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It's best to trade and invest in altcoins to diversify your portfolio. Beyond ETH, here are some of the best altcoins you need to consider now!

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 cryptocurrency can be lucrative. This has been evident since the 

 Summer of 2020, with cryptocurrency prices skyrocketing more than a hundredfold. One example would be Solana, below. Its price increased by 415 times over a span of one and a half years.

’s smart contract abilities, countless projects began to innovate and build on the Ethereum blockchain, leading to a boom in the number of protocol tokens, also known as 

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most promising altcoins, including ETH, KWENTA, PENDLE, CRV, GMX, LINK, MANTLE and ATOM.

The term “altcoins” (or “alternative coins”) refers to cryptocurrencies other than 

. Altcoins typically differ from Bitcoin in terms of their 

. For example, Bitcoin uses proof of work (

 uses proof of history (PoH). In addition, altcoins are different in the functionalities they provide. Bitcoin is a network focused on peer-to-peer (

 (EVM) gives developers the ability to build decentralized applications (

Bitcoin remains one of the largest cryptocurrencies, taking up 44.5% of the 

 (market cap) as of the time of this writing. But the altcoin market cap is growing, given the rising demand in verticals such as decentralized finance, NFTs and games. Among these, Ether (ETH) commands around

A Retrospective Look: Altcoin Growth and Projections

Altcoins experienced their first price rally back in 

, the most prominent example being Ether (ETH), which rallied from $8 at the start of 2017 to a peak of $1,448 in January 2018. This represented an 18,000% increase in token price. ETH managed to grow so significantly because of the functionalities it brought via the EVM, and the opportunities it offered for building DApps on its blockchain.

Concurrently, other altcoins were also skyrocketing in price, mainly due to the rise in initial coin offerings (

s), which significantly reduced the barriers to entry for projects launching their own 

 tokens. In addition, the ICO model leveled the playing field for market participants to participate in investments, which led to the dollar value of ICOs exceeding that of early-stage VC funding.

However, what goes up must come down. Eventually, projects including 

 (LTC) couldn’t maintain the rapid price increase, and soon after the peak, their prices started to decline.

While Bitcoin has managed to maintain its dominance in terms of market cap, numerous altcoins have been outperforming Bitcoin in terms of price action. Let’s take a look at some altcoins that have considerable potential to do well in the coming years.

Before we begin, it's important to distinguish between Ether (ETH) and Ethereum. Ethereum refers to the blockchain, while ETH is Ethereum’s native token. Ethereum was the 

 blockchain to introduce smart contract functionality, which allowed developers to build DApps on Ethereum using 

. In addition, Ethereum also created the ERC-20 token standard, which was widely used by projects to launch ICOs.

As mentioned above, the price of ETH grew from just $8 in January 2017 to a peak of $1,448 in January 2018. However, its price then began to decline, all the way to approximately $83, in tandem with the drop in prices of cryptocurrencies in general.

Nonetheless, the price of ETH started picking up once again in the first quarter of 2020 and rallied exponentially, increasing from $125 on Mar 30, 2020 to its ATH of $4,878.26 on Nov 10, 2021, an increase of approximately 3,800%. Thereafter, the price of ETH began to decline significantly once again following a series of black swan events, such as the 

As of the time of this writing, ETH’s price sits at $1,840.

The Ethereum network has undergone prominent changes over the past year. The first major development was its switch (

) from PoW to PoS consensus mechanism. Recently, Ethereum’s 

With more ETH getting burned each day due to 

 nature of ETH may possibly lead to a price increase. In addition, the ERC-4337 proposal was recently deployed on the Ethereum mainnet in March 2023, moving towards the goal of account abstraction to potentially onboard more users. Each of these developments could positively impact ETH’s price.

. Its trading platform was launched by one of the most prominent derivative protocols on Ethereum, 

, which issues synthetic assets from both the physical (e.g., gold and silver) and digital (i.e., cryptocurrencies) worlds. 

Kwenta has been performing well in terms of price action in 2023, increasing by almost 500%. Key reasons for this success include its novel architecture, which utilizes the Synthetix debt pool as its counterparty, and the incorporation of a funding rate mechanism.

At the start of 2023, KWENTA sat at $128. In February, its price began to rally significantly, and then reached a peak of $790.99 in March 2023, subsequently hitting a lower peak of $773 in April 2023. The price started to decline steadily over the next few months, and currently sits at $305 as of May 24, 2023. This price decrease may have been due to the competitive derivatives protocol landscape causing a certain level of user churn.

Recently, Optimism announced that its Bedrock upgrade will be set for 

. This is one of the biggest upgrades on Optimism to date, and will bring about higher network performance. Given this piece of news, it’s likely that the market will pay more attention to Optimism and its ecosystem, allowing Kwenta to benefit from some positive spillover.

Pendle is one of the most novel DeFi protocols to have entered the DeFi market, and has managed to attract significant attention. It’s a tokenized yield protocol that uses an 

 (AMM) system to facilitate the tokenizing and trading of future yield.

Essentially, owners of yield-bearing tokens deposit their assets into Pendle Finance and mint two tokens: (1) Yield token (YT), to represent the token owner’s claim on an asset’s future yield, and (2) Principal token (PT), to represent the underlying asset. By allowing for the trading of these two tokens, Pendle unlocks the door to a series of advanced yield strategies that can be taken on by market participants.

When PENDLE was launched in 2021, it performed very well, with prices reaching a high of $2.45. However, the price plunged over the next year to values below $0.01. This price action was sustained for close to half a year.

However, since the beginning of 2023, PENDLE’s price has picked up once again, increasing by 1,750% from a low of $0.035 to its recent peak of $0.643550.

, launching Penpie on May 2, 2023. This partnership is aimed at reducing the circulating supply of PENDLE and boosting yield for holders through veTokenomics. With this development, market participants can look forward to potential price surges in the future.

. It protocol was created to allow users to swap between different stablecoins (USDT, USDC, etc.) with low slippage and low fees, made possible through an AMM model.

Another feature that allows Curve to achieve low slippage is its “yield,” offered to LPs in the Curve pool. By depositing stablecoins into the Curve liquidity pool, LPs are rewarded with fees collected from the trading activity that takes place on Curve. This serves as a form of yield for the LPs and incentivizes them to deposit stablecoins, creating deeper liquidity in Curve’s swap pools.

The CRV token has fluctuated significantly over the years. During the DeFi Summer period, CRV launched at a price of $15.37, which declined sharply following the launch and dropped below $1. Nonetheless, CRV managed to pick up and reach a peak of $6.51 in early 2022, before dropping back below $1 in a DeFi landscape dealing with multiple black swan events.

 its own stablecoin, crvUSD. This launch comes amidst an industry trend of protocols building their native stablecoin, one example of which is 

. crvUSD features an innovative algorithm known as lending-liquidating AMM algorithm (

), which essentially rebalances users’ collateral as cryptocurrencies fluctuate in price. This smoothes the liquidation process, preventing users from suffering huge losses and reducing the chances of the protocol entering bad debt.

Given this development, it’s very likely that Curve will be able to attract significant liquidity into its protocol.

GMX is a decentralized spot and perpetual exchange. Users can trade a variety of derivatives with up to 50x leverage. This protocol managed to gain a significant market share from 2021 to 2022 because of its unique fee-sharing mechanism. Holders of the protocol’s native token, GMX, and 

 (LPs) are both eligible to share the fees received from transactions that take place on GMX. This incentivizes LPs to participate, ensuring deep liquidity that attracts traders.

GMX has been experiencing stellar price action, consistently hitting new highs since mid-2022, with the price recently hitting a new high of $91.07 on Apr 18, 2023. This is approximately a 480% increase in price since its launch. As shown in the chart above, GMX has been on a steady uptrend with just a few price corrections along the way.

The GMX team has been working hard on developing the protocol, not just for a better UX but also to improve the underlying protocol’s capabilities. Two of the main developments in the work are as follows:

With Chainlink’s low-latency pricing oracles, GMX will be able to receive price data faster as compared to conventional oracles. Since the trading platform is now subject to fewer delays, users will benefit from being able to execute more sophisticated trading strategies, while reducing the chances of being 

With v2, users will be able to execute their trades with features including market order, limit order, stop loss order, etc. These are highly useful tools for traders, and will help them execute their trade strategies in a more seamless manner.

Both of the abovementioned developments are useful for traders, and will likely attract more users to the GMX platform. LPs will then be incentivized to provide liquidity in order to earn the transaction fees from trading activity, creating a flywheel effect and organic demand for the GMX token.

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network focused on creating smart contracts to help blockchain networks interact with external parties to provide real-world data through 

To minimize the risk of data manipulation and single points of failure on Chainlink, the protocol uses a “decentralized oracle network” mechanism in which multiple nodes are in charge of fetching and delivering data, increasing its reliability. In addition, node operators are rewarded in LINK for their contribution. This serves as a form of incentivization for them to provide accurate data.

LINK was one of the best-performing altcoins in 2020, as its price exploded from a low of $1.76 at the beginning of 2020 to a peak of $52.70 over the next year and a half. This translates to a price surge of approximately 2,894%. 

One of the key reasons for this significant price increase could have been the DeFi Summer that saw many new DeFi protocols entering the market, the majority of which would require an oracle service. However, there have been questions regarding the value accrual toward LINK, which has led to its price declining steadily over the past year, now sitting at $6.70.

One of the most exciting developments ahead for Chainlink is its 

 (CCIP). With CCIP, developers will be able to build cross-chain applications with ease. Given the increasing number of blockchains that have been created, and the fragmentation of users and liquidity, builders have generally been searching for an interoperability solution. Chainlink could potentially address this need, and the increased usage could potentially lead to positive price action.

 to be built. It’s able to deliver superior performance for users due to its novel architecture. The L2 relies on 

 to guarantee data availability, and uses EigenLayer to leverage Ethereum's underlying security. The liveness of the Mantle network is further enhanced through the use of a decentralized sequencer, which reduces the level of censorship resistance faced by users.

 architecture, Mantle processes transactions in batches, which allows them to achieve low transaction fees.

 (DAO) in the web3 vertical. Very recently, a 

 was made on BitDAO to change the native token from BIT to 

 in order to achieve a “One brand, One token” principle. 

Hence, the subsequent price analysis will be on the BIT token, which has been launched. Please note that in a few months time, this will eventually be changed to the Mantle token. For now, we’ll address it as BIT.

When BitDAO had just launched in early August 2021, BIT did experience a relatively good surge in price action, increasing from a low of $1.25 to a peak of $3.10 within a span of three months. This increase in price was, however, not sustained, and the price of BIT has been declining ever since.

The token reached a low of $0.270167 late last year, but has been increasing steadily since the beginning of 2023.

The biggest anticipation here would definitely be for Mantle to launch its mainnet and onboard users into its ecosystem. Given how innovative Mantle is, with architecture to improve scalability coupled with some of the stellar integrations they’ve made with EigenLayer, it will be exciting to see how the protocol performs.

Cosmos is a decentralized blockchain network with a hub-and-spoke model to allow for interoperability among the blockchains built on it. This is made possible via the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol, whereby assets and data can be transferred through the hub to which blockchains are connected. The hub acts as a bridge to facilitate this seamless ecosystem interconnectedness.

ATOM performed well in 2021, with prices increasing from $5.42 to a peak of $44.45 in less than a year. This was mainly driven by the interoperability thesis. However, similar to LINK, holders of ATOM had concerns over the lack of value accrual to the token. This resulted in selling pressure, which caused its price to decrease steeply to $6.10 by mid-2022.

However, since that time, ATOM’s price has been picking up recently in anticipation of the developments that might be coming to the network.

One of the recent key announcements in the Cosmos ecosystem concerns the launch of Neutron. Neutron has been approved by the Cosmos Hub to launch on Replicated Security (RS), previously known as Interchain Security. This will allow chains that wish to build on Cosmos to benefit from its existing validator network and build with a strong security layer.

8 Best Altcoins That Could Shoot to the Moon in 2023

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