Macro Trends
1. Market trend: The market rebounded. Memes flew around chaotically. Grayscale continued to sell Bitcoin.
2. U.S. stocks fell, and the U.S. dollar index rose sharply. The Federal Reserve guided to cut interest rates three times this year, while the market had previously expected six rate cuts.
Market Hotspots
1. Fan tokens such as CHZ, SANTOS, and LAZIO have soared due to early speculation about the June European Cup. Jump is a market maker for CHZ and is about to launch a new token economy. Historically, the trend of CHZ is less affected by the market and often rises against the trend when it falls.
2. PENDLE and BLUR, which are used to pledge ETH, have also risen sharply. Blast has been launched on the test network, Manta will soon be launched on the secondary market, and Renzo, which is on the same track, is being sought after by the market.
3. Meme's TROLL, SMILEY, and ZUZALU have all skyrocketed hundreds of times in a week. There are rumors that these increases are driven by Chinese capital. They are looking for logically meaningful old coins such as Musk and Vitalik to hype. The main feature is that the project is worth 100,000 USDT and the chips are evenly distributed.
4. JUP of the Solana ecosystem will be airdropped on January 31. JUP is currently the largest DEX on the Solana platform.
5. Meme's TROLL and SMILEY have seen significant increases, dozens of times in a week. TROLL and SMILEY are based on Musk's ideas. Popular old coins are all hyped on the Ethereum chain. The Solana chain provides more liquidity for Shiba Inu coins.
6 Cryptocurrencies That Could Take Off in 2024
RNDR
Render is building a network to connect GPU owners with people who need GPU power for projects such as AI development, VR rendering, and more.
As the demand for GPU computing power continues to grow, Render targets a large market that is expected to grow. Its token model incentivizes people to contribute idle GPU resources.
Backed by strong technology and an experienced team, Render has huge upside potential as network adoption expands. It is one of the most promising existing AI cryptocurrencies on the market.
The token has huge potential, especially considering the expected growth in GPU sharing and image rendering in the coming years. This is especially true for more advanced image and video production as part of the Metaverse, augmented reality, gaming, VR, and other industries.
I expect RNDR to have 20-50x potential in the future and I think it will benefit greatly from the hype ahead of the Bitcoin block reward halving in 2024!
MATIC
Polygon 2.0 is a major innovation in Layer 2 scaling. Essentially, it is a new system of Validium zkRollups, all running on a universal interoperability layer built on Ethereum.
Without getting too technical, it’s a ZK rollup system (essentially layer 3) that all settles to an intermediate ZK rollup called the interop layer (layer 2), which then batches all transactions and settles them to Ethereum. The result is that you can have an “infinite” number of chains built with Polygon CDK, all using their own custom parameters, and all connecting back to the same interop layer, sharing liquidity pools on the same network setup, and settling natively to ether. Even the existing PoS Polygon that we all know and use will connect to the interop layer.
The beauty of this system is that adding new chains is very simple and permissionless, requiring only future chains to incentivize validators with POL tokens (or even USDC or ETH). The same validator can validate any number of chains simultaneously.
As part of the Polygon 2.0 upgrade, the migration from $MATIC to $POL is scheduled for the first half of 2024 and is already underway in the testnet. Well-known chains and projects such as OKX, Astar, and Immutable are committed to using
With all token unlocks complete and inflation at just 2%, it is expected that prices will really take off when POL 2.0 goes up in the second half of this year.
I have been adding to my funds over the past few weeks and will continue to buy on dips with the goal of holding the bull market for the long term. Expect 15-20x lower risk this cycle.
ARB
Arbitrum is a strong competitor to MATIC and as an L2 outperforms MATIC on most metrics. One caveat with Arbitrum is its poor token economics and value accrual. That said, $ARB's fundamentals and widespread adoption outweigh the shortcomings caused by sub-par token economics, which will likely be addressed in the next 18-24 months anyway.
Arbitrum is arguably the largest chain after ETH and BSC, even beating SOL on multiple metrics. It has the lowest market cap to TVL ratio at 1.03. For comparison, $ARB currently has an MC of $2.7B, while Optimism has an MC of $3.3B. Optimism has one-third of the stable and TVL, and 1/10 of the daily trading volume.
Arbitrum performs far better than any other layer 2 on ETH. Where it falls short compared to Polygon is in inflation and token unlocking, as well as accrual of token value. $ARB also has a solid SDK and Optimistic rollup technology stack, but it is technically inferior to Polygon's zkRollups, has longer settlement times, lower throughput, and lacks global liquidity.
As a layer 2, it is the most undervalued according to the above metrics, but it is right behind Polygon due to inflation and flaws in token economics.
