Welcome to “Top 5 Cryptocurrency Movers” where I look at all the major crypto coins on the market and choose the five that made the biggest move (either positive or negative) on this day, explaining my thoughts why the move happened, as well as the historical significance of the particular crypto. Here are my top five cryptocurrency movers for January 4, 2021:
#5: Ethereum (ETH) ($1107.45, +14.45%)
One day after rising over 25%, Ethereum continued its parabolic run, crushing through the $1,000 per ETH barrier and reaching a market cap of over $100,000,000,000! The only negative news coming out of this historic bull run for Ethereum are the massive gas fees for every transaction, which are currently averaging out to be over $10 whenever you send any amount of ETH, the highest mark it has ever been.
#4: Stellar (XLM) ($0.1581, +10.95%)
After being stagnant and unchanged the last month, Stellar increased 10% in one day on news that the country of Ukraine and their government picked Stellar Development Foundation to build the infrastructure for central bank-issued digital assets. The newly-announced partnership is set to begin later this month, as they develop their CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency). XLM is similar to Ripple (XRP) and has the same founder, Jed McCaleb.
#3: Waves (WAVES) ($5.45, -6.31%)
This booming crypto market has not positively affected all the major cryptocurrencies. Case in point is WAVES, which has fallen over 35% in the last 30 days, including six percent today. Waves is an open blockchain protocol platform that was developed to help provide users with the opportunity to create their own custom token, and the toolset for Web 3.0 applications and decentralized solutions. Despite the negative price point recently, WAVES is still up over 400% year-over-year.
#2: Loopring (LRC) ($0.4440, +62.76%)
For the second consecutive day, Loopring is up huge (over 60 percent) on the news that the Ethereum network transactions are being congested and the fees are becoming too expensive and out of control. LRC uses an Ethereum scaling protocol, launching a second-layer decentralized exchange inspired by Uniswap, and mitigates the majority of the transaction demand. The Loopring exchange has no gas fees, which led to an announcement earlier that LRC just had its highest volume day ever.
#1: Aave (AAVE) ($117.83, +17.82%)
Another cryptocurrency affected by the enormous Ethereum gas fees per transaction is AAVE, which grew double-digit percentage points today. Aave announced their NFT trading card game Aavegotchi will not be launched on Ethereum because of the high gas fees and will instead go live on the Matic Network because of their ability to achieve high transaction throughput and very low transaction fees. Aave is also a decentralized finance protocol that allows people to lend and borrow crypto.
Note that these prices are as of 9:00 PM EST/6:00 PM PST on the given day, and might not reflect the current price of the coin at the time of viewing this post.
