Wake up, folks. The bull run is about to start in earnest. Today we saw BTC hit $66k. Bitcoin spot ETFs are done. The Bitcoin halving is only another 60 days away. These are all bullish indicators.
A Bitcoin supply shock is in the making. This is the right time to position yourself. As you know, when Bitcoin makes a move, the rest tends to follow. So, make sure that you can ride and enjoy this bull run to its fullest. That’s why my research team and I went to look for some altcoin gems that are still cheap. Here I am, showing you three altcoin gems that deserve some spotlight time.
1) Akash ($AKT)
I love the Cosmos Hub and its ecosystem. Especially the airdrops. As a result, when most people talk about Cosmos, it’s about Celestia or Injective. Recently, you can also add Dymension. However, there are also some lesser-known altcoin gems in there. One is, for instance, Akash and its $AKT token.
Passage has launched the first ever metaverse world on @akashnet_ decentralized GPUs!
✨ 1-click deployment
✨ Up to 70% cost savings
✨ Seamless integration with Passage Elite pic.twitter.com/ZenOjwgff5— Passage (@passageio) February 21, 2024
With Akash, you can buy or sell cloud computing resources. In other words, we’re talking GPU here. Now, GPUs are graphics processing units. Or the memory on your graphic cards. Akash also files under DePIN, one of the hottest narratives currently. That GPU has video random access memory or VRAM. Two groups will need a lot of this. Gamers and AI. To keep it close to home, you can also add crypto miners.
So, this shows that there will be a constant or, even better, a rising demand for GPU. Buying a GPU can easily set you back $1.5k to $2k. So, renting is a good alternative. That’s exactly what Akash offers. The project has already been around since 2018. One of its founders, Greg Osuri is very active on X. See one of his recent posts here. It explains how busy Akash is.
The Coinbase listing is cool and all, but what's more intriguing is that Akash has set a new record for the number of active leases (applications) deployed on the network almost every day for the past month, with a new set of H100s, A100s, and A6000s will be coming online this… pic.twitter.com/fkHmSUJ5hk
— Greg Osuri ⟁ d/acc (@gregosuri) February 27, 2024
Akash offers a marketplace. Here, you can offer or get access to excess cloud computing resources. You pay with $AKT when buying, and you receive $AKT for selling your GPU. It uses a decentralized computer network for this.
The current $AKT price is $4.27. It has a market cap of $1 billion. Out of 388.5 million tokens, 229 million already circulated. The token price is up by 855% over one year. However, here’s a kicker. Furthermore, Coinbase added Akash to its roadmap. Akash is around 80% cheaper compared to the cloud giants. This project still has plenty of room for growth.
2) COTI Network ($COTI)
COTI Network is all about privacy. It’s an L2 built on Ethereum and fits like a glove in today’s altcoins gems. This means that it will benefit from Ethereum’s imminent Dencun upgrade. Transactions on L2s will become very cheap. Furthermore, COTI has been on fire recently. The $COTI token surged by 141% over the last 7 days. Make that 184% over 14 days, and 324% over 30 days. This makes it one of the best-performing tokens right now.
To mark the upcoming Ethereum Dencun Upgrade, @binance has introduced trading promotions, featuring $COTI 👇
COTI V2’s Layer 2 will also adapt and benefit from the Ethereum Dencun upgrade. More details coming soon. https://t.co/euEWlxkaVM
— COTI Foundation (@COTInetwork) March 4, 2024
Check out our recent video news by Cody. $COTI has a market cap of $366 million. There are currently 1.5 billion in circulation out of 2 billion $COTI.
So, what causes this stellar price increase? Well, COTI Network upgraded to V2. One of their new features was only revealed a few days ago. These are the ‘Garbled Circuits’. COTI considers them as a breakthrough for blockchain encryption. COTI sees privacy as the new frontier for L2s.
Garbled Circuits need up to 250x lighter computation and storage. As a result, it can run on any device. No other privacy solution can offer this, besides COTI. Furthermore, it offers a computational speed that’s 1000x faster compared to conventional systems.
COTI is a Layer 1 blockchain and uses a DAG or Directed Acyclic Graph architecture. However, it also works closely together with Cardano. For example, it runs the DJED stablecoin, and it also offers a payment service on Cardano, ADA Pay. All this seems to be only the beginning of COTI V2. The new use cases are plentiful. For example:
- DEXes
- AI
- RWA management
- Gaming
- SocialFi
- Bridging
- Governance
- ID dApps.
We’re happy to announce our upcoming Devnet and key target use cases for the growth fund!
The Devnet and upcoming grant program empower developers to experiment and build with COTI V2, fostering the growth of the COTI ecosystem.
Read all about it: https://t.co/NQepcfQoLy$COTI pic.twitter.com/A8eN7z6oIh
— COTI Foundation (@COTInetwork) February 28, 2024
So, as you can see, this holds some very hot narratives. It also shows that there’s still plenty of room for growth here.
3) Sui ($SUI)
My last altcoin gems pick of the day is Sui. This may come as a surprise. Sui may not be on everybody’s radar right now. But let me explain why I picked Sui.
Sui is concentrating on blockchain gaming. That’s currently already a $262 billion industry. We can expect another $50 billion in growth over the next 4 years. So, in 2027 it should be $312 billion. Now, even if blockchain gaming gets a small slice of this, it will be a large amount. In other words, there’s plenty of growth potential in this vertical.
Sui and DeFi
But there’s also another vertical in which Sui is doing well. That’s DeFi. Currently, they take the #11 spot on DeFiLlama for all chains in TVL. Almost on the sly, without making a big deal out of it. This means that it outperforms chains like Cardano, Aptos, or Near.
Another major feat is that Sui used the Wormhole bridge a lot. It’s in the second spot there, for transferring funds to Ethereum over the last 30 days. Sui bridged $250 million. Thus, beating chains like Solana, BSC, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and so on.
Furthermore, Sui is into ZK tech. For example, they introduced their zkLogin. This is an easy way to onboard users. Sui is also closing the gap between Web2 and Web3. Here’s another reminder, Sui’s TPS (transactions per second) is 297,000 TPS. The chain never needed it yet, but had recently a peak of 6,000 TPS.
All this didn’t go unnoticed on the $SUI token price. Currently, that price is $1.54. In October, the price was still at $0.38. It’s closing in on a $2 billion market cap. However, Sui has only unlocked 12% of its tokens, to date. That’s something to keep an eye out for.
And that brings me to the end. Which of these three altcoin gems do you like best?
