The cryptocurrency space has been one that's been deep red of late. However, some tokens have seen some positive momentum recently. On this Jan. 19 episode of "The Crypto Show" on Backstage Pass, Fool.com contributors Chris MacDonald and Jon Quast discussed some of the positive momentum behind Cardano (ADA 3.95%), Terra (CRYPTO: LUNA), and Dogecoin (DOGE 4.43%) in recent weeks.
Jon Quast: We're talking about some crypto gainers here. The big gainers over the past week, the percentages might be a little bit different now that show is airing, these things move fast, but Cardano up 26%, Terra up 10%, Dogecoin up 9%. These are No. 5, No. 9, and No. 11 cryptocurrencies by market cap respectively, so these are some big, big cryptocurrencies in the market and making some big moves this past week.
Chris MacDonald: Yeah, it's been a good week for specific tokens. It's always good to start with the winners when you're looking at volatility in the crypto world.
Every week, you can look across most of the top tokens, and seeing double-digit increases or decreases is not necessarily unusual. Cardano is the big winner this week. We touched last week on one of the key drivers of that being their Cardano Forest Project and how they're looking to become the first carbon-negative blockchain. That seems to be the key driver for this one. Interestingly, Cardano has, I believe moved back into a top 5 spot.
Jon Quast: Yeah. That's what I'm seeing today, No. 5.
Chris MacDonald: Yeah. It's surpassed Solana (SOL 3.74%), which is a fast-growing one and that's been a big mover over this past year. Cardano is back into the discussion among investors as to which tokens they see as real competitors to something, let's say, like in Ethereum (ETH 3.11%). It's making a big, big move this week.
Terra is another interesting one. That's an algorithmic stablecoin play. But there has been some news on Terra this past week that I think is interesting, and we're going to touch a little bit more on some investments that have been made in the crypto world. Terra did make a $139 million investment in a number of projects to build out its DeFi ecosystem. This is one that investors are starting to look at in terms of the ecosystem size. That's a big fundamental valuation factor for a lot of these networks, so that's something that investors have on their radar right now.
Jon Quast: When you say Terra, you're talking about the Luna tokens, correct?
Chris MacDonald: Luna is the token.
Jon Quast: Yeah. Because we wouldn't want to see the stablecoin up 10%. That would be bad.
Chris MacDonald: That's right, yeah. Terra is an interesting project. They basically have what's called the Terra stables where they put a bunch of stablecoins together and Luna is the token that represents the network so to speak. It's an interesting project because it's not tied to the U.S. dollar or anything like that. But it is a way for investors to get access or gain exposure to the stablecoin space, which we talked a little bit about last week.
Then Dogecoin, we've got to mention some of these dog coins once in a while. [laughs] From a speculative standpoint, it's up. It was up much more this week on a tweet of we're going to get, I think a little bit to that news maybe a little later on. But Elon Musk essentially announced that Tesla (TSLA +3.01%) would be accepting Dogecoin for some merchandise and it flew 25% in a day. It's given up most of those gains already, and I think that speaks to some of the speculative nature of some of these tokens. I think we're going to touch on that a little bit later, so I'll leave that for our discussion later on.
