XRP Earns #1 Spot Thanks to Encouraging News—Top 3 Coins to Watch for Oct 24—Oct 30

Broader economic factors continue to have a major influence on the cryptocurrency market—accordingly, there haven’t been to many exciting moves as of late. Regardless, let’s take a quick look at three cryptocurrency and blockchain projects that will be worth watching in the next few days.

3. Aptos (APT)

Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain that’s designed to function as a highly scalable platform for decentralized applications. The team behind Aptos includes former employees of Facebook’s Diem project, and the Aptos blockchain also utilizes the Move smart contracts programming language, which was initially created for Diem.

Using the low latency Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) engine, the consensus of the state of the Aptos ledger can be reached extremely quickly, making a sub-second finality and high transactional throughput a practical reality.

The project has received substantial backing from venture capital, as investors have poured $350 million into the project before the Aptos blockchain even launched on mainnet. The Aptos mainnet went live on October 17, and the launch was quickly followed by listings on major cryptocurrency exchanges.

Why Aptos? APT makes its debut on crypto exchanges

The Aptos markets will be interesting to follow primarily because APT is a new entrant to the market, and is already seeing considerable trading volumes. So far, the price action has been fairly subdued. APT has been trading inside a range under $10, roughly between the $6.5 and $8.5 price levels.

If similar price action continues this week, that might be a confirmation that retail crypto investors are not nearly as excited about Aptos as the venture capital investors that backed the project before launch. The launch of Aptos has been accompanied by controversy, with crypto community members criticizing the APT token distribution and the initial performance of the Aptos mainnet.

2. Maker (MKR)

Maker is a pioneering decentralized finance (DeFi) project that started in 2015. The purpose of the Maker protocol is to issue and manage Dai, a decentralized stablecoin that’s entirely backed by collateral in the form of crypto assets. The protocol initially only supported ETH as collateral, but now also supports crypto assets like BAT, ZRX, USDC and others.

Users can lock their cryptocurrency in «vaults» to mint Dai stablecoins, and the Dai must be returned if users want to get access to the locked cryptocurrencies again. The Maker protocol is governed by MakerDAO, which consists of MKR token holders. In addition to granting access to governance, MKR also functions as a collateral of last resort when the Maker protocol requires recapitalization.

Why Maker? MKR is one of the best performers in the crypto market as of late

Maker’s MKR governance token has been a tremendous performer recently despite the unexciting activity in the cryptocurrency market overall. At the time of writing, MKR is posting a 69.3% 1-month change, outperforming all other assets in the cryptocurrency top 100 except for Huobi Token.

Probably the biggest recent development related to Maker is MakerDAO’s decision to allocate $500 million into US treasury bonds and investment-grade corporate bonds. The reasoning behind the decision is to diversify the collateral that’s backing the Dai stablecoin. The move has been welcomed by the market, judging by MKR’s major price increase.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see whether MKR is heading towards a more substantial price correction or if the token will be able to sustain its recent momentum.

1. XRP (XRP)

XRP is a cryptocurrency that was launched in June of 2012. It was developed by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto, who started a company called OpenCoin together with Chris Larsen. 80% of the XRP supply was gifted to the company by the developers of XRP. OpenCoin has since been renamed to Ripple, and the company has put the majority of its XRP holdings into escrow.

XRP provides very fast and low-cost transfers, making it suitable for use-cases like remittances. It uses neither Proof-of-Work nor Proof-of-Stake, but instead implements the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol. Every participant in the XRP network can choose a set of validators that they trust to behave honestly.

Ripple has implemented the XRP cryptocurrency into its products, most notably On-Demand Liquidity (ODL). ODL works in partnership with cryptocurrency exchanges uses XRP to provide efficient cross-border money transfers.

Why XRP? There have been several encouraging news surrounding XRP recently

While the last week was disappointing in terms of XRP price action, there have been some notable developments surrounding the popular cryptocurrency.

Ripple has announced the second wave of recipients for its $250 million Creators Fund. The second wave of funding included 7 projects, with a focus on projects in the entertainment sector that utilize non-fungible tokens on the XRP Ledger platform. The Creators Fund is part of Ripple’s efforts to position XRP Ledger as a low-cost and energy-efficient platform for NFTs.

Recently, Ripple has also confirmed that they are working on an EVM-compatible sidechain that would connect to the XRP Ledger platform. Ripple’s chief technology officer David Schwartz says that Ripple aims to have the sidechain ready for the XRP Ledger mainnet sometime in 2023.

There has also been some progress in regards to the SEC vs Ripple lawsuit, with Ripple finally obtaining internal SEC emails related to former SEC director William Hinman.

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