After weeks of intense rallying, the altcoin market seems to be slowing down a bit. Cardano and Solana, two of the best performing alternative cryptocurrencies of the past months, look like they’ve lost some momentum. However, some less popular altcoins such as Hedera Hashgraph are still doing great. But the most widely discussed altcoin this week has surprisingly been Litecoin - and not for good reasons.
Shameless Pump and Dump Leaves Investors Disillusioned with LTC
On Monday, a press release announced that the US retail leader Walmart will start accepting Litecoin payments. Although most crypto investors were extremely suspicious of the news, the story of alleged partnership between LTC and Walmart was soon reported by CNBC and Reuters.
Soon after, the news was completely denied by Walmart representatives. A partnership between Walmart and Litecoin was never discussed, and the press release turned out to be completely fake.
The initial announcement caused the LTC price to erupt by over 36% in under an hour, and when the fake news got debunked, the Litecoin valuation fell down by the same amount to the level before from the pump.
Although the founder of Litecoin Charlie Lee has denied any involvement with the pump and dump, the crypto community seems to already made up its mind on the affair: such an obvious pump and dump is humiliating for Litcoin’s reputation, and it might signify the end of LTC a serious cryptocurrency.
Solana Network Crashes, But Quickly Starts to Recover
On Tuesday, SOL investors were unpleasantly surprised by the fact that the entire Solana network has suddenly crashed. The SOL blockchain was down for hours due to vague reasons such as “intermittent instability” and “resource exhaustion in the network”. As the servers were down, the SOL price has fallen down by over 15%.
Solana’s issues point out to the fact that sacrificing decentralization to gain extra efficiency comes at a cost. A highly centralized blockchain like Solana, which stores most of the validator nodes in one location, might be susceptible to numerous problems which cannot affect truly decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Cardano Keeps Struggling After the Underwhelming Launch of the Alonzo Update
According to Cardano developers, Alonzo was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread. The long-awaited update to the ADA blockchain was intended to turn the Cardano network into a complex smart contracts platform that would be able to provide the users with the same functionality as Ethereum, but at a much higher speed and at a much lower cost.
However, it is safe to say that the deployment of Alonzo was a complete failure. Many crypto enthusiasts are joking that they haven’t seen a working Solana smart contract yet, and the launch of Minswap, the first DEX (decentralized exchange) built on the SOL blockchain was especially embarrassing. Soon after its launch, Minswap was shut down because it was completely unusable for most people - and it still remains down till this day.
Cardano investors remain patient. Although the ADA price hasn’t crashed, it has been experiencing a significant downtrend ever since the failure of Alonzo became obvious.
Cardano is still the third largest cryptocurrency on the market, but this situation might change in the near future. If the problems with Alonzo won’t be resolved soon, the investors might move their funds to other projects. However, if the Cardano team manages to finally get smart contracts to work, the ADA price will surely start to quickly recover.
Hedera Hashgraph Outperforms the Competition
Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) has surprisingly become one of the fastest growing altcoins on the market. The HBAR price has increased by 150% over the past week, fueled not only by adding the NFT functionality to the Hedera Hashgraph network, but also by announcing impressive new partnerships with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Hedera Hashraph is a decentralized network which, like many other projects, promises to be the fastest and most efficient blockchain on the market. However, what distinguishes HBAR from the competition is the fact that it was designed from the start to easily accommodate not only simple smart contracts, but also very advanced DeFi solutions and dApps (decentralized applications).
Will Hedera Hashgraph manage to succeed in the hyper-competitive blockchain ecosystem? Only time will tell for sure, but many crypto experts believe that what we are witnessing is only the beginning of the HBAR price rally.
