What happened

The start to Thanksgiving week has been a gloomy one in the cryptocurrency world, with the overall crypto market providing investors with a decline today of approximately 3.5% over the past 24 hours, at the time of this writing. With few winners to focus on in this sector, investors' focus appears to be on which projects are underperforming the rest.

Today, NEAR Protocol (NEAR -1.50%), Chain (XCN -6.42%) and Radix (XRD) are among the leading laggards garnering attention, with 24-hour declines of 9.6%, 10.4%, and 8.3%, respectively, as of 12:45 p.m. ET.

Most digital assets are continuing to feel the negative side effects of the FTX bankruptcy, which has rocked investor confidence in the sector as a whole. Ongoing contagion-related concerns have hit projects like NEAR Protocol hard, with this token declining more than 50% since the start of November alone. 

For Chain and Radix, tokens that saw relatively stable price action until late last week, investors appear to be taking the view that this relative outperformance was unwarranted. With valuations getting hit nearly across the board, Chain and Radix are the latest cryptos to be looped in with their peers in today's session.

So what 

Interestingly, there are some parallels between these three projects that investors may be viewing as net negatives today. NEAR and Chain are both community-run cloud-based blockchain projects, allowing for decentralized applications or even independent blockchains to be launched. Radix provides similar building blocks to developers looking to utilize pre-written functions for smart contracts.

In essence, each of these crypto projects benefits from growth in the world of decentralized finance. With contagion concerns spreading, it appears investors are less enthused about these projects' growth prospects moving forward. 

Now what

There's little optimism for any project banking on outsized growth in the world of decentralized finance. Significant outside investor capital had fueled an incredible rally in 2021 for many projects, providing behind-the-scenes developer support. These bank-end projects essentially provided the application growth that has enticed more users into this ecosystem. Should developer interest shift away from the crypto sector, these are three projects with significant potential downside right now.

Thus, it appears in the absence of any sort of positive catalysts in this space, these three cryptos may not see much in the way of upside for some time. Accordingly, while these tokens may appear cheap, investors may want to remain cautious that these projects could more likely turn out to be value traps.