Crypto Weekly Wrap: Aug 23 - 29
'Ethereum Killers' dominate, future Cardano DEX ADAX nearly triples in the week
It was a mixed week in the crypto market with both Bitcoin and Ethereum more or less ending the week as they started, yet two surging altcoins registered new all time highs: Solana (SOL) and Cardano (ADA). Avalanche (AVAX) also continued to post strong gains as it rapidly attracts blue chip DeFi projects (the token is up ore than 300% over the past month). All three of these altcoins are challenging Ethereum’s dominance in the crypto space (particularly in the DeFi sector) as Ethereum’s high transaction fees and network congestion are weaknesses that other protocols such as these ones are tackling. Here is an interesting piece featuring SOL and AVAX.
Coinpad, however, remains most bullish on Cardano, which is set to launch a major upgrade to its network on September 12. Known as the Alonzo Hard Fork, this long-anticipated upgrade will allow for the implementation of smart contracts and decentralized applications. In other words, Cardano is just entering into the smart contract / DeFi space, while most of its peers / competitors are already in it. These coins (like SOL, AVAX, MATIC, and LUNA among others) all saw their explosive gains after activity on their networks surged. In short, Cardano has not reached this phase yet (but will in a few weeks), which is why we are more bullish on this coin than its peers / competitors (see more below in our Coinpad’s plays section).
Below are some of the other top crypto news stories that Coinpad has been monitoring over the past week, followed by the coins that we have been eyeing or buying over the week. But first, our disclaimer needs to be noted: the information provided here, as well as on our website (coinpad.io), does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other sort of advice and you should not treat any of the content as such. Do your own research and invest at your own risk!
If you are viewing this through a shared link and would like to receive these weekly wraps every Sunday, you can subscribe here for free.
Weekly news wrap
It looks like a new crypto whale is coming: UK Billionaire Simon Nixon’s Family Office to Enter the Cryptocurrency Space: Report
Institutional money coming into the sector continues, which seems to be going in tandem with wider retail adoption (crypto adoption is an important trend to track as obviously this drives up demand):
El Salvador is installing 200 ATMs ahead of its bitcoin adoption on September 7, said the president.
Here is a cool new BTC ATM (the K1) designed and built in El Salvador:
Finally, this is an interesting opinion piece on regulatory action around crypto: Crypto, Congress and the Commission: What’s next for the ‘Wild West’?
Coinpad’s plays:
As we explained in our previous Weekly Wrap, we are focusing our investments over the near term on upcoming decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that will launch on the Cardano network. As noted above, the network is set to launch a major upgrade on 12 September, which will allow for the implementation of smart contracts and decentralized applications, which will spark massive activity on the network in the DeFi space. We believe that DEX tokens will be high performers. (Think of buying Uniswap’s UNI token last September when it traded for a few dollars - and went to over $40 by May - or PancakeSwap’s CAKE token last October when it was around $0.50 - which went to over $40 by May as well.)
As seen with Ethereum’s Uniswap and Binance Smart Chain’s PancakeSwap, the token of a network’s dominant DEX will be a highly valued asset. So our investment thesis is simple: Invest early in any Cardano DEX contender as one of them should eventually reach a market capitalization (marketcap) somewhere in between PancakeSwap (roughly $5 billion) and Uniswap (roughly $16 billion). Let’s call it $10 billion. Two of our three picks right now still have marketcaps under $100 million, meaning a potential 100X-plus return on investment if our thesis proves correct. Yet, the Cardano DEX race is by no means “a winner takes all” scenario; likely there will be numerous DEX’s in the ecosystem and we believe that likely the top 3 or 4 will have a marketcap of at least $1 billion each. As a result, we are casting our crypto net wide and buying several of the main contenders now while their marketcaps are still miniscule. So, which ones are the main contenders? In no particular order, these are the ones we are eyeing and buying:
ADAX: This is an automated liquidity protocol that is both non-custodial and decentralized, meaning users will be able to trade tokens without having to give up their private keys or access to their tokens. They have a sleek demo of their DEX here. The ADAX token is listed on Coinmarketcap and has a current marketcap of about $85 million. When we wrote about ADAX in our weekly wrap last Sunday, its market cap was about $30 million (yes the coin has almost tripled in the last week). Yet that is just a drop in the bucket if the project succeeds (and why we are still buying).
You can read more about the product here. It was also featured in this recent article on the top crypto exchange products breaking into the global market.
You can only buy ADAX on one platform for the time being, ExMarkets (which is a leading crypto crowdfunding platform).
CARDSWAP (CSWAP): This is a highly speculative play in a token launched by Cardstarter, the first insured project accelerator for Cardano (we were an early investor of their native token Cards and got most of our CSWAP from mining it). While the initial plan was that the Cardstarter team would be launching a DEX (Cardswap), there are unofficial reports that the team is either merging or forming some sort of partnership with Sundaeswap - one the frontrunners to emerge as the dominant DEX on Cardano. The speculation (and we stress this is only speculation and that there has been no official announcement) is that CSWAP tokens will be converted to Sundaeswap tokens at a set conversion rate. Again, this is a highly speculative play. At the time of writing, CSWAP trades at around $0.19 with a market cap of about $50 million.
The only place to buy CSWAP at present is on Uniswap. We use Uniswap V3 (using the USDC-CSWAP liquidity pool). You will need to add / import the CSWAP token to see it on Uniswap (and in your wallet) by pasting CSWAP’s token address, which you can find here on Etherscan (always do your own research and always get a second source to confirm any token address). If you need further help or questions, there is a CSWAP group on Telegram that is typically helpful (t.me/CSWAP_Chat).
Wrapping up our list is ErgoDEX, which will be the first cross-chain DEX on top of Ergo and Cardano blockchains (therefore not a native Cardano DEX). The soon-to-be-released DEX is merely one part of the Ergo ecosystem and there is no separate DEX token; thus the way to invest in this DEX is by investing in Ergo’s native coin, ERG. Ergo is widely considered to be a revolutionary blockchain protocol, yet still relatively obscure and under the crypto limelight – mainly because it focuses on building rather than marketing. ERG combines aspects of many coins, including BTC, ETH, Chainlink, Monero and Uniswap (it has been dubbed the Swiss Army Knife of Crypto). We view ERG as the least risky investment of the Cardano DEX tokens because the coin will still succeed if the DEX does not take off (and that is highly unlikely).
For more information on the ErgoDEX see this recent article. With a marketcap of about $570 million, we believe Ergo has the potential to become a top ten coin by marketcap (which would place its marketcap at over $25 billion at current rankings).
Finally, we also continued to buy more Cardano (ADA) this week (actually we traded some of our ETH for it) as we believe the coin still has plenty of upwards movement in the coming weeks and we expect it will outperform ETH for the foreseeable future. Moreover, once smart contracts come out after Sept 12, there likely will be numerous ways to earn passive income with it other than the current staking mechanism (which rewards stakers at about 5% APY). Finally, the research and development arm behind Cardano recently announced further plans to attract Ethereum blockchain users to the network by launching the testnet of an ERC-20 migration tool this coming week. As a result, users will be able to transfer their Ethereum standard tokens (ERC-20) to Cardano’s native blockchain. That’s bullish - and an appropriate way to end this week’s wrap.
If you found our information helpful and you have not already subscribed to our site, please head over to coinpad.io (registration is free) and / or follow us on Twitter @coinpadhome.