As we progress into the first quarter of the year, this week’s choices are set to benefit from ongoing developments and significant announcements that will help each project to continue to progress. These developments should help the projects to strengthen their market positions, and bring increased amounts of attention to their respective currencies.
Maker (MKR)
Maker MKR, 11.97% is the native currency of the MakerDAO project, which is a decentralized finance platform that also administers the DAI stablecoin. By using MakerDAO users can lock up their Ethereum ETH, -2.10% holdings in order to receive loans paid out in the Dai DAI, -0.25% currency.
Why Maker?
The project continues to move along and grow in adoption, after investment fund a16z crypto purchased 6% of the total MKR token supply for $15m. The team launched a new CDP Portal, which makes it easier for people to lock up ETH in exchange for DAI.
As a result, around 2% of the total ETH supply is currently locked up as collateral on the platform as over 2 million ETH has been committed to CDPs. The number of CDPs created hit an all time high of 1867 in January and the team are working towards allowing the collateralization of assets such as commodities, security, tokens, and traditional stocks and shares. The increased usage of DAI/MKR benefits MKR holders as the currency is burnt to pay fees on the platform.
Aeternity (AE)
Aeternity AE, -2.48% is an open source and Turing-complete blockchain that enables real-world data to be interfaced with smart contracts using decentralized oracles. The project uses a novel hybrid Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm and also uses state channels in order to achieve high levels of performance.
Why Aeternity?
The team have announced that the first network hardfork is set to take place on February 20, and they have outlined two main reasons behind these scheduled forks:
To give users several opportunities to migrate their AE (ERC20) tokens to the æternity Mainnet.
To gradually introduce new features and improvements to the æternity blockchain.
There are two more forks still to come with the community advised to keep an eye on team communications.
IOST (IOST)
IOStoken IOST, 2.28% is a token designed for the Decentralized Internet of Services with a scalable, secure and decentralized blockchain App platform. The Singapore-based project launched in January 2017 and offers the developers to create, innovate and build their next big ideas on the platform.
Why IOST?
The project’s Mainnet v1.0 is set to launch on February 25, with DApps launched on the Testnet v2.0 ‘Everest’ released on December 20th 2018 now being migrated onto Mainnet. The team predict that the Mainnet launch will lead to an increasing amount of engagement with projects and dApp developers and help IOST to continue to gain significant adoption.
How did the coins perform last week?
NEO NEO, 1.94% benefited from speculation running up to the NeoDev Con and grew by around 11% over the week. NEO is currently trading at around $8.25 and Komodo KMD, 1.39% was an even stronger performer as it grew by 36%, and is currently trading at $0.87. Waves WAVES, 1.47% dipped by around 2%, and is currently trading at $2.56. Over the course of the week, the market dipped from a total cap of around $121B on Monday to around $119B on Sunday.