Top 8 Altcoins to watch out for in February 2023

The first month of 2023 has been pretty good for investors. The overall crypto market capitalisation gained a little over 35% in the month of January 2023, which has been primarily led by the king coin, Bitcoin. In fact, the recovery has been so good that it has managed to recover all the losses the markets had taken on post the catastrophic crash of the FTX crypto exchange. The strong recovery in the crypto market has pushed the overall market cap beyond the $1 trillion mark once again.

Before expanding on the top altcoins in 2023 that you need to keep an eye out for, let us understand what altcoins are. Very simply, an ‘altcoin’ refers to any crypto asset other than Bitcoin. So by that definition, Ethereum is an altcoin and it is the most popular altcoin followed by Binance Coin and the likes.

So why do we need altcoins?

The reason behind that is pretty simple – Bitcoin, the grandfather of all cryptos, was good at some things like becoming a store of value, however doesn’t work as a good means of transferring value or a payments system. Also, Bitcoin wasn’t built to be programmable.

Ethereum for example, on the other hand – also referred to as the second generation of cryptos – introduced programmable money in the forms of smart contracts. But even Ethereum had a few issues with gas fees and scalability thus a bunch of other blockchains were launched like Solana, Polygon and the likes.

With that idea out of the way, let’s talk about the next crucial aspect – which cryptos to invest in? An investor can go about in many ways to choose cryptos and find the best one to invest in – it could be researching on the problem the project is trying to solve, or it could be as simple as a passive look at the top cryptos by market cap. Both these, and other methods have their pros and cons and investors need to be aware about it.

In this article, we have put together a list of the top altcoins by market cap that you need to keep an eye out for in 2023. These are coins that have a strong background, technically sound, is backed by a large number of investors and is led by a competent team of developers. These cryptos when put together form a well balanced portfolio that may give decent returns over the long term. These coins have varied use cases and utilities that reduce downside risk posed by any one particular token and thus maximizing returns over the long term. So here are the top altcoins to watch out for in 2023:

Values as of 20 February, 2023.

Additional Read: Top Crypto Projects

ETHEREUM (ETH)

Ethereum is a crypto asset that almost everybody who is even vaguely aware of the crypto industry knows about this coin – and it is popularly known as the altcoin king. However, let’s take a deeper look into the reasons behind Ethereum’s skyrocketing journey up the ladders to become Bitcoin’s biggest contender as of today. This token was built by Vitalik Buterin and launched in July, 2015.

According to official definitions, Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform that works on a peer-to-peer network that securely executes and verifies application code, called smart contracts. In fact, Ethereum was the first smart contract platform in the crypto world, and thus is popularly known as the ‘second generation’ of cryptos.

So what are Smart contracts? Why are smart contracts so important in the world of crypto? Smart contract is basically a functionality of a blockchain network that allows participants to transact with each other without a trusted central authority in accordance to a few pre-established rules. Smart contracts thus enable the creation of the decentralized finance (DeFi) economy. These transactions in DeFi happen over the blockchain and thus are immutable, verifiable, and securely distributed across the network, giving participants complete visibility into the data.

And we finalized!

Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 15, 2022

Back on 15 September, 2022 Ethereum underwent one of its biggest transitions the crypto world had ever seen. In a successful conclusion to an effort that began nearly two years before the event, back in December 2020 – Ethereum underwent the highly anticipated Ethereum Merge – where the entire network transitioned from a proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. It is currently ranked #2 on CoinMarketCap according to its market cap and thus forms a definitive part of the list of top altcoins in 2023 that you need to keep an eye out for.

Additional read: Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade

ETH price has rallied 4.5% in the past 30 days

Ethereum’s native crypto token ETH has had a very strong rally since the beginning of 2023, having risen about 43% in YTD and is up about 4.5% in the past 30 days, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

BINANCE COIN (BNB)

Listed as #3 according to its market capitalization (excluding stablecoins), Binance coin is a crypto issued by the Binance crypto exchange, founded by Changing Zhao, popularly known as CZ. Initially built on the Ethereum blockchain network, it has since been shifted to its own native blockchain known as Binance Smart Chain where the BNB token serves various purposes.

Back in 2017, it had been built with the objective of being a utility token to be used to discounted trading on the Binance crypto exchange but since then it has expanded and it is now widely being promoted and also being used for other transactions like payments through Binance Pay for real world items like travel, entertainment and online services to paying transaction fees on BSC. Binance also uses its profits to repurchase its tokens from the open market to permanently destroy those in its burning mechanism. The burning protocol is in place to ensure that some amount of tokens are removed from circulation, reduce circulating supply of the coin and thus sustain or even increase in value.

Binance is unarguably the biggest crypto exchange in the world – but has been in a hot puddle in the last couple of days amidst billions of dollars worth of cryptos being withdrawn from its exchange and even claims corporate battles with other exchanges like WazirX in India. However, CZ took to Twitter to post about its efforts on doubling down to improve the trust in the industry and being more compliant to international rules and regulations in the crypto space.

We’ve also doubled down on trust & safety, growing our security team by 500%, publishing proof of reserves, and topping up our SAFU fund.

Read more here: https://t.co/68EtMZVkYC

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) February 3, 2023

Read more: FTX Collapse Explained

BNB price has rallied 6% in the past 30 days

Binance Smart Chain’s native crypto token BNB has had a decent rally since the beginning of 2023, having risen about 31% in YTD and is up about 6% in the past 30 days, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

RIPPLE (XRP)

Ripply Labs is a company that is working towards building and solidifying a decentralized technology that acts as a crypto and digital payment network for financial transactions. Hence, Ripple is an open-source protocol that was specifically designed to enable extremely peer-to-peer (P2P) fast and cheap transactions between two parties, completely removing the need for a centralized intermediary. Ripple was released back in 2012 and co-founded by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto.

With these suite of products and services, Ripple has grown to become serve large global payment networks including major financial institutions and international banks amongst its customers. One thing to note is that the Ripple Network does not run on either the PoW (Proof of Work) or PoS (Proof of Stake) system. Instead it applies a consensus protocol in order to validate the financial transactions and settle account balances, The biggest benefit of the XRP ledger is that a transaction is confirmed within 5-7 seconds with a minimum transaction fee of 0.00001 XRP.

Additional Read: Proof of Stake vs Proof of Work

Ripple Labs however has been embattled in a court lawsuit against the SEC over the question of XRP being a security or not. However, recent news flows on the same suggest that the lawsuit might be coming to a conclusion very soon.

XRP price has fallen 3.6% in the past 30 days

Ripple’s native crypto token XRP has had a decent rally since the beginning of 2023, having risen about 16% in YTD but is down about about 3.6% in the past 30 days, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

CARDANO (ADA)

Cardano, also popularly hailed as the ‘third generation of cryptos’ (with Bitcoin being the first and Ethereum being the second), is the most up-and-coming crypto project in the industry. It is also quite talked about in the space as it is the most developed crypto project out there. Thanks to the innovative way in which it was created – it is one of the most peer-reviewed and carefully designed blockchains platforms in the marketplace. Thanks to this extensive peer-review processes and systems, this proof-of-stake (PoS) token truly has the potential to beat Ethereum too.

While the year of 2022 hasn’t been kind to Cardano’s native crypto token ADA, in terms of price action – thanks to its strong development team and vision of its leaders that it has still continued to build and create a platform that is unique and provides features that could help it overtake Ethereum. This is especially true thanks to the now-concluded Cardano’s Vasil Hark Fork that went live on 22 September, 2023. This is the reason why Cardano is next in the list of top altcoins in November 2022 by market cap.

🐳 #Cardano's price is up +65% in 2023, and key shark & whale accumulating has had a lot to do with this. Addresses holding 100K to 100M $ADA now hold the most in their combined wallets since Nov. 8th. Today, $100k+ whale transactions hit a 12-week high. https://t.co/Od5c4Qw0qn pic.twitter.com/LmvmXnMZQe

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) February 4, 2023

This trend can be expected to continue thanks to its consistent dedication to develop the ecosystem and making it more and more conducive for development of Web3 applications, and thus has a huge potential to grow in the future. It also presents a very promising picture for the future of the third generation of crypto, and its native token, ADA. Thus Cardano is able to hold its spot firmly in the top altcoins to watch out for in 2023, despite its poor price performance.

Read more: Cardano Price Prediction

ADA price has rallied 13.2% in the past 30 days

Cardano’s native crypto token ADA has had a very strong rally since the beginning of 2023, having risen about 63.5% in YTD and is up about 13.2% in the past 30 days, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

POLYGON (MATIC)

Earlier known as MATIC network, Polygon is a layer-2 scaling solution built on top of the Ethereum blockchain network. It is powered by MATIC, which is an Ethereum (ERC-20) token that becomes the backbone for the Polygon network. Polygon network was built with the objective of providing a way to significantly increase transaction speeds and reduce the cost of transactions but with the security of the Ethereum blockchain, by using layer-2 sidechains.

This blockchain protocol allows users to deposit ETH tokens to a Polygon smart contract and then using the MATIC tokens, users can interact within the Polygon ecosystem and then even be able to withdraw their ETH tokens back on the main chain. The MATIC token is used for a variety of purposes ranging from paying transaction fees to participating in the proof-of-stake consensus of the sidechain.

Polygon network in the past year or so has shot to the limelight in the crypto space and recently became the only blockchain company to be selected for the Disney Accelerator Program 2022. Thanks to its active role in the industry, it is also quickly becoming home to some very popular NFT collections and projects from all over the world.

Very recently, according to cryptoglobe.com, Mike McGlone, a Senior Macro Strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence (Bloomberg’s research arm on the Bloomberg Terminal”) shared his two cents on what he thinks about the Polygon L2 scaling solution on Ethereum,

 ‘No L2 has created more network effects for Ethereum than Polygon’

Read the report below to know more!

MATIC price has rallied 18.4% in the past 30 days

Polygon’s native crypto token MATIC has had an extremely strong rally since the beginning of 2023, having risen about 98% in YTD and is up about 50% in the past 30 days alone, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

SOLANA (SOL)

Solana, which was launched fairly recently, when compared to other coins on this list on in 2020 has been probably one of the most talked about tokens amid the bull run of 2021. But similar to some other coins on this list, Solana too is an open-source, permissionless and a high-speed layer-1 decentralized blockchain network. It was built with the objective to achieve the highest throughput of any other blockchain networks in the market while at the same time, being extremely cost efficient too.

Solana as a protocol implements a hybrid consensus mechanism that combines both Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Proof-of-History (PoH). Due to this hybrid model of consensus, the platform is able to generate over 710,000 transactions per second (TPS) with minimal to no scaling solutions on the native blockchain. This kind of efficiency has been possible thanks to its PoH mechanism which provides a digital record of confirming the occurrence of an event on the network at a given time. It relies on PoS’s Byzantine fault tolerance(BFT) algorithm to reach a consensus and it also uses a 256-bit secure hash algorithm (SHA-256) to provide real-time data.

However, amid the bear market of 2022, Solana has been one of the top coins by market cap that was affected the most. It had suffered a series of network outages and hacks through the year which had led to a serious dent in its reputation and viability as a ‘Ethereum-killer’ token. But since the beginning of 2023, Solana has been in the news for the good reasons – one of the main ons being a research report suggesting that Solana was the fastest growing developer ecosystem in 2022, despite the price crash in that year.

1/ A new report by @ElectricCapital shows that Solana is the fastest growing developer ecosystem, surpassing 2,000 total developers in 2022. It's second in raw numbers only to Ethereum.

Let's dig into the numbers.https://t.co/HQvPbQzQD2 pic.twitter.com/xV6pnoT7db

— Solana (@solana) January 17, 2023

Additional read: Solana vs Cardano

SOL price has rallied 4.1% in the past 30 days

Solana’s native crypto token SOL has had an extremely strong rally since the beginning of 2023, having risen about 165% in YTD and is up about 4.1% in the past 30 days, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

UNISWAP (UNI)

Uniswap has been one of the biggest and the most dominant players in the world of decentralized finance, especially so in its sector of decentralized exchanges (DEX). Uniswap is one of the most popular and widely used decentralized trading protocol that is well-known for facilitating automated trading of DeFi tokens without any centralized body. It also has its own automated market maker (AMM) and was launched back in 2018 by Hayden Adams and has grown to garner a lot of attention since its inception. It gained much of its traction especially in the year 2021 when the crypto space saw the DeFi boom.

To further add to that, Uniswap is run by its own decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that is governed using its native governance token, UNI. This was undertaken to enhance the ability and the profitability of the users to shape its future. It limits the risks as well as reduces costs for all parties involved by automating the procedure of market-making. This mechanism also does away with the identity requirements for its users and lets anyone create a liquidity pool for any pair of tokens.

UNI is a token that is very popular amongst major crypto whales too as it has constantly been in to top ranks of the coins that are being HODLed by large players in the crypto market. Even more recently, UNI now features on the list of top 10 tokens purchased amongst the 2000 biggest ETH whales in the past 24 hours too.

JUST IN: $UNI @Uniswap now on top 10 purchased tokens among 2000 biggest #ETH whales in the last 24hrs 🐳

We've also got $SHIB, $LDO, $CRV & $GALA on the list 👀

Whale leaderboard: https://t.co/R19lKnPlsK#UNI #whalestats #babywhale #BBW pic.twitter.com/ZatzyVFPUa

— WhaleStats (tracking crypto whales) (@WhaleStats) February 20, 2023

UNI price has rallied 9.8% in the past 30 days

Uniswap native crypto token UNI has had a strong rally since the beginning of 2023, having risen about 40% in YTD and is up about 9.8% in the past 30 days, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

CHAINLINK (LINK)

The last but not the least on this list of top altcoins that you need to keep your eye out for in 2023 is Chainlink. Chainlink is yet another blockchain network that was built with a very unique purpose in mind. Chainlink is a crypto network that has the objective to incentivise a global network of computers to provide reliable, real-world data to smart contracts running on top of other blockchain networks.

The need for this blockchain is extremely relevant and the use cases are many. So, smart contract from various blockchain networks tend to require data and information from outside its native network. These data points can include anything from prices of assets, weather and interest rates for any specific smart contract. That’s where Chainlink’s oracle network comes in – it provides a method to bring these external data points to smart contracts in a truly decentralized manner. For example, smart contracts seeking to replicate bonds or insurance agreements may need access to APIs reporting on market prices or Internet of Things data.

Chainlink devised a very interesting solution to this problem – it created a network by incentivising data providers (or oracles, as it is better known) to act as a bridge between the blockchain smart contracts at the relevant external data sources.

Chainlink, since the beginning of 2023 has made decent recovery on the back on the overall crypto market improvement in sentiment and prices. However, it is still Bitcoin which is leading the rally in the market and as we see the bull run returning in the market eventually – altcoins especially like Chainlink’s LINK price can be expected to post significant rallies and post healthy returns going forward – thanks to its monopoly in the sector in which it is operating in.

This features on the top altcoins by market cap at #22 on CMC by market cap and is a part of this list of top altcoins, thanks to the critical use case this particular project is trying to solve.

Additional Read: Top Crypto Price Predictions

LINK price has rallied 18.4% in the past 30 days

Chainlink’s native crypto token LINK has had a very strong rally since the beginning of 2023, having risen about 45.4% in YTD and is up about 18.4% in the past 30 days, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

CONCLUSION

This is a comprehensive list of some of the most unique and different projects that you can invest in 2023, especially so as we are seeing some broad-base recovery amongst major crypto assets in the market.. However, investors should do their own research as the crypto market tends to be extremely volatile. Thus researching further would bring about more understanding and conviction before investing your hard earned money into these cryptos.

Additional read: 5 Ways to Survive the Crypto Bear Market: Beginners Guide

SO, HOW CAN YOU INVEST IN THESE PROJECTS?

Today investing in these crypto project is extremely simple with the CoinDCX App! Just download the CoinDCX crypto investing app, enter the details required and wait for your profile to get verified. Once done, fund your wallet and buy any of the coin of your choice.