Nikolas Sargeant
The crypto market has shown relentless upward momentum so far this year, with Bitcoin closing to within inches of its all-time high, hitting a price of $69,170.63 earlier this week.The market has retraced a little since then, with Bitcoin currently priced $66,161.20 at the time of writing, but most experts believe that the overall trend remains positively bullish.
While Bitcoin has gone from strength-to-strength, it’s far from being the only show in town, and its growth since the new year has acted as a catalyst for hundreds of promising altcoins, many of which have made even more impressive gains.
Most of this growth occurred during the 29 days of February we have in this leap year, and there were a handful of really promising altcoins that stood out from the crowd. They’re standouts, not only because of their surging price, but because the innovative projects that gave birth to those assets have created genuine utility and won over the backing of growing communities, setting them up for sustained progress throughout 2024 and beyond.
So let’s take a look at some of those standout altcoins and see just how far they have come:
Nolus (NLS)
Nolus is an up-and-coming DeFi protocol inspired by traditional finance-based leasing mechanics, where users only pay a small fraction upfront and gain full ownership after repayment is made in full. It’s a unique approach in DeFi that overcomes the industry’s traditional requirements for over-collateralization, boosting capital efficiency and providing borrowers with superior loan terms.
It’s an exciting development in part due to its cross-chain interoperability, which allows it to link liquidity pools across multiple chains, eliminating market fragmentation. It has the ability to swap assets across dozens of integrated DEX platforms, thereby simplifying the borrowing process, while simultaneously protecting liquidity providers by ensuring they only deal in stable assets.
The NLS token is designed to incentivize lending by providing additional rewards through the protocol’s incentivization pool, while ensuring borrowers can obtain loans at lower rates when they stake NLS. Staking also makes token holders eligible for special down payment options, while other use cases include governance and transaction fees
NLS was a solid performer in February, hitting an all-time high of $0.104 on February 16 and is still up more than 10% in the last 30 days despite the market retrace, with its current price of $0.06852 at the time of writing.
NLS has a circulating supply of 871.5 million, with its maximum supply capped at 1 billion, giving it a low market cap of just $86.67 million, a strong indication it has more room to grow. In addition, the fact it hit a new all-time high so early in the bull run, even before "altcoins season" kicks off, suggests it still has great potential to go places. There's more to come too, with lots to look forward to on its roadmap and the growing strength of the Cosmos ecosystem it belongs too. Moreover, the rise of leveraged trading in DeFi as the bull run explodes will provide yet more reasons to utilize NLS. All the signs suggest Nolus is a protocol that’s going places, and it looks well-placed to achieve a new ATH before too long if the crypto market keeps up its bullish run.
Oasys (OAS)
Oasys has emerged as one of the top blockchain gaming focused chains in the industry, pioneering the concept of “play-and-earn” games where players own their in-game assets and earn real-life rewards for racking up achievements and beating their rivals.
The team behind Oasys has developed a novel architecture that’s based on a multi-layered structure, consisting of the Hub-Layer and the Verse-Layer. Whereas the Hub-Layer is a Layer-1 protocol that serves as the platform’s foundation, Verse-Layer is a Layer-2 scaling platform that sits atop of that foundational network. It’s where game-specific interaction and logic occur, and it ensures that even the most popular blockchain games won’t suffer from the delayed transactions and high gas fees that afflict networks such as Ethereum during times of heavy traffic.
Oasys has bold ambitions to create a gaming metaverse that enables a new generation of virtual reality- and social-based gaming. It sees the gaming industry entering a new “Multiverse Era”, where players will move through different digital worlds in the same way as they flow across social media networks today, with the benefits of full asset ownership.
The platform’s OAS token recently hit a new all-time high at $0.1442 on Feb. 13, and despite a slight dip since then it remains just shy of that milestone, priced at $0.1238 at the time of writing. All told, it is up 22.3% in the last 30 days. The total supply of OAS is capped at 10,000,000,000, while its current circulating supply stands at 1,965,093,352.
Adding to its recent momentum, Oasys announced just a few days ago that it’s collaborating with a company called Metabora SG, which is the Web3 gaming unit of famed video games developer and PubG creator Kakao Games. The collaboration will see Oasys and Metabora SG co-develop a number of high-quality blockchain-based games. Given the reputation of Kakao Games and the quality of its video game titles, the partnership puts Oasys in a strong position to expand its network in the months and years to come.
Ankr (ANKR)
ANKR is a top-trending cross-chain infrastructure token that’s dedicated to helping developers, users and dApps interact with an array of blockchain platforms easily. The Ankr project provides access to various APIs and RPCs to aid developers in building sophisticated dApps, stake tokens on Ankr Earn for passive income generation and customized offerings for enterprises building blockchain solutions.
The project is one of the best known distributed ledgers that’s dedicated to the DeFi industry, pursuing a laudable goal of advancing Web3’s mainstream adoption. ANKR fits into this as the platform’s primary utility token and it has a number of use cases within its extensive and growing ecosystem.
For instance, ANKR is used to pay the gas fees required to access Ankr’s network services. It’s also used for governance and staking. The ANKR token has gained considerable momentum in February, with its value soaring more than 78.06% in the month to date. The supply of ANKR is capped at 10 billion, and its current price is $0.04248, giving it a low market cap of just $424.8 million at the time of writing. That, alongside the fact it remains more than 81% off of its all-time high of $0.2252, suggests ANKR still has plenty of oomph left in its growth engine.
Fetch.ai (FET)
Fetch.ai is a blockchain-based infrastructure platform that merges the concept of decentralized ledgers with artificial intelligence. It has built a decentralized and permissionless environment for hosting AI applications and sets itself apart from many similar projects looking to integrate AI with blockchain.
Unlike other networks, Fetch.ai is designed to support an extensive range of use cases across industries, including banking, commodities exchanges, supply chains and logistics, autonomous AI-powered travel agencies, smart cities, smart homes, traffic and railways systems management and more besides. It has some big users too, including the engineering firm Bosch, which uses Fetch.ai’s blockchain as the foundation of its “internet of things” sensor network for monitoring industrial machines.
FET is the native token of the Fetch.ai network that makes everything run smoothly, paying for network fees, governance, staking and incentives. FET has enjoyed a stellar rise since February, and is up by a staggering 387.2%, with a token price of $2.60, just below its all-time high of $2.77 that was achieved on March 7. With a circulating supply 1,043,462,805 and a maximum supply capped at 1,152,997,575, demand for FET is looking likely to increase as the Fetch.ai network achieves further market penetration amid the ongoing bullish sentiment in the wider crypto industry.
Crown Token (CROWN)
CROWN is the native token of Photo Finish LIVE, a horse racing game created by Third Time Games that’s officially sponsored by none other than the Kentucky Derby, giving it a significant air of legitimacy. The token was only launched in January, but it has quickly forged a path to the top of many people’s trending tokens lists thanks to the popularity of the game.
Photo Finish LIVE is a “play-to-earn” game where players buy, sell and train virtual racing horses in metaverse-based races against other, human-owned virtual horses. The game’s mechanics enable players to place bets on the outcome of each race, and there are chances for the winners to earn significant rewards if they back the right horse or raise a champion steed.
There are currently more than 12,000 CROWN token holders and the asset has hit a trading volume of more than $1.8 million since its launch. The token is currently worth $1.43 at the time of writing, registering growth of 133.14% in the last 30 days to achieve a market cap of around $359.8 million. Given its still very early in the life of CROWN and the enthusiastic reception thus far, there are lots of reasons to think it can maintain its forward impetus for some time to come.
