Crypto influencer and trader Tyler Swope is naming ten under-the-radar projects that have the potential to blast off in the current altcoin hype cycle.
First on Swope’s list is blockchain scalability platform Matic Network (MATIC), which he says is hosting a layer-two financial product that is racking up tens of millions of dollars in trading volume.
“On Matic, it’s the number one DApp listed on their website, as we can see it’s Polymarket. This is prediction markets for real-world events and it went live on Matic’s layer two… Of all the open market on Polymarket, it equals up to about $32 million in trading volume. Of the resolved since its October launch, about $22 million. So about $54 million since launch four months ago.”
Number two is xDai, a decentralized platform using a stablecoin to power payments. Swope says xDai is hosting a financial product in Perpetual Protocol which he notes is printing hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volume.
“They are decentralized perpetual contracts. Now the mainnet for Perp, it only launched three weeks ago… Just in two days, January 4th and 3rd, it did $29 million alone in volume and the rest of the day since launch about $80 million. That is nearly $110 million as of January 4th.”
Another project on Swope’s radar is PowerPool (CVP). While the protocol for pooling governance tokens made the list, the crypto influencer highlights that PowerPool’s layer-two integrations are not yet complete.
Fourth is prediction market platform Gnosis which Swope says is building Omen, a product to compete against Matic’s Polymarket. However, the trader highlights that Omen has a lot of catching up to do.
“It’s no Polymarket yet. It only has done over $6 million in total volume since it’s launch.”
Swope is also looking at Optimism, a project that aims to execute cheaper and faster transactions on the Ethereum blockchain by using rollups, which is a scaling method that enables Ethereum to keep compressed transactions on-chain while delegating computations such as contract execution off-chain.
Another project that Swope is keeping tabs on is Fuel Labs after the protocol put up their own rollup on the mainnet.
“It only supports token transfers and swaps right now, no complex smart contracts, but like Optimism PBC, they say soon for hosting those.”
Swope is watching the progress of Arbitrum as well. He says the project is closer to fully implementing rollups than Optimism and Fuel Labs.
The last three projects that Swope is keeping track of are protocols that use zk rollups, which are layer-two solutions that bundle hundreds of transfers in a single transfer while using the zero-knowledge proof approach to record and validate the block on Ethereum. Swope says the leading projects that rely on zk rollups are Loopring, Starkware, and Matter Labs. However, the trader says the protocols are still in development as they lack certain features.
“Loopring has been pushing forward on the mainnet with theirs but again it’s just for token exchanges, and not for the full basket of smart contracts. Then with zk, there’s also Starkware which is also going to scale ERC20 as well as NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and ERC721s. They went live with 2.0 StarkEx on December 2nd but this too, isn’t for the full basket of smart contracts…
But the furthest along with the zk rollup goal of smart contracts is Matter Labs with zksync as they have a testnet and Curve on top of it, launched back in October of last year. But since then, it has been quiet with no word regarding mainnet transfer of Curve yet.”
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