Forget Bitcoin: These 3 Cryptos Could Dominate 2022

While Bitcoin leads the crypto space in market cap, it's draggin' wagon when it comes to price growth this year. Here are three cryptos currently outperforming BTC.

Bitcoin (BTC) continues to be the reigning cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with a current valuation of $829 billion according to CoinMarketCap. Yet despite a recent price surge of 16% over the past week, it's still down 35% from its all-time high posted on Nov. 11, 2021, according to CoinGecko.

So, while Bitcoin seems to be settling in for a bit of a breather around the $43,500 price range, here are three crypto projects with some giddy-up that could leave BTC in the dust in 2022. Each is currently in the green for the past 24 hours and is outperforming Bitcoin during the past week.

Theta is leading the way in blockchain-based video streaming

If you're not sure what video streaming is, think Netflix, Disney+, AmazonPrime, YouTube -- you get the idea. Theta (THETA) is one of the first video streaming platforms built on a blockchain. Because the THETA tech runs on a decentralized network, it's a serious threat to traditional streaming and cable services that have centralized outages, exploit content creators, charge high rates to subscribers, and that provide limited content choices and sketchy infrastructure.

The THETA protocol upends the entire video distribution model because users share bandwidth and computing resources on a peer-to-peer (P2P) basis across a growing validator network comprising thousands of "nodes" -- a.k.a private server farms. Theta also has its own native cryptocurrency token, THETA, which incentivizes governance tasks across its network. It has corporate heavy hitters that include Samsung, Sony Europe, Binance, and Google serving as "enterprise validators" for its blockchain traffic -- that fact is truly unique within the crypto space and shows validation for Theta's business model by other media titans.

According to CoinMarketCap, THETA's capitalization is $4 billion and its price at writing is $4.05, which is up about 6% on the day and 41% over the past seven. Grandview Research reports that the global video streaming market was $50 billion in 2020, and projects it will grow more than 20% annually through 2028. THETA is well positioned to disrupt and snag share from that massive market.

Avalanche is gaining traction in the smart contract space

Avalanche (AVAX) launched in 2020 and has quickly grown into a viable alternative to Ethereum -- the second-ranked crypto by market cap -- and other smart contract platforms. The AVAX blockchain enables developers to build decentralized applications -- think of the iPhone app store -- as well as independent, customized blockchains, which are also known as "subnets." Simultaneously, AVAX operates seamlessly with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), so the thousands of projects and apps already on Ethereum can easily move to AVAX.

When stacked up against Ethereum, AVAX has a very high throughput of 4,500 transactions per second (TPS) per subnet with virtually instant transaction settlements within 1 second. Its transactions cost only pennies to users, compared to the $35 average Ethereum transaction cost. Its low fees make AVAX ideal for DeFi or NFT transactions. According to the AVAX blog, last year many NFT platforms, including five of the most popular NFT markets, ran on the AVAX network, with more being added.

As of this writing CoinMarketCap has the AVAX market cap at more than $22 billion, and it's currently priced at $90.56, which is up 6.11% over the past 24 hours and 29.33% on the week. Given its truly unique, agnostic tech that harmonizes the crypto-verse, this project could easily blast 200% if macro conditions stabilize.

Celsius can benefit from the decentralized finance (DeFi) boom

Celsius (CEL) is an all-inclusive financial and banking services platform for crypto users. It specializes in P2P lending for DeFi globally. The Celsius network has its own token, CEL, that provides liquidity to lending pools and increases user payouts when used as preferred lending currency. Its DeFi lending pools enable users to access funding and earn by lending out their crypto.

Celsius claims to be one of the top-performing user-to-user lending protocols in the space with more than 1 million registered users and $25.2 billion in assets loaned among them. The network has also paid out more than $929 million in yield rewards since its launch in June 2018.

As far as upside potential, the DeFi sector is one of the fastest growing blockchain areas, and DeFi Pulse shows that right now there's more than $87.5 billion staked -- a.k.a. "earmarked" -- for DeFi lending purposes, so Celsius is in the right space. As of this writing, CoinMarketCap has CEL priced at $3.47, up nearly 3% on the day, and a robust 33.03% spanning the past seven days. Assuming regulators don't kill DeFi, CEL could pump 200%-300% due to its use case and discounted market cap.

Please understand that this discussion is based on opinion and is not financial advice. Be sure to do your own research before investing.