Bears are continuing to intensify their grip on the crypto market. Most coins are trading well below their all-time highs, even 70-80 percent lower in some cases. However, a handful of projects have managed to register sizeable gains over the last seven days and look poised to see an uptick going forward.
Here's a look at three such altcoins and what's causing them to hover above the rest of the market:
Elrond (EGLD)
Elrond is a blockchain platform for distributed apps and enterprise use cases. It touts itself as a highly scalable, fast and secure platform. Through its Adaptive State Sharding and a unique Secure Proof of Stake (SPoS), Elrond can achieve 15,000 transactions per second (TPS), with the ability to scale beyond 100,000 TPS in the future.
The price of EGLD, the native coin of the Elrond blockchain, has spiked nearly 22.5 percent over the last ten days, jumping to $55.65 at the time of writing from $45.43 on September 28. One reason for the spike could be Elrond's new mainnet upgrade.
After Ethereum and Cardano, Elrond's update has also been on the cards for a while. News of the update started propping up the price of ELGD towards the end of September. However, the real rally began after Beniamin Mincu, Elrond founder and CEO, announced the success of the new mainnet upgrade through a tweet on October 3.
Experts believe that ELGD could rally a further 20 percent if it could break through the $54.5 barrier. Considering it is currently at $55.73, a climb to levels of $60 is expected in the coming days.
Polygon (MATIC)
MATIC is another altcoin that has been flashing green over the last week and shows promise for future gains too. Polygon is a layer two or sidechain scaling solution. It provides a framework for new and existing blockchain projects to build on Ethereum without experiencing scalability issues.
MATIC has rallied more than 8 percent over the last week, going from $0.7754 on October 1 to $0.8396 at the time of writing. According to an article by Bankless, Polygon investors could be in for further gains. MATIC has formed a falling wedge and an inverted head and shoulders pattern, both bullish indicators. This puts MATIC in position for a bullish breakout with key resistance at $1.20.
Another factor that points to a bullish sentiment around Polygon is the number of unique addresses. As per a Santiment report, MATIC was one of the top cryptocurrencies with increasing unique network addresses. As per the report, the carbon-neutral blockchain was ranked fifth, behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Tether, in terms of new unique interacting network addresses per day.
Uniswap (UNI)
Uniswap is the world's leading decentralized exchange by some margin. It currently boasts an average daily trading volume of over $1 billion, with its closest rival, PancakeSwap, coming in at a meagre $200 million. Further, it has a massive 64 percent of all DEX volumes, according to DeFi Llama.
The price of the platform's native token, UNI, has also climbed nearly 9 percent in the previous week or so. UNI has rallied from $6.29 on October 1 to $6.93 at the time of writing. This could be because Uniswap Labs, the parent company of Uniswap, is preparing for $200M in fresh funding, according to multiple reports.
Two significant investors linked to the funding round are Polychain Capital and a Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund. If the funding round goes through, it will put Uniswap on track to become the next crypto unicorn. This would help Uniswap build on its product offerings and cement its position as the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) in the world. These are all good indicators of further price hikes.
Conclusion
While these cryptocurrencies look on track for further gains, one must remember that the crypto markets are highly volatile. Sometimes, even the strongest indicators can turn out to be false. Therefore, it is extremely important to do your own research before putting any monies on the line. Also, invest only as much as you can afford to lose entirely.
