The year is almost over, and although we haven’t witnessed a spectacular December rally like in 2020, the last 7 days were quite favorable for blockchain investors in general, and for altcoin enthusiasts specifically. While most of the top 10 largest altcoins didn’t make significant gains, many of the smaller alternative cryptocurrencies managed to grow in price massively. Without any further delay, let’s take a look at what has happened on the altcoin market in the last week of 2022!
SushiSwap Performs Superbly - But Is It Truly the Beginning of a Massive Rally, or just a Recovery?
The best performing major altcoin of the week was SushiSwap (SUSHI). Over the past 7 days, the SUSHI price has increased by an impressive 63%. However, while that’s certainly good news for SUSHI holders, a deeper look at the SushiSwap price history suggests that the situation might not be as bullish as it initially seems.
Over the last 1.5 months, the SUSHI price has decreased by 65%, which was a bitter conclusion to a generally bad year for SushiSwap. Once the second biggest decentralized exchange in the ecosystem and a serious competitor to Uniswap, SushiSwap has lost most of its significance, and with it - most of its market capitalization as well.
In other words, while an increase of 63% in a week looks impressive, it’s worth noting that SUSHI is still nowhere near a true recovery, and has not even managed to fully reverse the losses from the past couple months. The SUSHI price is still almost 61% down from the all-time high of $23.38 reached in March, 2021, and it would take a tremendous rally to reach that price again in the near future.
It’s also worth noting that the increase in SUSHI price doesn’t seem to be motivated by any organic factors. Instead, the price looks to be pumped by whales, who have acquired an additional 10% of the SUSHI total supply since the beginning of November. But will the activity of whales be enough to give the SUSHI price a boost necessary to sustain a long-lasting uptrend, or is the current price spike temporary?
Cardano Ecosystem Grows - Will 2022 Be the Year of ADA?
The largest altcoins didn’t make significant gains this week, with the exception of Cardano. Over the past 7 days, the ADA price has increased by almost 8%. Currently, ADA is the 6th largest cryptocurrency in the ecosystem, and can soon flip Solana (SOL) to enter the list of top 5 coins by market capitalization.
The last couple weeks weren’t very good for Cardano, mainly due to the troublesome launch of the Alonzo hard fork. However, the 2021 as a whole was spectacular for ADA, and the recent increase in price seems to reflect it.
Since last Christmas, the ADA ecosystem has grown tremendously. The number of Cardano wallets has increased from just 190,000 to over 2,5 million, making Cardano one of the most widely used cryptocurrencies in the world.
Polygon Finally Provides an Explanation For Its Secretive Hard Fork
Usually, hard forks are a very big deal in the crypto ecosystem, and they are often preceded with months of fiery debates and building hype. This wasn’t the case with the Polygon (MATIC) hard fork that happened last month in complete silence. Now, almost a month later, the Polygon team has finally explained why the hard fork was necessary.
According to Jaynti Kanani, the CEO of Polygon, on December 3rd a critical security vulnerability was discovered - so serious that it could potentially erase the entire $24 billion market cap of MATIC. Very soon, the bug in the smart contract was patched - but before that happened, a hacker reportedly managed to steal MATIC tokens worth over $2 million.
Although the vulnerability has been dealt with in a swift manner before any serious damage was done, the way in which Polygon introduced the hard fork caused much controversy. The MATIC community felt surprised and confused with the sudden, and unannounced change - however, the Polygon executives vow to keep up with the strategy of “silent updates” in the future.
Elon Musk Pumps Another Dog Token
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and an avid cryptocurrency influencer, has decided to pump the price of yet another meme crypto. On Christmas Day, Musk tweeted a photo of his dog wearing a Santa outfit with the caption “Floki Santa”.
Unsurprisingly, Musk’s tweet was enough to cause the price of Santa Floki (HOHOHO) to rapidly skyrocket by over 5,300%. Of course, the price has started to decrease as fast as it grew, and it has already retracted 70% of the gains.
