Eight cryptocurrencies with strong momentum to watch

Hi friends!

The market fell sharply today. I added more $ETH spot. I believe in the long-term investment theory.

Today I took a closer look at 8 cryptocurrencies that I believe have strong momentum recently.

Over the past few months we’ve seen a huge increase in the price (and demand) of many coins. I’m sure we’ve all started to wonder, which coins should I add to my portfolio?

This is absolutely not a buying advice, you should always manage your own risk and no one is responsible for this but yourself.

Manta ($MANTA)

Manta is essentially a blockchain protocol designed to provide decentralized data security and anonymization solutions - it is able to integrate with various blockchains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, etc.; this enables its users to securely store and share data using data masking and anonymization techniques.

Manta also offers high scalability and low transaction fees, something Ethereum has struggled with for years — some might even call Manta the Swiss Army Knife of data privacy and performance.

So how does it work? It is a platform that enables developers to build and deploy ZK applications on Ethereum with low fees. Zk-proos are used to ensure data privacy and validity. Manta has strong backing from notable investors such as Binance, Polychain, ParaFi, and Hypersphere, as well as a growing ecosystem of partners that aim to deploy on its scalable and secure L2, called Manta Pacific.

With institutional money flowing into the crypto space and Ethereum expected to get its ETF approved, it seems clear that privacy will be at the core of the upcoming cycle. Manta is more than just another cryptocurrency, it’s more like a passport to a world where dapps are accessible, efficient, and secure.

Some things to consider: The first unlock will be in September 2024, which means there are no investor allocations yet, which could further enhance Manta’s value proposition given that ecosystem airdrops are popular right now.

Ondo Finance ($ONDO)

Ondo Finance is a rising giant on the horizon, this real asset (RWA) strong platform is backed by notable investors like Founders Fund, Pantera, and Coinbase.

$ONDO is leading the charge for RWAs, with over $200M in assets under management, 40% of which are tokenized securities. They appear to be on their way to continued growth through partnerships with partners like Mantle, Solana, and Polygon. $ONDO has a variety of interesting products such as: OUSG (tokenized Blackrock ETF), OMMF (tokenized Blackrock Money Market Fund), USDY (stablecoin backed by US Treasuries), and Ondo Bridge.

It will be very interesting to watch how the $ONDO and RWA story develops in the coming months. Looking at market statistics: market cap of $370M, total circulating market cap of $2.5B, next unlock in 12 months as of now (Jan 22, 2024), we are clearly early adopters considering the Coinbase listing and $15B TVL.

Cartesi ($CTSI)

Cartesi is not a new face in the crypto space, and in 2023 we saw Cartesi release many impressive developments and updates, but now it’s 2024, let’s see what they have achieved and if they continue to maintain their usual reputation as builders (a lot has happened).

In short, Cartesi brings unique value to the crypto space, such as mainstream development toolchains and computational scalability. An interesting development is that the Cartesi team will host a BUIDLathon hackathon with a prize pool of $15,000, where developers can use its technology to create fully decentralized applications using familiar programming stacks and libraries.

As the Layer 2 trend gathers momentum, $CTSI seems destined to get bigger and better as more developers start to pay attention to its technology. This is something I will be watching closely. In particular, Cartesi also has a huge staking milestone with a large amount of $CTSI staked and a participation rate of over 40%. Staking contributes to the security and efficiency of Noether's POS system and provides rewards for your $CTSI.

Also, the main reason I bought this coin was because the founder of Celestia recommended it.

The good thing is that $CTSI has almost no unlocking left, so their market cap is almost in line with the Full Flow Value (FDV), which is interesting because we can't expect any sudden sell-offs, and while they keep building, we can only imagine how far they will go from this relatively small market cap of only $185 million.

Dusk ($DUSK)

$DUSK, another project that is not new in the crypto space, is basically a combination of privacy and compliance, and is a unique L1 blockchain customized for finance. A key factor in “why choose Dusk” is that it excels in privacy through ZK proofs, thus following the ZK narrative.

Dusk is also built from the ground up, which ensures full control over security, native compliance features, and performance customization for finance - as an L1, Dusk will not compromise on decentralization or security, which is critical to financial trust. The advantage of Dusk as an L1 is that L2 solutions rely on the security of another chain, however, an L1 like Dusk will be self-sufficient and provide stronger integrity.

They are also the first L1 with privacy built in, where any wallet, transaction or smart contract will be confidential - they built a custom VM to handle confidential transactions, paying special attention to their compliance with EU regulations such as MiCa, MiFid and GDPR.

With $Mina outperforming expectations in the ZK space recently, it is not surprising to expect $Dusk to follow suit. $Dusk has no further major unlocks and is essentially 100% of circulating supply.

Restake Finance ($RSTK)

Basically, $RSTK is an enhanced version of Liquidity Staking — acting as an LSD means that users can stake ETH to earn POS rewards while accessing their staked ETH in the form of LST (Liquidity Staking Token), which in the case of $RSTK is rstETH.

rstETH can also be used to earn additional adjustment rewards and protection through other protocols. Now let's take a look at EigenLayer. This is a protocol that allows ETH validators to earn additional income as a software module on top of ETH.

The importance of understanding the EigenLayer dynamics is that $RSTK’s reward system works like this: users will earn native ETH rewards through the POW mechanism, and rstETH will earn additional yield through EigenLayer, which can be claimed from dapps - this rstETH can also be used to lend, borrow, and earn yield, basically earning yield on your ETH without locking it up.

This is also the first project on EigenLayer with a token, and the first mover in the native rewards system, and even without an actual product, there has been a lot of demand and interest in $RSTK over the past month, but because there is no actual product, there has been a sell-off. Overall, there is a huge demand for $RSTK, remember, it is a first mover in an extremely high TVL space. If the team delivers, we can expect to see potential growth here.

OrdiSwap ($ORDS)

While $SAVM attracted a lot of attention in January, and OrdiSwap was quietly building and launching its mainnet AMM on native BTC, I firmly believe there is a pricing mispricing here.

Technologies like $SAVM and $ORDS are paving the way for DeFi on BTC, and for $ORDS there are many active liquidity pools and the TVL is growing rapidly. For comparison, this could be the UniSwap of BTC, which in itself represents huge potential, not to mention a very nice UI/UX, and you can check out the top tokens, TVL and fee analysis.

OrdiSwap has the potential to become a top AMM on BTC and is also enabling DeFi on BTC, it is expected to rise further.

PYTH ($PYTH)

PYTH is a price oracle that appears to be mispriced and can be considered a competitor to $LINK, which has a full value of $4 billion. With the recent craze for ecosystem airdrops, it is expected that $PYTH holders may be eligible to participate in these airdrops. $PYTH is essentially a price oracle with the best market data. $PYTH is also used by many tokenless projects, including currently very popular projects such as Drift Protocol, Parcl, MarginFi, and Zeta.

Drift Protocol has also hinted at an airdrop, so while nothing has been confirmed yet, there is speculation that $PYTH holders may be eligible to participate. So why is this a strong buy? Well, $PYTH is rumored to be holding and it is severely undervalued compared to its peer $LINK. Remember, $PYTH is also the native token of $SOL, further capitalizing on the Solana craze.

Overall, $PYTH appears to be an easy buy option at the moment, with price targets from credible analysts in the space exceeding its current price by more than 50%. One thing worth noting is that there is a huge upcoming unlock on May 20, 2024, which will see 21.3% of the total supply enter the market.

Sei ($SEI)

$SEI in its most concise form is essentially an L1 that redefines blockchain scalability and efficiency through parallel computing, thus leading the parallelized EVM narrative. In the past 30 days, the price of $SEI has surged by a staggering 200%.

Parallel computing is a core concept of the parallel EVM narrative, and essentially involves using computing resources simultaneously to solve computational problems - in short, allowing multiple transactions to be processed in parallel at the same time, significantly increasing the throughput of the blockchain. In the standard EVM, transactions are processed sequentially, forming a single-threaded execution model, while parallel VMs such as $SEI are able to break down these tasks, allowing multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously. This enhances scalability, efficiency, and optimization.

As the market continues to saturate with new Rollups, and the problems with the global fee market persist, the L2-centric narrative will shift to parallelized EVM, and $SEI seems to be looking like a test run for $SOL from the last round. In addition to this, another highly anticipated parallel VM project, $MONAD, will also be launched soon! $SEI recently unlocked $89 million on January 15th, and the next unlock will take place in the coming period. The decline has already occurred, and anonymous people should consider starting to buy some!