4 Altcoins Having the Potential to Go 50-100X, SOL, DOT, AVAX & NEAR Price to Thrive in the Upcoming Cycle! 

What Is Solana (SOL)?

Solana is a highly functional open source project that banks on blockchain technology’s permissionless nature to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. While the idea and initial work on the project began in 2017, Solana was officially launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Solana.

The Solana protocol is designed to facilitate decentralized app (DApp) creation. It aims to improve scalability by introducing a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.

Because of the innovative hybrid consensus model, Solana enjoys interest from small-time traders and institutional traders alike. A significant focus for the Solana Foundation is to make decentralized finance accessible on a larger scale.

Who Are the Founders of Solana?

Anatoly Yakovenko is the most important person behind Solana. His professional career started at Qualcomm, where he quickly moved up the ranks and became senior staff engineer manager in 2015. Later on, his professional path shifted, and Yakovenko entered a new position as a software engineer at Dropbox.

In 2017, Yakovenko started working on a project which would later materialize as Solana. He teamed up with his Qualcomm colleague Greg Fitzgerald, and they founded a project called Solana Labs. Attracting several more former Qualcomm colleagues in the process, the Solana protocol and SOL token were released to the public in 2020.

What Makes Solana Unique?

One of the essential innovations Solana brings to the table is the proof-of-history (PoH) consensus developed by Anatoly Yakovenko. This concept allows for greater scalability of the protocol, which in turn boosts usability.

Solana is known in the cryptocurrency space because of the incredibly short processing times the blockchain offers. Solana’s hybrid protocol allows for significantly decreased validation times for both transaction and smart contract execution. With lightning-fast processing times, Solana has attracted a lot of institutional interest as well.

The Solana protocol is intended to serve both small-time users and enterprise customers alike. One of Solana’s main promises to customers is that they will not be surprised by increased fees and taxes. The protocol is designed in such a way as to have low transaction costs while still guaranteeing scalability and fast processing.

Combined with the longstanding professional expertise creators Anatoly Yakovenko and Greg Fitzgerald bring to the project, Solana is ranked number 7 in the CoinMarketCap ranking as of September 2021.

This came on the back of an impressive bull run, where Solana price gained over 700% since mid-July 2021. The launch of the Degenerate Ape NFT collection sent SOL price to an all-time high (ATH) above $60, and it has been climbing since, largely due to higher developer activity on the Solana ecosystem, greater institutional interest, growing DeFi ecosystem, and the rise of the NFTs and gaming vertical on Solana. Solana price rose to an ATH of $216 on Sept. 9, 2021.

Solana has received much praise for its speed and performance, and has even been tipped as a rival that can compare to Ethereum and challenge the dominant smart contract platform. However, the network has been plagued by repeated outages that have impaired its price and aspirations to be the “Visa of crypto.” Furthermore, its ecosystem is accused of favoring venture capital investors with unfair tokenomics.

This has led to a retrace in the price of SOL as of February 2022, and more short-term bearish price action cannot be ruled out. However, in the long run, Solana should appreciate thanks to strong support from exchanges like FTX.

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Want to keep track of Solana prices live? Download the CoinMarketCap mobile app!

Want to convert Solana price today to your desired fiat currency? Check out CoinMarketCap exchange rate calculator.

How Many Solana (SOL) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The Solana Foundation has announced that a total of 489 million SOL tokens will be released in circulation. At the moment, about 260 million of these have already entered the market.

The SOL token distribution is as follows: 16.23% went towards an initial seed sale, 12.92% of tokens were dedicated to a founding sale, 12.79% of SOL coins were distributed among team members and 10.46% of tokens were given to the Solana Foundation. The remaining tokens were already released for public and private sales or are still to be released to the market.

Solana price during the initial seed sale, held on April 5, 2018, was $0.04. Given the recent ATH, that represents an impressive 5400X return on investment (ROI).

How Is the Solana Network Secured?

Solana relies on a unique combination of proof-of-history (PoH) and proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms.

Proof-of-history is the main component of the Solana protocol, as it is responsible for the bulk of transaction processing. PoH records successful operations and the time that has passed between them, thus ensuring the trustless nature of the blockchain.

The proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus is used as a monitoring tool for the PoH processes, and it validates each sequence of blocks produced by it.

The combination of two consensus mechanisms makes Solana a unique phenomenon in the blockchain industry.

Where Can You Buy Solana (SOL)?

SOL tokens can be purchased on most exchanges. One choice to trade Solana is on Binance, as it has the highest SOL/USDT trading volume, $753,103,225 as of September 2021.

Next is Coinbase, with a trading volume of $343,872,841. Other options to trade Solana include FTX, Bilaxy and Huobi Global. Of course, it is important to note that investing in cryptocurrency comes with a risk, just like any other investment opportunity.

To check Solana price live in the fiat currency of your choice, you can use CoinMarketCap’s converter feature directly on the Solana currency page, or the dedicated exchange rate converter page. Popular Solana price pairs include: SOL/USD, SOL/GBP, SOL/AUD,
SOL/JPY and SOL/EUR.

What Is Polkadot (DOT)?

Polkadot is an open-source sharded multichain protocol that connects and secures a network of specialized blockchains, facilitating cross-chain transfer of any data or asset types, not just tokens, thereby allowing blockchains to be interoperable with each other. Polkadot was designed to provide a foundation for a decentralized internet of blockchains, also known as Web3.

Polkadot is known as a layer-0 metaprotocol because it underlies and describes a format for a network of layer 1 blockchains known as parachains (parallel chains). As a metaprotocol, Polkadot is also capable of autonomously and forklessly updating its own codebase via on-chain governance according to the will of its token holder community.

Polkadot provides a foundation to support a decentralized web, controlled by its users, and to simplify the creation of new applications, institutions and services.

The Polkadot protocol can connect public and private chains, permissionless networks, oracles and future technologies, allowing these independent blockchains to trustlessly share information and transactions through the Polkadot Relay Chain (explained further down).

Polkadot’s native DOT token serves three clear purposes: staking for operations and security, facilitating network governance, and bonding tokens to connect parachains .

Polkadot has four core components:

• Relay Chain: Polkadot’s “heart,” helping to create consensus, interoperability and shared security across the network of different chains;
• Parachains: independent chains that can have their own tokens and be optimized for specific use cases;
• Parathreads: similar to parachains but with flexible connectivity based on an economical pay-as-you-go model;
• Bridges: allow parachains and parathreads to connect and communicate with external blockchains like Ethereum.

Who Are the Founders of Polkadot?

Polkadot is the flagship protocol of Web3 Foundation, a Swiss Foundation with a mission to facilitate an open-source, fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web.

Polkadot’s founders are Dr. Gavin Wood, Robert Habermeier and Peter Czaban.

Wood, Web3 Foundation’s president, is the most well-known of the trio thanks to his industry influence as Ethereum co-founder, Parity Technologies founder and the creator of the smart contract coding language Solidity. Wood is also credited with coining the term Web3.

Habermeier is a Thiel Fellow and accomplished blockchain and cryptography researcher and developer. Czaban is the former Technology Director at Web3 Foundation, with a wealth of experience across highly specialized fintech industries.

What Makes Polkadot Unique?

Polkadot is a sharded multichain network, meaning it can process many transactions on several chains in parallel (“parachains”). This parallel processing power improves scalability.

Custom blockchains are quick and easy to develop using the Substrate framework and Substrate blockchains are designed to be easy to connect to Polkadot’s network. The network is also highly flexible and adaptive, allowing the sharing of information and functionality between participants. Polkadot can be automatically upgraded without the need for a fork in order to implement new features or remove bugs.

The network has a highly sophisticated user-driven governance system where all token holders have a vote in how the network is run. Teams can customize their own blockchain’s governance on Polkadot based on their needs and evolving conditions. Nominators, validators, and collators all fulfil various duties to help secure and maintain the network and eradicate bad behavior.

At the end of 2021, Polkadot successfully concluded its first Parachain auctions. The Parachain auctions followed an un-permissioned candle auction system. The winning bid is the highest bid at the random moment the auction ends.

Polkadot assigned the first five slots to the following auction winners: Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Parallel and Clover. These projects will have their parachain slots locked in for 96 weeks, guaranteed by the DOT bidders committed as collateral. As customary on Polkadot, all projects had previously been battle-tested on its de-facto testnet Kusama.

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Want to keep track of Polkadot prices live? Download the CoinMarketCap mobile app!

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How Many Polkadot (DOT) Tokens Are There in Circulation?

Following the network’s redenomination after a referendum on Polkadot, DOT balances increased by 100, so one old DOT was equivalent to 100 new DOT. This meant that the initial maximum supply of 10 million old DOT in August 2020 became 1 billion new DOT tokens. The redenomination was undertaken purely to avoid the use of small decimals and make calculation easier. While all balances were increased by a factor of one hundred, this did not impact the distribution of DOT or holders’ proportional share.

Polkadot’s first initial coin offering (ICO) was held in October 2017, and the Polkadot price was $0.29, with 2.24 million tokens offered. The second ICO was held in July 2020, and the Polkadot price offered was $1.25, and 342,080 DOT tokens were sold.

How Is the Polkadot Network Secured?

The network uses an NPoS (nominated proof-of-stake) mechanism with validators and nominators.Nominators back validators with their tokens. These staked tokens maximize chain security by making it prohibitively expensive to misbehave.

Validators are staked on the Relay Chain and confirm transactions coming from the different parachains. This unique validity scheme enables chains to interact with each other securely under the same rules, yet remain independently governed.

Where Can You Buy Polkadot (DOT)?

The top exchanges for Polkadot (DOT) trading are currently Binance, Huobi Global, OKEx, Coinbase, KuCoin and more. You can find others listed on the Polkadot’s markets page on CoinMarketCap.

You can now also buy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum directly by credit card in the fiat currency of your choice. To find out how, read more here.

To check Polkadot price live in the fiat currency of your choice, you can use CoinMarketCap’s converter feature directly on the Polkadot currency page.

Here are some other articles that you may be interested in:

• What Is a Crypto Faucet?
• What Are Crypto Debit Cards?
• What Is Web 3.0?
• What Is Yield Farming?
• What Is Crypto Lending?

What Is Avalanche (AVAX)?

Avalanche is a layer one blockchain that functions as a platform for decentralized applications and custom blockchain networks. It is one of Ethereum’s rivals, aiming to unseat Ethereum as the most popular blockchain for smart contracts. It aims to do so by having a higher transaction output of up to 6,500 transactions per second while not compromising scalability.

This is made possible by Avalanche’s unique architecture. The Avalanche network consists of three individual blockchains: the X-Chain, C-Chain and P-Chain. Each chain has a distinct purpose, which is radically different from the approach Bitcoin and Ethereum use, namely having all nodes validate all transactions. Avalanche blockchains even use different consensus mechanisms based on their use cases.

After its mainnet launch in 2020, Avalanche has worked on developing its own ecosystem of DApps and DeFi. Different Ethereum-based projects such as SushiSwap and TrueUSD have integrated with Avalanche. Furthermore, the platform is constantly working on improving interoperability between its own ecosystem and Ethereum, like through the development of bridges.

Who Are the Founders of Avalanche?

Avalanche was launched by Ava Labs, founded by Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer, and Cornell University computer science PhD’s Kevin Sekniqi and Maofan “Ted” Yin. Gün Sirer is a veteran in cryptographic research, having designed a conceptual peer-to-peer virtual currency six years before the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper. He was also involved in work on Bitcoin scaling solutions and research on Ethereum before the infamous The DAO hack in 2016.

From that research arose the whitepaper that led to the foundation of Ava Labs in 2018. The project closed a seed round in February 2019 that included investors such as Polychain, Andreessen Horowitz and Balaji Srinivasan. Avalanche closed its initial coin offering in 2020 in under 24 hours, raising $42 million in the process.

What Makes Avalanche Unique?

Avalanche attempts to solve the blockchain trilemma, which posits that blockchains cannot achieve a sufficient degree of decentralization at scale. A consequence of this are high gas fees, as is often the case on Ethereum.

To solve this problem, Avalanche designed three interoperable blockchains.

• The Exchange Chain (X-Chain) is employed to create and exchange the native AVAX tokens and other assets. Similar to the ERC-20 standard on Ethereum, these tokens follow a set of standardized rules. It uses the Avalanche consensus mechanism.
• The Contract Chain (C-Chain) hosts smart contracts and decentralized applications. It has its own Avalanche Virtual Machine, similar to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, allowing developers to fork EVM-compatible DApps. It uses the Snowman consensus mechanism.
• The Platform Chain (P-Chain) coordinates network validators, tracks active subnets and enables the creation of new subnets. Subnets are sets of validators, sort of like a validator cartel. Each subnet can be validating several blockchains, but a blockchain can only be validated by one subnet. It also uses the Snowman consensus mechanism.

This division of computing tasks enables higher throughput without compromising on decentralization. For instance, private blockchains on the network could require its subnet’s validators to be sufficiently geographically decentralized or comply with certain regulations. Following this modular structure, Avalanche improves its interoperability with other blockchains wishing to integrate with the Avalanche ecosystem. Furthermore, the two different consensus mechanisms are designed with each blockchain’s requirements in mind, further improving their efficiency.

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How Many Avalanche (AVAX) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The total supply of AVAX is 720 million. Its token distribution is as follows:

• 2.5% – seed sale, with 10% released on mainnet launch and the rest being released every three months.
• 3.5% – private sale, with 10% released on mainnet launch and the rest being released every three months.
• 10% – public sale, with 10% released on mainnet launch and 15% released every three months over a period of 18 months.
• 9.26% – allocated to the foundation, released over ten years.
• 7% – community endowment, released over twelve months.
• 0.27% – testnet incentive program, released over one year.
• 5% – strategic partners, released over four years.
• 2.5% – airdrops, released over four years.
• 10% – team, released over four years.
• 50% staking rewards

Staking AVAX currently provides an annual reward of 11.57%, with the minimum time for staking being two weeks with a minimum of 2,000 AVAX.

How Is the Avalanche Network Secured?

AVAX is traded on the Exchange Chain, which follows its own Avalanche consensus mechanism. Unlike proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, the Avalanche consensus mechanism does not have one leader processing transactions that get validated by others. Instead, all nodes process and validate transactions by employing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) protocol. That way, transactions are processed simultaneously, and validators’ random polling ensures that transactions are correct with statistical certainty. There are no blocks in this consensus mechanism, allowing immediate finalization and significantly improving the blockchain’s speed.

Where Can You Buy Avalanche (AVAX)?

AVAX is available on Binance, Bitfinex, Gate.io and Kucoin.

To find out even more about this project, check out our deep dive of Near.

What Is NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

NEAR Protocol is a layer-one blockchain that was designed as a community-run cloud computing platform and that eliminates some of the limitations that have been bogging competing blockchains, such as low transaction speeds, low throughput and poor interoperability. This provides the ideal environment for DApps and creates a developer and user-friendly platform. For instance, NEAR uses human-readable account names, unlike the cryptographic wallet addresses common to Ethereum. NEAR also introduces unique solutions to scaling problems and has its own consensus mechanism called “Doomslug.”

NEAR Protocol is being built by the NEAR Collective, its community that is updating the initial code and releasing updates to the ecosystem. Its declared goal is to build a platform that is “secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people.”

Flux, a protocol that allows developers to create markets based on assets, commodities, real-world events, and Mintbase, an NFT minting platform are examples of projects being built on NEAR Protocol.

Who Are the Founders of NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

NEAR Protocol was founded by Erik Trautman, an entrepreneur with experience on Wall Street and founder of Viking Education. His co-founders were Illia Polosukhin, who has more than ten years of industry experience, including three years at Google, and Alexander Skidanov, a computer scientist that worked at Microsoft and went on to join memSQL, where he became the director of engineering. NEAR Protocol has an extensive team of experienced developers that includes several International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) gold medalists and winners. The team claims to have people with experience of building some of the only real-world sharded systems at scale, a solution the protocol is pursuing to improve blockchain scalability.

What Makes NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Unique?

NEAR uses its Nightshade technology to improve transaction throughput massively. Nightshade is a variation of sharding, in which individual sets of validators process transactions in parallel across multiple sharded chains, improving the overall capacity of the blockchain. In contrast to “regular” sharding, shards in Nightshade produce a fraction of the next block, called “chunks.” In doing so, NEAR Protocol is able to achieve up to 100,000 transactions per second and achieve near-instant transaction finality thanks to a one-second block cadence while simultaneously keeping transaction fees at virtually zero.

NEAR Protocol also improves upon the convoluted onboarding process of other blockchains by having human-readable addresses and building decentralized applications with similar registration flow to what users have already experienced. Moreover, it provides developers with modular components, helping them start projects like token contracts or NFTs more quickly.

Near Protocol Ecosystem Fund

On Oct. 25, 2021, NEAR announced a $800 million in ecosystem funding initiatives, following in the footsteps of various Layer-1s blockchains like Avalanche, Fantom and Celo. The fund will be used to bankroll initiatives that will focus on accelerating growth in the NEAR protocol ecosystem. The fund includes $350 million in funding from Proximity Labs. Out of the total fund, $250 million will be used to help existing projects scale, and $100 million will be allocated to the Startup Grant Pools, where 20 startups will be given $5M each. NEAR will focus on funding Decentralized Finance (DeFi) focused teams that are “actively revolutionizing and reimagining the way we interact with money.” NEAR is also actively looking for projects building on NFTs, DAOs and gaming. On a separate note, NEAR recently raised $150 million in seed investment led by Three Arrows Capital, with additional participation from Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda, Zee Prime and more. This will be used to accelerate the adoption of Web3 technologies.

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How Many NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The total supply of NEAR is 1 billion tokens, according to the following token distribution:

• 17.2% – Community Grants
• 11.4% – Operation Grants
• 10% – Foundation Endowment
• 11.7% – Early Ecosystem
• 14% – Core Contributors
• 17.6% – Backers
• 6.1% – Small Backers
• 12% – Community Sale

NEAR Protocol launched its mainnet on April 22, 2020 with 1 billion NEAR tokens created at genesis. 5% of additional supply is issued each year to support the network as epoch rewards, of which 90% goes to validators (4.5% total) and 10% to the protocol treasury (0.5% total). 30% of transaction fees are paid out as rebates to contracts that interact with a transaction, while the remaining 70% are burned. The NEAR token is used for:

• Fees for processing transactions and storing data.
• Running validator nodes on the network via staking NEAR tokens.
• Used for governance votes to determine how network resources are allocated.

How Is the NEAR Protocol Network Secured?

NEAR uses a variation of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism called Doomslug. Doomslug is based on two rounds of consensus, where a block is considered finalized as soon as it has received the first communication round. This allows for near-instant finality by having validators take turns producing blocks rather than competing directly based on their stake.

The NEAR Foundation is a Swiss-based non-profit dedicated to protocol maintenance, ecosystem funding, and guiding the protocol’s governance. The protocol has also built a bridge to Ethereum, allowing users to transfer ERC-20 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain to NEAR.

Where Can You Buy NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

NEAR is available on Binance, Huobi Global, Mandala Exchange, FTX and OKEx.

Cryptocurrency newbie? You can read more about how to enter the market and how to buy NEAR or any other token in the CoinMarketCap education portal — Alexandria.

Polkadot is an open-source project founded by the Web3 Foundation. Polkadot is a sharded protocol that enables blockchain networks to operate together. The DOT token serves three distinct purposes: governance over the network, staking, and bonding.

Polkadot is an open-source project founded by the Web3 Foundation. Polkadot is a sharded protocol that enables blockchain networks to operate together. The DOT token serves three distinct purposes: governance over the network, staking, and bonding.