Written by Babywhale, Techub News
When everyone thought that after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the Bitcoin spot ETF, the scene of "tens of thousands of coins rising together" in 2021 would reappear, the reality gave a heavy blow: except for Bitcoin directly reaching $100,000, a large number of "altcoins" that shined in the last bull market not only failed to set new highs in this round of market, but are still hovering at the bottom.
To some extent, this may also indicate that as cryptocurrency investment gradually becomes mainstream in the United States, new funds will be concentrated on high-quality targets, just like U.S. stocks. In this round of market, some tokens that once reached the peak in the previous bull market have once again become the darlings of profit seekers in this round. The author has counted some tokens that hit a staged high in the 2021 bull market and hit a new high in this round, but the scope of understanding is limited and may not cover all tokens that meet this situation.
SOL
In 2021, when "Alt L1" was very popular, EVM-compatible L1s including Fantom, NEAR, Avalanche, etc. took over the overflow traffic due to the high cost of Ethereum Gas. In this, Solana did not follow the trend, but rebuilt an ecosystem outside of EVM. With the support of SBF, the founder of FTX, which was at its peak at the time, and the operation of the team itself, the price of SOL soared from less than $1 when it was first listed on the exchange to over $200.
But then, as the overall market went from crazy to calm, coupled with the collapse of FTX, SBF, one of Solana’s biggest supporters, was imprisoned, SOL fell to around US$7, and well-known NFT projects on Solana left one after another. Many investors believed that Solana’s story might end here.
To the surprise of these people, in this cycle, Solana has regained new vitality thanks to the sudden rise of Meme. Coupled with the rise of several ecological projects such as the re-staking project Jito, the price of SOL has been rising all the way and broke through the high of nearly US$260 set in early November 2021 nearly a week ago.
BNB
As the only public chain among "exchange platform coins" that has truly achieved ecological diversification, BNB issued by Binance is impressive both in its "resistance to decline" in the bear market and its rise in the bull market. In the bear market of 2022, BNB fell all the way from its highest level of around $660 in May 2021 to below $200. Although the decline is not small, compared with many tokens that have fallen by more than 90% or even almost to zero, BNB can be regarded as an asset with a higher "value preservation rate".
Later, with the market recovery and Binance launching Launchpool and Launchpad projects at an almost crazy frequency, BNB also continued to advance and broke through the price high of the previous bull market on June 24 this year, reaching a maximum of US$700. Compared with the dismal exit of Huobi's HECO Network, BNB still has a lot of potential value worth further exploration both within the exchange and on the BNB Chain.
TRX
The record high of Tron token TRX in this cycle is both unexpected and reasonable. The issuance of USDT has approached 140 billion, and Tron has been the first choice for USDT transfer for quite a long time. Although Tron has been surpassed by Ethereum in USDT issuance and is obviously inferior to Ethereum in actual application scenarios, it has to be admitted that at least in terms of capital flow, Tron is still the only choice for USDT holders.
According to DefiLlama data, the TVL on Tron is about $7.555 billion at the time of writing this article, and the figure once exceeded $10 billion in March this year. The price of TRX reached a high of $0.18 on April 17, 2021. Three and a half years later, on November 12, two weeks ago, TRX hit a new high and rose to more than $0.22 in the following days.
TON
The emergence of TON can be traced back to the ICO era, when Telegram raised $1.7 billion for its token Grams through ICO financing and planned to launch The Open Network (TON), but a lawsuit from the SEC put everything on hold. This typical SEC-style lawsuit, which looked like securities in every way, was not finally settled until 2020, and Telegram also paid the price of not being able to continue the development of TON.
After that, TON continued to operate with the support of the community, but it never made much of a splash in the industry. Its token price hit a high of $4.4 at the end of 2021 and then continued to fall along with the broader market.
Now it is 2022. From April to July, the TON Foundation and several other institutions have launched ecological funds worth tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, signaling the rapid expansion of the TON ecosystem. As a blockchain owned by Telegram with tens of millions of users, TON has not put too much effort into the number of users. The various games it has launched and the interactive experience integrated with Telegram have made the process from 0 to 1 very smooth, and the speed from 1 to 100 is also astonishing.
As the market heats up, the price of TON briefly exceeded US$8 in June this year. Compared with its previous "peak", its price has increased by nearly 100%.
LEO
To be honest, if I hadn’t checked the data website, I wouldn’t have known the existence of this token. LEO is a token issued by the old exchange Bitfinex, and its functions include fee reduction, etc. As for why the token hit a new high, I haven’t found any convincing news. The only possibility is that the hacker who stole 120,000 bitcoins from Bitfinex was sentenced, which may be seen as a positive to some extent.
LEO briefly surpassed $8 in early February 2022, and a week ago on November 20, LEO hit a new high and rose to nearly $9.
FET
Fetch.ai was born before the last bull market, and it has survived until today when AI has become a hot topic. In the early years, the concept of "blockchain +" was very popular, and many related projects were established. Most of them have become the dust of history, but some projects have persisted to this day and ushered in a real second spring. In addition to Fetch.ai, there are also IoTeX and others.
In the first half of this year, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol proposed to establish a super artificial intelligence alliance and merge tokens. The plan has been completed. The important impact of AI on the development of human society is beyond doubt, but whether Crypto can really promote this process still needs time to observe.
In early September 2021, FET hit a temporary high of nearly US$1.2. The artificial intelligence trend brought about by OpenAI this year has brought the price of FET to around US$3.5, nearly doubling the high point of the previous bull market.
OKB
As one of the three largest exchanges in China, OKX has performed well in the past two years. On the one hand, OKX has made a series of optimizations in trading-related functions and user experience, allowing traders to set up more personalized trading plans. This has also led other exchanges to follow suit; on the other hand, the Web3 wallet launched by OKX may even be worthy of being called a phenomenal product, and it has become the only choice for many gold diggers when the streets are empty.
As for the price of OKB, it actually hit a record high as early as the beginning of last year, which coincided with the time when OKX made drastic reforms. In March of this year, OKB hit a record high of nearly $74, which was more than 70% higher than the high of around $44 in early May 2021.
STX
I have to sigh here that some projects whose token prices hit new highs in this round of market are not the darlings of the previous bull market, but have existed many years ago and "met their soulmates" in this cycle.
Stacks is an early attempt of Web3 to use the Bitcoin network to build a smart contract platform. Its design is very interesting. Simply put, Bitcoin holders use Bitcoin to bid to obtain the block rewards and transaction fees of Stacks' new blocks, and the packaging of blocks is done by STX pledgers. After the blocks are uploaded to the chain, they can get the Bitcoin used for bidding. And because it also uploads status information to the Bitcoin network to achieve final confirmation, Stacks is also considered to be "Bitcoin L2" to some extent.
The east wind brought by the inscription has brought new vitality to this project that has been working in the Bitcoin ecosystem for many years. The price of STX also rose to a high of around US$3.85 in April this year, surpassing the interim high of around US$3.6 set in November 2021.
INJ
The Cosmos ecosystem must be an indelible shadow in the minds of many investors. Like Polkadot, it has a unique style and technical strength in the cross-chain field, but it has not triggered a trend similar to DeFi. From the token price information website, Injective is also a project that was born before the last bull market, but it may not be known to most people until it received $40 million in financing in August 2022.
Judging from the investors and the participants of the ecological fund it launched, including market makers, hedge funds and other roles, Injective should want to establish a DeFi liquidity center. This plan is not unique, and it seems nothing special on the surface, but the price of INJ has been rising. In mid-March this year, the price of INJ rose to more than $52, more than double the interim high of around $25 in April 2021.
BGB
If the price increase of BNB and OKB is "reasonable", then the sudden emergence of Bitget must be beyond the expectations of most people. From the author's point of view, it is really unimaginable that there can still be new players in the field of exchanges where there are already many giants, but Bitget has done it. Aggressive market strategy, crazy but efficient culture, wallet products and various investments to assist. Before officially starting the market battle, Bitget must have designed a comprehensive plan long ago, and just caught the residual heat brought by the last round of bull market and seized the opportunity of a new round of users pouring into Web3.
Compared to the previously introduced tokens that hit a new high in 2021 and then followed the market down before hitting a new high, BGB has been in a climbing stage since its birth in 2021, and hit a high of US$1.7 a few days ago.
