Crypto has had a rough start in 2022, with the market down 18% to $1.8 trillion at writing. But the industry's fundamentals still look good -- especially with soaring inflation and geopolitical uncertainty giving investors an incentive to diversify out of traditional currencies.
Fantom (FTM -5.23%) and Solana (SOL -10.28%) could make great ways to bet on a crypto rebound in March and beyond.
Fantom
Founded in 2019, Fantom is a blockchain platform designed to host decentralized applications (dApps) (these are programs that use self-executing smart contracts to provide services on the network). Fantom's affordable valuation and impressive technical specs could set it up for long-term growth.
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According to its developers, Fantom is the "fastest public blockchain in crypto" on a metric called time-to-finality. Time-to-finality measures the time from transaction submission to confirmation. And Fantom's developers believe this is a more useful metric than transactions per second because it better accounts for how long it takes to complete transactions, not how many can be run at the same time.
That said, Fantom has not provided speed comparisons between its platform and rivals in terms of time-to-finality. So investors will have to wait for more information before measuring it against other blockchains.
But with a market cap of just $4.2 billion, Fantom is significantly smaller than large rivals like Solana and Ethereum (worth $29 billion and $318 billion, respectively). So its affordable valuation makes it an excellent option for investors who missed out on the more popular platforms when they were cheap.
Solana
With a market cap of $29 billion, Solana is an excellent cryptocurrency for investors who want to bet on a larger and more established dApp platform. The Solana blockchain boasts industry-leading technical capabilities, and its active development team is working to fix recent challenges with reliability.
With a transaction capacity of 50,000 per second, Solana's speed trounces major blockchains like Ethereum, which can only handle 15 per second or less. This blazing-fast speed is attracting dApp developers who need a highly scalable platform for their projects. Recently, basketball legend Michael Jordan launched HEIR -- a non-fungible-token (NFT) platform on Solana. NFTs are digital proof of ownership stored on the blockchain, and HEIR will include collectibles inspired by Jordan's basketball career.
This project is compelling proof of concept for Solana's blockchain and a potential sign of its growing mainstream acceptance.
That said, Solana is also facing its share of growing pains. For example, the platform faced a series of outages in January because of duplicate transactions. But its developers are working on improvements that should help put these challenges to rest.
The need for speed
Blockchain speed is becoming more important as the technology is adapted to increasingly complex use cases. But while Solana and Fantom both boast impressive technical capabilities, they suit different investment strategies. Solana is better for those who want to bet on a larger and more established platform. But Fantom is a better way to get in on the ground floor of a long-term growth opportunity.
