After briefly breaking the support line at $40,000, Bitcoin has rebounded and quickly rallied upwards by a few thousand dollars. But although the altcoin market reacted positively, most of the alternative cryptocurrencies have only made modest gains. However, some less known altcoins managed to appreciate greatly. Without further introduction, let’s take a look at some of the most interesting altcoin news from the past week!
Solana Is Having Troubles - Will the Metaverse Save SOL?
The last quarter of 2021 was not very good for Solana (SOL). The ambitious project encountered many bumps in the road, mostly caused by technological difficulties which led to downtimes and outages. Even though Solana managed to stay in the top 5 of largest cryptocurrencies on the market, the investors’ sentiment towards SOL became much less enthusiastic.
However, there’s a chance that Solana’s problems might finally be over, as one of the new projects on the SOL blockchain has just announced a massive partnership with Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
The project called Portals is a metaverse built on the Solana network that allows individuals and businesses to own rooms in the virtual world. Although the project has not gained larger recognition yet, Binance’s decision to build a virtual office in the Solana metaverse might give a lot of momentum not only to Portals, but to the SOL ecosystem as a whole.
So far, businesses and brands migrating to the metaverse were choosing ETH-based platforms like Decentraland (MANA) or The Sandbox (SAND). Will Binance’s surprising decision to choose Solana as their go-to metaverse destination be enough to change this trend?
Disney Joins the Metaverse Race
Following in the steps of companies such as Meta (previously Facebook), IBM, Nvidia and Microsoft, yet another multi-billion dollar enterprise has jumped on the metaverse bandwagon. Disney, the largest media company in the world, has announced that their patent for a groundbreaking metaverse technology has just been accepted by the US regulators.
So far, most projects claiming to be metaverses are still simple online games which don’t even feature Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) solutions. Disney’s metaverse will be different - the innovative technology will enable displaying 3D assets directly on real life objects like walls.
It’s still unclear whether Disney’s metaverse will feature blockchain-based assets such as Non-Fungible Tokens, or will Disney decide to launch their own altcoin, but one thing is certain: the possibility of displaying your NFTs in real life one day has just become much more likely!
Harmony and Oasis Network Become the Best Performing Major Altcoins of the Week
The most famous altcoins made very moderate gains this week, and some haven’t even managed to make up for their recent losses. However, two less-known alternative cryptocurrencies have made impressive gains over the last 7 days.
Out of the top 100 largest coins in the market, Oasis Network (ROSE) has done the best. Oasis Network is a DeFi-oriented decentralized protocol aiming to increase the privacy and scalability of data stored on the blockchain. The ROSE price has increased by over 32%, which made Oasis Network the 68th biggest project in the blockchain ecosystem.
Another altcoin that made superb gains this week was Harmony (ONE), a blockchain platform aimed at dApps developers and allowing building fast and efficient smart contracts with cross-chain interoperability. Over the past 7 weeks, the ONE price has increased by almost 29%.
The SHIB Price Increases Slightly, as the Shiba Inu Supply Becomes More and More Centralized
The Shiba Inu (SHIB) price has increased by over 5% in the last 7 days, covering a small fraction of the massive losses that SHIB holders have suffered since October. But in the case of Shiba Inu, on-chain data can tell us more than the price activity itself.
Over the past week, two significant things have happened to Shiba Inu. Most importantly, the SHIB whale activity increased tremendously, with a few addresses rapidly accumulating billions of SHIB tokens. In other words, the cryptocurrency known for the fact that most of the supply is owned by less than 10 wallets is becoming more and more centralized.
On the other hand, the number of SHIB transactions keeps diminishing. The number of daily SHIB transactions have fallen down to under 200, which shows that the retail interest in the meme cryptocurrency might be waning.
Is the massive accumulation of SHIB by a few whales over the past couple weeks a sign that we might witness one more huge Shiba Inu pump before the tokens are dumped? It’s likely that we’ll find out really soon!
