As the world witnesses a surged in the prices of Bitcoin this year, investors have turnaround once again showing their interest to trade digital currencies. Analysts believe that some less common cryptocurrencies could also bring surprises for buyers in the coming months. In this piece, we discuss a few altcoins to watch in 2021. In the last, we’ll also take a look at how far can crypto increase?
Talking about one of the most popular digital currencies – the bitcoin, its value increased by more than 114% over the last four months reaching an all-time high of $60,000 as of April 10, 2021. According to a popular crypto research website Trading Dominance, Bitcoin was standing around $28000, as of December 27, 2020. That’s the reason why investors have started enchanting about the potential increase in the price of several other cryptocurrencies listed below.
Ripple: Although XRP is not as popular as Bitcoin, it is still a well-known digital currency in the crypto space. Ripple is a digital coin used on the decentralized XRP blockchain that claims to offer robust payment solutions. Ripple is believed to transfer funds much faster than traditional wire transfers. Unlike bitcoin, where tokens are awarded to computers that resolve transactions by solving algorithms, Ripple tokens are distributed by humans. Not to mention, people can’t mine Ripple as well. However, experts in the industry believe it to be a potential solution for handling specifically small transactions as opposed to wire transfers. Besides, Bitcoin, Ripple is amongst such few cryptocurrencies that witnessed a price surge of nearly more than 107% over just a month, reaching $1.31, as of April 22, 2021. As per https://www.statista.com/ XRP was being traded around $0.60, as of November 2020.
Litecoin: Litecoin is the first Altcoin launched in early 2010. After losing some interest of investors following its release, the crypto managed to attract vast numbers of users for its super-fast transactions as compared to the time-consuming process of the bitcoin blockchain. Being way cheaper than Bitcoin, Litecoin offers easy access to small-scale investors looking to make profits in the crypto space. Although Litecoin increased by 167% the following year, it is still being traded around $108. Despite not being able to regain the dominant position in the crypto ranking, Investors could think to have a second look at it provided that institutions pour more liquidity into the crypto industry.
Cosmos: Since blockchain technology has been on the rise for the past several years, more digital currencies have been introduced, including the Cosmos. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Cosmos intends to bring solutions concerning the platform scalability issues of different blockchains or the way these blockchains interoperate. In other terms, Cosmos aims to connect and inter-linked different blockchains over the internet. At present, the cost of Cosmos native token is around $19.5 per token. However, if Cosmos remains successful in reshaping technology by introducing new methods for blockchain platforms to interact, it might attract a potentially high volume of investors in the coming months. Resultantly, the price of Cosmos tokens might rise significantly.
Bitcoin Cash: You might perceive the crypto as being co-related to the most famous crypto – the Bitcoin. However, that’s not true. Ever since the bitcoin was introduced, industry experts started raising their concerns over the scalability of Bitcoin (BTC). It was argued that the complex blockchain technology will take more time to process transactions as compared to the existing payment solutions i-e credit cards.
For instance, a credit card company VISA process over 150 million transactions a day. On average it takes not more than a second for the company to process 1700 transactions. On the other hand, the blockchain-based bitcoin hardly processes 7 transactions over several minutes. To address the issue, developers presented two solutions. The first solution was to divide verifiable blockchain data into smaller chunks, so transactions may be processed faster. The other solution was to make the data blocks big enough to handle multiple transactions in one go.
In short Bitcoin Cash came into existence as a product of any of those solutions also known as a hard fork. That means, the Bitcoin Cash blockchain architecture is the same as Bitcoin but it is a completely new cryptocurrency. Not to mention, investors can’t use Bitcoin Cash on the parent Bitcoin blockchain for transaction purposes. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) transactions are faster than Bitcoin (BTC) since the ability of Bitcoin Cash blocks is up to 32 MB way more than 1 MB of the parent Bitcoin. Besides having an edge of scalability, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has also the added benefit of having a similar name as the original Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) dropped the lowest ever point $116.8 during January 2019. However, after reclaiming the bullish momentum in December 2020 with a price tag of $356 per token, the price of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) kept increasing continuously. Currently, the Bitcoin Cash token is available for $783 which might even increase further as per the industry economists.
After climbing to a price of more than $60,000, Bloomberg experts predict the price of Bitcoin might reach the $400,000 milestone this year. One of the possible reasons could be the initiation of the materialization process for the institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies.
