2021 was a great year for a lot of cryptos, but Shiba Inu (SHIB) was the big winner. Shib was launched in Aug. 2020 and joined the leading 10 cryptos by market cap in Oct. 2021. The crypto was initially said to be a “Dogecoin killer” and briefly overtook Dogecoin before once again falling below the top dog.
Both Shiba Inu and Dogecoin are meme coins that are themed around a Japanese dog breed. Shiba Inu is just one of the many pet coins from Dogecoin’s litter — Doge has also spawned crypto coins like Floki Inu, Baby Doge Coin, and Husky Coin (HUSKY).
But Shiba Inu has been the most successful. It increased over 800% in Oct. on the back of Musk’s Shiba Inu dog he got and a petition for Robinhood to list the coin on its exchange. With a market capitalization of $18 billion, it is now in 13th place on the crypto charts.
The problem with meme coins is that they are a lot less predictable than most of the crypto market. A coin might skyrocket on the back of a tweet — but that is not something you could predict or control. Coins that have solid fundamentals are a lot safer to invest in. And we have got three amazing cryptocurrencies that might overtake Shiba Inu this year.
1. Elrond
Elrond is an Ethereum (ETH) alternative that is well positioned for this year. It might not sound as good as Shiba Inu, but try to remember that Solana was one of the leading performers of 2021.
Smart contracts are little pieces of self-executing code that are on the blockchain. ETH was the original smart contract cryptocurrency but is now having a hard time with network congestion and higher fees. As a result of this, platforms that are cheaper and faster are taking market share.
Elrond is still in the early stages and there are a lot of contenders in this race. But if it manages to attract some developers, this cryptocurrency might surpass Shib.
2. Serum
One reason that smart contract platforms are so high in demand is that they help power the booming decentralized finance (DeFi) space. There are two caveats to purchasing DeFi coins: the first is we don’t know what might happen in DeFi in 2022– regulation might have a huge impact on this industry. The second is that the decentralized finance space changes extremely fast. A coin that is successful today might fall out of favor tomorrow.
That said, Serum seems to be a good option because it is the utility coin for a decentralized exchange that was created on Solana’s network. This means that users could benefit from Solana’s quick, low fee transactions.
3. Livepeer
Decentralization — removing the middleman from the transaction– is one of the most exciting things about blockchain tech. It does not only apply to finance. Livepeer brings a decentralized approach to video streaming as well. Its website states that 80% of the internet bandwidth is being taken up by video streaming.
The part of video streaming that is the most costly is the process of reformatting videos for different bandwidths and devices, called transcoding. Instead of investing in costly hardware, Livepeer lets people contribute their extra bandwidth to the transcoding processes. They earn LPT coins and Livepeer can transcode videos for less costs.
Author: Scott Dowdy
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