Cryptocurrencies have gradually become a major investment path for which investors derive huge return on investments even though there can be down times. There are many cryptocurrencies but five standout tested and trusted, giving investors a reason to come back and reinvest.
Digital currency popularly known as cryptocurrency, had a bullish performance in the market for the first time in a long in the month of July, 2022, to reclaim the trillion-dollar status it lost in June. This comes as a recovery from June 2022, which was one of the worst market monthly performances as the space traded at levels not seen since November 2020.
The first on our list is the Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.
Bitcoin began trading from $19,784.73 at the beginning of the month and ultimately ended the month at $23,336.90, representing a 17.95% gain. Bitcoin traded at a peak of $24,572.58 at the end of the month. Bitcoin’s market dominance ended the month at 41.22%, up by 0.89% from the 42.11% seen at the beginning of the month.
Bitcoin responded strongly to the Federal Reserve 75 basis point rate hike last week, with BTC closing up 5.7% on the week. It also responded positively to the FOMC announcement as Chairman Powell indicated that the current target Fed Funds rate at 2.25% to 2.5% was now considered neutral, and eyes were on developing data on economic slow-down.
Next is Etherium’s Ether, conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, Ether is second only to Bitcoin in market capitalization.
It is a scarce digital money that you can use on the internet similar to Bitcoin. In the digital assets space, Ethereum remains the largest smart contract platform, hosting a plethora of financial products, innovation, and automation, with varying degrees of decentralization often referred to as DeFi.
Etherium has the capacity to process 13 transactions per second (TPS). This is a 769,000% growth in the network’s transaction speed. Ether ended the month trading $1,681.52.
Another digital currency to look out for is the Cardano.
Cardano is one of the biggest blockchains to successfully use a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which is less energy intensive than the proof-of-work algorithm relied upon by Bitcoin. Although the much larger Ethereum is going to be upgrading to PoS, this transition is only going to take place gradually.
Cardano has so far, proven to be what it promised to be. The network, as of the time of this writing, currently leads Ethereum blockchains in terms of transaction volume in the last 24 hours. This has been the trend for the past 4 months as the blockchain offers significantly less transaction fees than Bitcoin and Ethereum.
However, during the month of July, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the blockchain engineering firm behind the Cardano network, released another disappointing news, announcing another delay to the long-awaited Vasil upgrade. The Vasil upgrade is set to provide a “massive performance improvement to Cardano” and its smart contract capabilities, according to Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson. It was previously slated to go through on June 29 and then slated for the last week in July. However, the latest estimate is now set for sometime in August.
ADA ended the month trading $0.517.
There is also Solana, an Ethereum competitor, operating on a PoS, similar to Cardano’s blockchain. It is unique because the platform touts to improve its scalability by introducing a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.
The average number of daily transactions atop the Solana blockchain plunged by 17.6% in Q2/2022 versus the previous quarter, according to data from Messari. Also, to consider, Solana’s revenue dropped 44.4% quarter-on-quarter (also because of recurring network outages). The blockchain made $6.4 million in Q2 2022 from $11.6 million in Q1. According to James Trautman, a researcher at Messari, He explained that “As seen in 2021 and throughout Q1 and Q2, degraded network performance decreases network usage and reduces the network’s continued flow of revenue. If Solana were to continue to experience degraded performance that lasts for a material amount of time, a resulting drag on fundamental usage may catalyze volatility and drag on network value.”
SOL ended the month trading $42.40.
And the last on our list is the XRP, a native token of the XRP Ledger that can be used as a currency to transact on the platform and other supported platforms. Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network created by Ripple Labs Inc.
Despite dealing with the case, Singapore-based institutional digital payment solution provider FOMO Pay has become the latest fintech firm to integrate Ripple’s liquidity solution called on-demand liquidity (ODL). Ripple’s call on-demand liquidity (ODL) service has gained a lot of popularity in the private banking and payment sector. The enterprise solution uses Ripple (XRP) as a bridge between two currencies, eliminating pre-funding of destination accounts and reducing operational costs. The tech has proven a great success in Asia, where cross-border transactions are among the highest.
XRP ended the month trading $0.3805.
The cryptocurrency market capitalization in the month of July regained its trillion-dollar status. The industry gained by 26.46% for the month, from $855.6 billion at the start of the month to end the month at $1.08 trillion. The cryptocurrency market capitalization traded as low as $854 billion in the month of June.
