The crypto world discussion is typically dominated by few high-profile cryptocurrencies. However, Avalanche (AVAX -1.46%), Filecoin (FIL -4.64%), and Cosmos Hub (ATOM -2.75%) are stealing the spotlight today, after seeing massive moves over the past weekend. Since Friday at 4 p.m. ET, these three tokens have surged 19%, 16.3%, and 6.3%, respectively. While certainly not in the same quality class as leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum, these three projects are outperforming due to specific catalysts that are worth diving into.

Big moves tied to big activity

Avalanche has seen a surge in activity on its network, with increased transactions leading to more than 38,000 tokens burned. This has coincided with strong staking activity as well, leading to healthy network fundamentals and an increasingly bullish outlook for investors. Further upside appears to be tied to the listing of Avalanche perpetual futures contracts on Coinbase Global, which should allow for improved liquidity for traders (making it easier for investors to buy and sell Avalanche closer to its spot price).

Filecoin has also seen a surge in transaction volume, with overall transactions increasing more than 75% over the past day, as of this morning's session. Improved demand for Filecoin's native token has improved liquidity, and led to a much more bullish outlook for fundamentals-oriented investors. Additional interest appears to be circulating around Filecoin's upcoming presentation at the LabWeek 2023 event, where it's speculated the developer team could discuss new innovations, including decentralized storage, artificial intelligence (AI) upgrades, and zero-knowledge proofs, as well as other potential updates.

Cosmos' recent surge appears to be tied to key developments made on the Cosmos-based Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain, which will essentially result in Ethereum-formatted transactions becoming the default. By removing Cosmos transactions, the hope is that more Ethereum developers will choose to build on the Cosmos chain, boosting activity.

Fundamentals becoming increasingly important

One of the more interesting elements of the recent impressive moves made in these three cryptos over the past weekend is the fact that these moves are all fundamentals-based. In other words, investors appear to be eyeing projects that are seeing a surge in real activity, rather than crypto projects seeing a surge in interest on the basis of technical or trading factors. Overall, this appears to be a much more productive environment for value-oriented investors, in that the market is ascribing greater value to projects supporting a greater share of real activity in the crypto ecosystem.

So long as these fundamental trends continue to be the case, Avalanche, Filecoin, and Cosmos appear to be projects investors will continue to focus in on. I think the recent momentum these projects have generated could certainly be sustainable, and even boosted by additional interest from momentum traders over the near to medium term.

In general, I think a crypto market that prices digital assets according to their fundamental strength or weakness is a positive for the sector. The fact that these three cryptos are moving in the same direction as their transaction data is encouraging, and I'm going to watch these three tokens closely from here on out.