What happened
The price of many altcoins rose today as cryptocurrencies moved higher and the broader market jumped. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen more than 647 points as of 2:50 p.m. ET and the Nasdaq Composite was up nearly 1.5%.
Over the past 24 hours, the price of Fantom (FTM -5.61%) traded roughly 16% higher, Loopring (LRC -0.89%) jumped roughly 25%, and Aave (AAVE 0.54%) was up roughly 15%.
So what
Some on social media are attributing the rise in Fantom to rumors that Andre Cronje, a well-known developer in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, might be coming back to the project. In March, Cronje's colleague Anton Nell announced that he and Cronje were leaving DeFi for no clear reason.
But recently, people have noticed Cronje working on Fantom-related projects on GitHub, a platform for developers. People have also noticed that Cronje's crypto wallet associated with Fantom recently purchased 100 million Fantom tokens, sparking speculation of his return.
Image source: Getty Images.
Like several other blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies, Fantom is a smart-contract blockchain network that claims to have created a network that is faster and that can scale more efficiently than Ethereum, meaning transactions on the network would cost less. There has also been a stablecoin built on Fantom's network.
Loopring appears to be moving on news today that the video game retailer GameStop has released digital wallets for storing in-game non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that utilize Loopring's technology for faster transactions.
According to a description of the new wallet from GameStop, "harnessing the power of Loopring's zkRollup -- an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling protocol -- GameStop gives you low cost and fast transactions, with Ethereum security, opportunity, and global reach. This allows you to reduce gas fees and network congestion, while always remaining in control of your funds."
Loopring is a network built on top of Ethereum but works to help ease congestion on it by processing some of the transactions from Ethereum on Loopring. The network can supposedly process more than 2,000 transactions per second, which makes transactions cost less than a penny, far cheaper than what they cost on Ethereum.
Aave, a decentralized liquidity market protocol, recently launched a new project called Lens Protocol, which seeks to be a decentralized social media platform in which users can essentially own their content by making it all into NFTs and keeping it in a digital wallet. Developers will be able to build social media apps on Lens Protocol. Many people are interested in decentralized social media platforms because they would be difficult to censor content on and they take the power away from one central source such as big tech firms.
Now what
It looks like these altcoins are rising partly due to strength in the broader markets and partly because of new projects they are associated with or network-specific news like in Fantom's case.
All of these projects certainly look somewhat interesting and do appear to bring strong technical capabilities. I'm not really a big investor of altcoins like this, so I likely won't end up buying. Still, these three definitely look like they are worth a glance, especially Aave with its potential to bring a real alternative to mainstream social media, which seems to be of interest to many people right now.
Fantom and Loopring could be good as well, but there are lots of altcoins now, many of which are seeking to solve speed and scalability issues, so make sure to do research and check out potential competitors before investing.
