Top 5 cryptocurrencies to watch in April 2022

March ended up being a bullish month for the cryptocurrency space as the flagship cryptocurrency asset, Bitcoin gained for the second month in a row, rising from $43,193.23 at the start. to end the month at $45,538.68, a gain of 5.43%.

Bitcoin was trading as low as $37,260.20 at the start of the month, however, in the last few days of the month, we saw a rally up to $48,086.84, which is a rise of 29 % from its trough for the month. Bitcoin's market dominance ended the month at 41.63%, down 0.99% from the 42.62% seen at the start of the month.

As expected, the cryptocurrency market capitalization also gained 12.39% for the month, rising from $1.86 trillion at the start of the month to end the month at $2.09 trillion. . The cryptocurrency's market capitalization traded at $1.65 trillion on the day Bitcoin hit its March low.

The Altcoin market saw similar gains, gaining more than 15.19% in February, rising from around $1.06 trillion to $1.22 trillion by the end of the month. During the month of March, we saw the market capitalization of the altcoin lose its trillion-dollar status as it traded as low as $923.5 billion.

March saw many events that affected the performance of the cryptocurrency space. In fact, Bitcoin turned positive year-to-date (YtD), on the 29th day of the month when Bitcoin broke through $46,311.74, its opening price for the year. The recent market rally is the result of a major accumulation seen across BTC, Ether, and ADA.

Highlights of March

The month began with OpenSea, the world's largest NFT marketplace, excluding its Iranian users from its platform due to regulations, sparking outrage among NFT collectors and sparking a new debate about decentralization in the crypto space. . This happened around the time Bitcoin traded its monthly low.

After that, we started to see a net accumulation of ADA, the native token of the Cardano network. Data provided by blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock reveals that the balance held by addresses with 1 million to 10 million coins hit a record high of 12 billion ADA ($9.72 billion) last week, a gain of 41% since the end of January. We also saw a similar build in Ether as well as BTC over the month.

The month also saw Quidax, an African-founded cryptocurrency exchange, listing on CoinMarketCap, one of the world's leading sources of cryptocurrency-related market data, becoming the first fully owned crypto exchange. by Africans to be listed on the platform.

We also saw veteran banking giant, HSBC, become the latest corporate banking entity to enter the metaverse by partnering with one of the leading metaverse projects by market capitalization, The Sandbox.

Towards the end of the month, we saw Yuga Labs, the company behind one of NFT's largest collections, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), launch its own token, ApeCoin, under the symbol APE, as another incentive to be part of the exclusive digital asset club. Post-launch, the platform raised $450 million, bringing its valuation to $4 billion

To top it off, the current hawkish stance of the US Federal Reserve has proven true as the regulator raised its interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to a range of 0.25% to 0. .5% from its current level close to zero. 

With the current bullish momentum seen in the market, here is a look at 5 cryptocurrencies that investors should watch out for in March 2022:

Bitcoin Bitcoin

We continued to see a lot of net accumulation of bitcoin whales. The trend that began in February continued into March 2022 with the Luna Foundation leading the way, buying more than 30,000 BTC, in line with its commitment to purchase $10 billion worth of Bitcoin against its programmable stablecoin, UST.

The latest issue of the Blockware Intelligence Newsletter, hosted by William Clemente, On-Chain Analyst and Chief Information Analyst at Blockware, explained that when it comes to the Long Term Holder (LTH) accumulation, an analytics metric series that measures the portfolio backlog of address entities with a history Not selling its holdings, the report states that the metric “shows the most contracting reading in the history of bitcoin trading, in other words, long-term bitcoin holders are closing the supply at a rate that exceeds the amount of BTC being released into circulation each day.”

The report also states that illiquid supply continues to rise. More recently, William also recently acknowledged in a tweet that the illiquid supply shock is still bullish as the market is pushed higher. “The illiquid supply shock with further progress,” he said, adding the illiquid supply shock chart to support his point.

The report also states: “Based on Chain Treasure, it actually appears that some of this (hoarding) is coming from smaller entities; with whale stocks on a broader downtrend despite peaking in recent days.

Bitcoin finished the month at $45538.68.

Cardano's ADA

Cardano is one of the largest blockchains to successfully use a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which consumes less power than the proof-of-work algorithm Bitcoin relies on. Although the much larger Ethereum is being upgraded to PoS, this transition will only be gradual.

 The network, at the time of this writing, currently leads the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains in terms of transaction volume over the past 24 hours. Cardano now represents a transaction volume of $73.1 billion with transaction fees of around $56,907. To show how cheap blockchain is, Ethereum and Bitcoin, which both had a transaction volume of $10.62 billion and $38.14 billion respectively in the last 24 hours, have transaction fees of $17.06 million and $480,000 respectively.

The increase in transaction volume is the result of increased activity in the Cardano ecosystem chain since the first decentralized application, SundaeSwap, launched in January.  Although we saw SundaeSwap leading the charge, now we see Minswap, a new DEX that has just launched, accounting for over 50% of TVL on the network.

ADA ended the month trading $1.14.

Ethereum Ether

As in the case of Bitcoin and ADA, we are also seeing a significant build-up of whales for the native blockchain token Ethereum. 

According to data provided by Glassnode, an on-chain analytics software tracking tool, almost 550,000 ETH, worth around $1.66 billion, using the current market price at the time of the writing this article, left the YtD centralized trading platforms. The massive outflow reduced the exchange's net Ether balance to 21.72 million ETH, down from its record high of 31.68 million ETH in June 2020.

Also of note, according to data from IntoTheBlock, over 30% of all Ether withdrawals from exchanges seen in 2022 occurred in the past week. In detail, more than 180,000 ETH left crypto trading platforms on March 15, bringing the weekly flow, worth just over $500 million as of March 18. The Chainalysis data report revealed similar readings, showing that Ether tokens could have exited trading this week at an average of around 120,000 units per day, a bullish signal.

Ether ended the month trading at $3,281.64.

SOL from Solana

Solana is also called a competitor of Ethereum, operating on a PoS, similar to the Cardano blockchain. It is unique because the platform claims to improve its scalability by introducing Proof of History (PoH) consensus combined with the underlying Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.

The token received more interest from participants following OpenSea's announcement that it will add support for the Solana ecosystem in April 2022. Due to current events, the volume of NFT exchanges have skyrocketed in other existing Solana marketplaces, such as Magic Eden.

Solana is the second largest NFT ecosystem behind Ethereum, with an estimated market capitalization of $1.5 billion across its collections. The Solana NFT space grew rapidly last fall thanks to rising collections like Solana Monkey Business, Degenerate Ape Academy and Aurory. Solana boasts of offering faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficient transactions than the Ethereum mainnet.

The Ethereum-powered OpenSea is currently the most popular marketplace in the entire NFT industry, accumulating billions of dollars each month in transaction volume, including over $5 billion in January on Ethereum and the solution. side chain scaling, Polygon. In January, OpenSea was valued at $13.3 billion following a $300 million Series C raise.

SOL ended the month trading at $122.66.

XRP

XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger and can be used as a currency to transact on the platform and other supported platforms.

Ripple is still handling the case with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In December 2020, the SEC accused Ripple of allegations that its executives sold $1.3 billion worth of XRP in an unregistered securities offering. Ripple took issue with the claims, saying that XRP should not be considered a security.

 Ripple argues that the SEC should have informed the company of its intentions before taking the matter to court. By failing to do so, the agency denied Ripple what is called a fair notice.

In a development regarding the case, Judge Analisa Torres granted Ripple permission to respond to the SEC's memorandum of law in support of the fair notice motion to strike defense, according to court documents. So far, Ripple has had the ability to unseal a series of documents from 2012 whose contents purport to show that the company did not know that the XRP token could be classified as a security, which the SEC claims the company knew. .

However, in March, the SEC scored a point against Ripple as the judge granted an extension to submit a discovery schedule regarding the individual defendants, Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen as part of the case against Ripple Labs. While the decision favors the SEC, some onlookers have suggested that the enforcement body is dragging its feet and slowing down the case to frustrate Ripple Labs.

Many are predicting that Ripple will win the case and this led to a whale buying $700 million worth of XRP in the month of February. This is described as the second largest accumulation in the history of XRP. Furthermore, a former SEC official also predicts that the SEC will lose on the merits of the case against XRP. Attorney Joseph Hall said, “I'm not entirely sure what the SEC plans to prove in the XRP litigation…And I still think there's a good chance [the SEC] will lose on the bottom. This is why XRP makes our list for March.

XRP ended the month trading at $0.8146.

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