The Terra blockchain has become the second largest DeFi protocol behind Ethereum
Has entered the top 10 of ‘cryptos’, along with Avalanche (AVAX)
The ‘altcoins’ are leaving interesting movements this week, after several days in which the cryptocurrency market had languished, due to the fall in risk appetite, fears about Ómicron or the monetary policy decision of the Federal Reserve (Fed ). While bitcoin and ethereum have not quite found ‘momentum’, several tokens are leaving significant increases of more than 15% and 20% in the last seven days. The digital currencies of the Terra (LUNA) and Avalanche (AVAX) projects stand out above the others, which rose almost 60% and 40%, respectively, in the last week.
Both have crept into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, with more than 30,000 million dollars, according to CoinmarketCap, displacing dogecoin and polkadot and, in addition, LUNA has marked other important milestones. After surpassing its previous all-time high, the Terra token has continued to climb, in a rally that appears to be seeking the $ 100 psychological level. Currently, it changes hands at $ 95. As for the Avalanche token, it is very close to its best price of all time on November 30, above $ 145 and is trading around $ 124.
These ‘altcoins’ have had an outstanding performance in recent months and do not seem to have reached their full potential in this cycle yet “, explains Moisés Santos, expert in digital assets at Bitpanda. Both projects are, together with Solana, three interesting alternatives to Ethereum as a basis for setting up decentralized finance projects.
Terra is a blockchain project developed by Terraform Labs , which seeks easy access to the creation of stable cryptocurrencies, that is, they do not vary in price (stablecoins) and whose price is anchored to that of known currencies such as the dollar. Its native token, LUNA, is among those that have grown the most in 2021 (more than 14,000%) and “there is great expectation about its behavior next year,” Santos says.
Avalanche, for its part, is seen by experts as a more than interesting alternative to Ethereum . Its creator describes it as “the most innovative and fastest-developing platform” and it will end December with a revaluation in 2021, of more than 3,000%.
The meteoric rise of LUNA has also caused the Terra network to surpass Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in terms of total locked value (TVL) to become the second largest DeFi protocol behind Ethereum.
Currently, there is a total of $ 18.06 billion locked in a total of 13 projects based on Terra, compared to TVL’s $ 16.6 billion in as many as 225 BSC protocols, according to Defi Llama.
The rise in LUNA can be attributed in part to recent advancements , including adjustments to the burning mechanism of the Terra protocol. One of them is Columbus 5, a recent update that has introduced several technological improvements and has changed the way the UST, Terra’s stablecoin denominated in US dollars, is minted.
The rises of these ‘altcoins’ together with other increases of smaller size, but equally important such as ripple, which is up 10%, have raised the total capitalization to 2.3 trillion dollars. Overall, the market capitalization of digital currencies has fallen by almost $ 750 billion in the last 5 weeks. After hitting an all-time high market cap of $ 3 trillion, the total value of crypto assets has gradually declined over the past 5 weeks, in line with declines for bitcoin of around 33% from its all-time highs.