miner to convince a client (C) that some data (D) has been replicated to its own uniquely dedicated physical storage.” Filecoin claims that it is secure against malicious activity.
Storage miners get rewarded according to their contribution to the platform. Investors in FIL-USD are hoping that Filecoin will become a major competitor to these global tech titans.
FIL-USD started 2021 around $22.22. Now it trades at $49.22. That is a return of about 121.5%. However, in the past month, it is down about 13%. With a market cap of $4.5 billion, it is among the top 25 altcoins.
Cryptos: FTX Token (FTT-USD)
52-Week Range: $2.93 – $63.10
Launched in May 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang, FTX Token is the native cryptocurrency token of the crypto derivatives trading platform FTX. Lennart Ante and Andre Meyer of Blockchain Research Lab, Hamburg, Germany, point out, “Some cryptocurrency exchanges are fully centralized and resemble stock exchanges, while other, decentralized exchanges solely operate as computer code on a blockchain infrastructure, allowing the users to trade peer-to-peer with each other. The level of regulation and transparency also differs across exchanges.”
FTX Token, which offers futures, leveraged tokens and over-the-counter (OTC) trading, has been in the news in recent days. It has recently closed a $900 million Series B fundraising. As a result, the group is valued at $18 billion. The exchange has around 1 million users with around $10 billion in daily trading volume.
FTT-USD started 2021 around $5.80. Now it trades at $32.11. Long-term investors have been regarded with a return of over 453.6%. In the past month, the altcoin is up about 26%. With a market cap of $3 billion, it is among the top 35 altcoins.
Cryptos: Klaytn (KLAY-USD)
52-Week Range: $0.743 – $2.6090
Our next digital token comes from South Korea, where the messaging app “KakaoTalk” reaches more than 90% of residents in the country. Launched in June 2019, Klaytn was built by Kakao, the group behind KakaoTalk.
Kakao claims Klaytn “combines the best features of both public blockchains (decentralized data & control, distributed governance) and private blockchains (low latency, high scalability) via an efficient ‘hybrid’ design.”
Over the years, Klaytn has been extending its blockchain ecosystem. For instance, it has partnered with OpenSea, which enables users to buy and sell blockchain-based collectibles, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), game items and other digital assets. Please note that Klaytn prefers the term Blockchain App (BApp) instead of dApp.
InvestorPlace.com readers might have also heard of the Klaytn Phone that offers BApps. It was first developed in 2019 by Samsung Electronics and GroundX, a blockchain affiliate of Kakao. The smartphone offers an “experience for users interacting with blockchain-powered services.”
KLAY-USD started 2021 around $0.4864. Now it trades at $1.02. That is a return of about 110%. However, in the past month, it is trading basically flat. With a market cap of $2.5 billion, it is among the top 40 altcoins.
Cryptos: Monero (XMR-USD)
52-Week Range: $71.39 – $517.62
Privacy-oriented crypto enthusiasts have been keeping a close eye on Monero, our last crypto pick for today. Launched in 2014, Monero was designed to allow transactions to take place privately and with anonymity. The network is based on the CryptoNote protocol, which enables the anonymity through the use of “ring signatures.”
Recent research highlights, “A ring signature scheme allows a member of a group to sign messages on behalf of the group without revealing his identities, i.e. signer anonymity… Ring signature provides perfect (or unconditional) anonymity.”
Put another way, “during the verification process it is practically impossible to trace back to the original creator.” And outside observers can’t tell which member of the group signed it. So that transactions cannot be linked to one another, the network creates stealth addresses for every single transaction.
XMR-USD started 2021 around $135.66. Now it trades at $246.30. That is a return of about 81.5%. With a market cap of $4.3 billion, it is among the top 30 altcoins.
On the date of publication, Tezcan Gecgil did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article.
Tezcan Gecgil has worked in investment management for over two decades in the U.S. and U.K. In addition to formal higher education in the field, she has also completed all 3 levels of the Chartered Market Technician (CMT) examination. Her passion is for options trading based on technical analysis of fundamentally strong companies. She especially enjoys setting up weekly covered calls for income generation.
