2 Unstoppable Cryptos to Watch in February

These projects have ended the dour month of January with surprising gains of 25% and strong momentum heading into next month.

January has been a lousy month for investors. When the equity markets close today, it's expected that the S&P 500 will likely log its worst month since the start of the pandemic back in March 2020 when markets cratered 19%.

Of course, the volatile nature of the cryptocurrency industry makes that drop in equities seem like a rejuvenating dip in a Swedish hot spring, compared to cryptos' 30% crash so far this month and erasure of some $700 billion in value.

However, not every crypto asset has descended to Dante's third ring of Hell -- in fact some are doing surprisingly well. The following two projects have managed to produce surprisingly consistent gains of more than 25% with strong momentum driving into February.

1. Synthetix (SNX)

Synthetix is a decentralized finance protocol built on Ethereum, which means it offers a lot of automated banking features based on smart contracts on one of the premier blockchains. What makes this project unique is that it issues synthetic assets that can be traded or held on the blockchain, which represent real-world assets that are not on the blockchain. The users of this platform refer to those derived digital assets that trade on the Synthetix Network as "synths."

These synths mimic the actual assets in terms of their real-world values and prices. Right now, there are four types of asset classes available on Synthetix -- crypto, forex, equities, and commodities. The value to crypto investors is that synths allow them access to stay on the blockchain and invest in cryptos as well as analogs for foreign currencies like the Euro, stocks like Tesla, and commodities like oil and gold -- all from one blockchain network.

The synths eliminate the need for asset conversions by third parties who would take high fees and days to convert a gold position to a stock and then to a crypto, for example. All such asset conversions between synths are done instantly and cheaply through smart contracts. As of this writing, SNX was trading up 4.12% over the past 24 hours and 34.4% over the past seven days, according to CoinMarketCap.com. Its total market capitalization is $638 million, which could jump 20 times and still not be a top-10 project -- so there's lots of room for this one to run.

2. Ankr (ANKR)

Ankr is a unique multi-blockchain network provider and staking DeFi platform that seamlessly works across more than 40 other blockchains including Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and Polkadot. This cross-functionality is called "interoperability" and is extremely critical to the future of Web 3.0, NFTs, gaming, and the metaverse.

Without getting too wonky, it streamlines use and rollouts for decentralized apps, hosting nodes, and staking across a wide variety of blockchain networks. So, imagine you have an iPhone for personal use and an Android phone for your job, and there's an exercise app you love to use on both devices. In this example, Ankr would allow smooth seamless updates for that exercise app across both incompatible devices and any other apps you link it to.

The ANKR platform is geared towards developers, users, and businesses, but the brains behind the project wanted to create a way for individuals and startups to obtain affordable access to decentralized cloud computing services. It's like a cheap version of Amazon's AWS or Microsoft Azure that's available to the masses. As of this writing, ANKR was up 6.82% on the day and 27.50% for the past week according to CoinMarketCap. The total market cap value for ANKR is $634 million and could easily see a 10-20 multiple.

It's always important to do your own research and to understand that there's no guarantee these recent results will continue. However, there is something to be said about projects that are able to significantly outperform a widespread market malaise.