Key facts:
Updating their protocols favored Zilliqa, Waves, and Aave.
The announcement of OpenSea’s NTF support in Solana was favorable for its price.
Bitcoin posted a price decline of 1.52% in the week of March 28 to April 3, while altcoins posted a moderate rally in the same period. Despite the altcoin market capitalization increasing from $1.25 trillion to $1.28 trillion, or 2.4%, a small group of altcoins showed returns of over 20%.
The most appreciated cryptocurrencies in the last seven days are led by Zilliqa (ZIL), which incorporates a server segmentation technique (sharding) on your blockchain to increase its scalability. It is followed by Aave (AAVE), which has continued to benefit from its protocol update, and Waves (WAVES), which registered a temporary rally last Sunday of 50% compared to its initial price for the week.
The weekly top closes with Solana (SOL), who managed to break above $140 last Saturday for the first time since the end of January, and Terra (LUNA), whose purchases of bitcoin as a reserve helped revitalize its price.
At the current time, Zilliqa has experienced an extraordinary upswing due to its debut in the metaverse. The notorious price boom began last March 25, with ad the launch this month of a platform called Metapolis, a metaverse as a service proposal for third parties (MaaS, for its acronym in English).
Zilliqa partners with Agora, a talent management app, for the launch of Metapolis, which they have defined aims to “bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds,” according to the statement.
Last week, the price of Zilliqa went from USD 0.15397 to USD 0.15463, which represented a 44.83% appreciation in that period. Zilliqa’s appreciation since the announcement, when trading at $0.0047, was 350%.
New protocol continues to drive Aave
The week of March 14-20, Aave was the second most appreciated altcoin, as reported by CriptoNoticias, largely due to the launch of the third version of its protocol. In the last seven days it has also managed to position itself in second place among the most appreciated, in a virtual tie with Zilliqa. Aave went from USD 169 to USD 243.7, which represents an appreciation of 44.2%.
The update allows the transfer of Aave tokens between the different versions of the protocol on the different DeFi platforms that have lived in the cryptocurrency niche. The Aave V3 protocol ensures compatibility so that decentralized applications or dApps can run on Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Fantom, Harmony and Optimism, to which Ethereum will be added later.
Waves also updates its platform
For the third consecutive week, Waves appears at the top of the altcoins, partly due to the expectation of its NFT Duck Wars game, although the fact that it began its migration to Waves 2.0, a new iteration of its blockchain, has also had an influence. This update will enable faster transactions and ensure compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
At the same time there are other more ambitious goals for the next twelve months, including a metaverse protocol with integrated decentralized gaming.
On the other hand, Waves includes in its roadmap an international expansion and the project of an incubation fund to facilitate the transition from Web 2 to Web 3. Waves increased 43.4% in the last seven days, going from USD 32.73 to USD 46.96.
The promise of NFTs drives Solana
Solana has maintained an increasing trajectory of its price, due to the increasing demand for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on its platform, and to the ad of OpenSea last Tuesday March 29, which will add support for the Solana ecosystem in this month of April.
Last week, as shown in the graph belowowing, Solana’s price went from USD 106.92 to USD 136.85, which represents an increase of 27.9%
According to the cryptoslam.io platform, the daily sales volume of NFTs on the Solana network, ranges between 5 and 12 million dollars per day, with the participation of between 2,000 and 10,000 unique users. Total sales for March amounted to USD 171 million.
Bitcoin Strengthens Terra
Closing out the weekly top 5 altcoins, Luna, which is deployed on the Terra public blockchain, appreciated 20.3% in the past week and reached an all-time high of $117.81 on Sunday, to close at $112.81.
For that same day, the cryptocurrency closed with a series of six consecutive weekly candles in green, representing a Moon rise of more than 100%.
Luna’s bullish rally was attributed to the favorable impact of the Luna Foundation’s decision to increase its bitcoin reserves, as reported in this medium. This resulted in the acquisition between March 22 and 23, of 5,954 BTC, equivalent to around USD 250 million. The goal set by Terra is to reach USD 10 billion of the bitcoin strategic reserve.
