This past week has been quite a doozy for cryptocurrency. If you are keeping score, Ethereum, the holy grail that most cryptocurrency is paired with, fell below $1,100 on Monday afternoon before slightly recovering. So far this year, it has lost more than 70% of its value since its all time high in November 2021 when it was worth $4,891.70 each. It is currently trading sideways, hovering around $1,200. Bitcoin, which is considered cryptocurrency’s first born and most stable coin, fell below $16,000, also losing 70% of its value of its all-time high in November 2021 when it was worth an astounding $68,789. It now hovers around $16,500 each. The effects of FTX are still being felt and investors are still weary of all the bad news that is being reported. Edward Moya, a senior market analyst at Oanda, wrote on Market Pulse, “Today’s weakness is mainly attributed to exhaustion with the bear market rally that has powered stocks. There is no shortage of news across crypto markets and a lot of it is speculative.”
The good news is crypto never closes. Just when it seems that crypto has reached an all-time low, it shakes back and starts to rise again. Sure, it may go down again, but just wait a few minutes or a day, and it will pick back up. This week, we highlight a few tokens that may pique your interest.
Shiba Inu
Unless you are a new investor/holder of cryptocurrency, Shiba Inu (Shib) is a DeFi token most people are familiar with. In 2020, an anonymous developer named Ryoshi launched Shib. With an initial mind-boggling number of one quadrillion tokens, half of the supply was allocated to Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum wallet. Shortly after Buterin donated 10% of his Shib to the Covid-19 relief effort in India and sent the remaining 40% to a dead wallet, taken out of circulation forever. That leaves approximately 590 trillion Shib coins available for purchase.
Shib is 100 percent run by the community. The genius in this is, it has allowed the community to create crypto apps like ShibaSwap, a decentralized exchanged that allows users to trade and stake tokens without any intervention. The Shiba community is also planning to release an NFT platform and DAO-based governance system for its ecosystem.
Shib coin may be considered a meme coin, but it is still a popular one. In 2021, Shib reached an all-time high of $0.000084. This was an outrageously explosive 150,000,000% increase from when it was launched in August 2020. Getting into this project early would have generated spectacular returns.
Though Shib has cooled since that time, it is still seeing a lot of movement. Over the past seven days, aside from the November 22, 2022 drop due to the FTX hacker selling his Ethereum, the price has been at a steady $0.00000897.
BNB
For those who are not Ethereum fans, many turn to Binance Coin, or BNB. Created to empower the Binance platform and fuel its operations, it was initially created on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC-20 token in July 2017 but was migrated to the Binance Chain in February 2019 to become the native token of the Binance chain. BNB has a wide range of uses including paying of the listing fee, exchange fees, trading fees, or any other charges a holder in Binance may incur. The benefits of owing the token include quick transactions, trading of more than 150 cryptocurrencies on the exchange, trading discounts, and to pay for many multiple service providers who accept BNB as payment.
The total supply of BNB was 200 million coins but has since decreased due to periodic burning events and a real-time burning mechanism. The formula used to determine what is burned is somewhat complicated, but, according to binance.com, it “is the total number of blocks produced on the BSC during the calendar quarter” times 1,000, divided by the “average price of BNB against the dollar” plus the value of the price anchor, initially set to 1,000, but can be changed through a BSC BEP proposal and community vote.” [1] Twenty-one burns have already been completed which brings the total amount of coins available for purchase a little over 163 million. That means 19.34% of the total supply has burned, with a valuation of over $4 billion! That is a lot of money to burn away but helps keep the price rising as the total available tokens continues to decrease. [2]
BNB had an initial price of 1 ethereum for 2,700 BNB or 1 Bitcoin for 20,000 BNB. At the all-time low, BNB was worth $0.0398 each. At its all-time high, it was worth $686.31 each, a whopping 750,432% increase. Imagine getting in early on this project!
BNB has had a solid week so far. On Monday, one BNB was valued at $260.89. It is now sitting at $298.10, which is roughly a 14% increase. Not too bad for a week that has not been too kind to crypto.
CRO
Another interesting native token to an exchange is the Cronos (CRO) token. Originally known as the Crypto.com Coin, it was rebranded to Cronos last February to reflect the growth of its ecosystem. With a goal to “build a network of cryptocurrency projects and develop merchants’ ability to accept crypto as a form of payment,” CRO has made quite an impression in journeying towards that effort.
CRO has a max supply of 30.26 billion and launched in 2017. Their mission, according to crypto.com website is to “Accelerate the world’s transition to cryptocurrency.” With over 70 million users in over 90 countries, they are clearly on the path to achieve just that. Its price has surged due to a host of different factors. This includes high profile sponsorship deals with the UFC, Formula One Racing, and actor Matt Damon’s Water.org. CRO also has secured a strategic partnership with Transak, a Web3 platform to provide Web3 users with payment services such as Visa and Google Pay, naming rights to the former Staples Center, home of the Los Angeles Lakers, and has a staking feature that many investors find attractive.
Security is a priority of crypto.com. The company stores all crypto.com user-owned assets in offline, cold storage vaults that have high-level verification and monitoring measures in place. Crypto.com is also working with Ledger, the cold wallet storage security group, to create a “Ledger Vault” to add to its security. [3] Don’t fret though. It does keep corporate-reserved funds in hot wallets that keeps all trades moving safely and smoothly.
Though its current ranking is 32, it once reached the top ten ranks. According to coinbase.com, CRO At the height of its rise, had an all-time high of $0.97. Those who got in early would have seen their initial investment rise over 90%. Currently CRO is experiencing the same struggle as most crypto currencies are right now with its price over the past week staying around the $0.065 range.
XRP
XRP is an interesting token. As the native token developed by Ripple Labs, it began as a global payments network and has several major banks and financial services as its customers. [4] Founded in 2012 by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb, XRP aims to increase the speed and reduce the cost of transferring money between institutions. To date, Ripple has raised over $120 million from several well-known venture firms and is considered one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world by market capitalization. Though Ripple and its founding team own a substantial majority of the XRP supply, it has sold over $1 billion worth of XRP.
After the release of XRP, Ripple led efforts to get financial institutions to use the XRP ledger, a consensus network for digital currencies, to process remittances. This was the beginning of regulatory scrutiny. In 2015, FinCEN fined Ripple for violating the Bank Secrecy Act for failure to obtain written authorization. In 2019, Ripple was targeted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a class action lawsuit that has been ongoing for over two years. The SEC alleged that Ripple distributed XRP and labeled it as illegal unregistered securities trade. This lawsuit has opened the conversation to what is and is not a security and Ripple has both vehemently denied any wrongdoing and many of the community of developers, traders, and the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem have blasted the SEC’s approach to enforce crypto regulation.
Despite XRP not being listed in any exchanged based in the United States due to the ongoing litigation, XRP’s chart looks healthy. At launch, its price was $0.005. Its all time high reached an impressive $3.40, before falling substantially due to the ongoing litigation. A look at the charts will see there is no shortage of people willing to buy, sell, and trade XRP. On November 21, fxstreet.com reported that XRP price defends $0.35 support as 24-hour trading volume hits the $2 billion mark. Quite a feat considering XRP has no listings on exchanges in the US.
The current price of XRP hovers at $0.38. As the lawsuit with the SEC continues to work towards a resolution, many see this token as being one to watch out for. Early adopters know the potential of this token and continue to show support despite the backlash from those who may try to disrupt it.
Bolix Token
Bolix Token is a ten token ecosystem that has a vision to bring real world business revenue back into the project through periodic buybacks and burns. Over time, the growth and stability of the project will continue to rise in an organic way so holders can remain confident their holdings will increase. This also allows for the smaller investor to be in the same boat as the larger investor. Everyone who is a part of the Bolix Token ecosystem has had to purchase their tokens. No tokens were given to any founder, team members, or community members.
Part of its ecosystem includes the release of NFTs. The first NFT, known as Rambow Cloud NFT is the Genesis NFT and the key to the entire ecosystem and currently, can only be bought on the secondary market. For those who held the Genesis NFT when Bolix Token was launched, they were able to get into the pre-sale of the token, earning more of the token than those who did not own any of the Rambow Cloud NFTs. The second set of NFTs in the ecosystem is called the Bullionaire NFTs, to honor the Bull market we all look forward to. It is currently minting at bolixmint.com. Owning the Genesis collection NFT, along with both Bolix Token and the Bullionaire NFT allows the holder to receive an airdrop of the forthcoming second token. For more information, head over to the website at bolixcorp.com.
Bolix Token remains solid though. Most of its holders are holding their position. Starting the week, Bolix Token started at $0.0000013. It is standing on a green candle at the moment at $0.000002272. That’s a large increase that has been sustained over a months period of time, not too bad considering the kind of week crypto is having.
Time.com reports that, despite the rocky road everyone has felt this past year, those who invested early in Ethereum have a ROI of nearly 300%, meaning that “early investors have nearly quadrupled their investment every year since the summer of 2014.” And those who were early investors in Bitcoin in 2009, when it was worth $0.10 each, and bought 1,000 bitcoins for $100, at its all-time high, that would have pocketed $48 million, and that is not accounting for compounding or buying any more over that time. This equates to 480,000% ROI!
What does this mean? Investing into any project early is key. Always do your own research and when you find a solid project, if you are early in that solid project, your returns could be substantial. No one knows what the future will hold, but if history is any predictor, the crypto market will see the bull again, and these projects are good ones to do your research on and see if they fit the financial goals you have set for the future.
**Would you like to have your project highlighted during the weekly Defi roundup? Send an email to derek@bolixcorp.com, james@bolixcorp.com, or jason@bolixcorp.com and lets talk! **
[2] https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-bnb-auto-burn
[3] https://defirate.com/reviews/crypto-com
[4] Why XRP could become the best performing cryptocurrency for the year [Video] (fxstreet.com)