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Historically speaking December has been one of the best performing months on cryptocurrency markets. While this year’s December is looking more like the exception that proves the rule, several cryptocurrency projects are aiming to make a breakthrough by releasing important updates or launching new features in the last days of 2021. Therefore, this article lists three projects that have important project development slated for last two weeks of 2021.
3. Harmony (ONE)
Harmony is a cross-chain Layer 2 protocol that facilitates fast transaction times while maintaining low fees. Currently, the network supports transfers between five different blockchains, including Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Harmony puts a big emphasize on scalability – the projects goal is to scale the network to 10 million transactions per second, allowing it to handle a decentralized economy for 10 billion people and 100 billion devices. The project is currently offering more than $300 million in developer grants.
Harmony to launch Trustless Ethereum Bridge on Mainnet on December 20
Harmony developers recently revealed that the release of the much-anticipated Trustless Ethereum Bridge, will take place on December 20. By utilizing an industry leading architecture, the newly deployed bridge will be able to interact with Ethereum mainnet in a gas efficient and seamless way. The bridge will also be “trustless”, which means that no single entity will own the bridge’s smart contracts. Even the contract on Ethereum’s end will be operated by Harmony validators, and not by the Harmony team as it is usually the case with custodial bridges. The Trustless Ethereum Bridge has a massive potential to boost Harmony's popularity as it will give ETH and ERC-20 token holders a simple and quickly way to transact their assets while avoiding ETH’s high gas fees. Looking at a bigger time frame, Harmony has a major upside in the long run as well. Its network offers faster transaction finality, better basic computation, and a more gas-efficient blockchain interoperability than Ethereum and many Ethereum alternatives. Recently Harmony became a technical partner of AAG Ventures, a blockchain gaming company focused at developing play-to-earn infrastructure. This way, Harmony is gaining exposure to the trending metaverse sector.
2. BitTorrent Token (BTT)
Released by Bram Cohen in 2001, BitTorrent is one of the world's largest decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocols in the world by number of users. The protocol is utilized by almost every torrent client used around the world. BitTorrent was purchased by blockchain platform TRON in July 2018. Up to now BitTorrent token (BTT) existed in the form of a TRC-10 token on the TRON blockchain. BitTorrent intends to build a token-based economy for networking, bandwidth, and storage resources on the existing BitTorrent network using BTT.
BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) mainnet is live!
BitTorrent developers recently launched BitTorrent Chain (BTTC), a native blockchain that is designed to support interoperability with Ethereum, TRON, and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystems. As the old BTT get swapped for the new BTT, the tokens will also get redenominated. The old BTT tokens got redenominated and swapped with the new BTT tokens at a ratio of 1:1000. The total supply of BTT tokens therefore increased from 990,000,000,000 to 990,000,000,000,000 while maintaining its current market cap. The new tokens after redenomination are referred to as BTT, while the old ones are renamed as BTTOLD. BTT holders are advised to swap their BTT within 30 days. To boost liquidity on the newly launched BitTorrent Chain, BitTorrent has partnered with WOO Network. With its own PoS chain, BitTorrent is one big step closer to creating a blockchain-based economy for P2P file exchange networks.
1. Polkadot (DOT)
Polkadot is a blockchain solution that allows multiple specialized blockchains called parachains to run at the same time and interoperate. Polkadot can connect diverse blockchains into a single, decentralized and highly scalable ecosystem. The network operates using a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm and utilizes a native currency DOT. The project was originally designed by Dr. Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the inventor the smart contract programming language named Solidity. Along with Cardano, Solana, and several other networks Polkadot is considered one of the potential “Ethereum killers”.
First batch of parachain winners will be deployed on their respective parachains on December 17
The first batch of Polkadot parachain slot auctions is coming to an end, with the last auction scheduled to conclude on December 16. Four projects, Acala, Moonbeam, Astar and Parallel, already managed to secure their Polkadot parachain slot while the battle for the fifth and last parachain of the first batch is still very much on with Clover Finance and Efinity currently standing toe to toe. The first four parachain winners alone managed to raise approximately 90 million DOT for their crowdloans, worth roughly $2.5 billion. Contributors that committed their DOT to winning projects’ crowdloans are eligible to receive staking rewards. Rewards for contributing DOT are a way to attract investors and are project specific. If you contributed some DOT and would like to know how big of a reward you can expect, some information can be found on the official parachain auction website. Bear in mind, however, that most projects decide to distribute rewards over the course of 96 weeks, which is how long that parachain leases will last. On December 17, a day after the last parachain auction ends, the five winning projects will be deployed on their respective parachains. The parachain auctions have significantly decreased the available DOT supply, as DOT in crowdloans is locked for next 2 years. In addition, Polkadot is set to auction another five parachain slots in the beginning of 2022. Assuming the rate of participation continues to increase on its current trajectory, we could end up seeing up to around 20% of the total circulating DOT supply locked up for most of the next two years. Such a major decrease in supply is unlikely to leave DOT price unaffected.