DailyCoin’s Top 10 Crypto Projects of 2021

2021 was a crucial year for the crypto industry: millions of people joined the decentralized world and NFTs in force emerged alongside with the metaverse. However, there were a handful of cryptocurrency projects that gained particular fame and really stood out from the pack.

As the year draws to a close, DailyCoin has compiled a list of the top 10 crypto projects of 2021. The list includes 10 digital assets using the yearly statistics of CoinMarketCap.

#10 Decentraland

Decentraland is a metaverse built on the Ethereum blockchain; users create avatars, buy virtual land to live on, and even virtual clothes to wear. In fact, Decentraland auctions plots of digital land, which sell for millions of dollars. The platform hosts various events, including music festivals where artists like Paris Hilton and DeadMau5 perform.

In Decentraland, transactions are made with MANA, its native token, whose price rose from $0.08 at the beginning of 2021 to over $5 in November.

Governmental institutions have shown interest in Decentraland as well: Barbados is planning to build a diplomatic embassy in the metaverse.

Attracting over 300,000 daily active users, it’s no wonder that this crypto project has been one of the most successful in 2021.

#9 Harmony

Harmony is a blockchain-based platform that is fast, transparent, has low fees, and facilitates the creation of dApps; it’s position as a catalyst for several Web 3.0 innovations has helped determine Harmony’s popularity. The blockchain’s superb features include the sharding process, Verifiable Random Function (VRF), and the effective proof-of-stake (EPoS) consensus mechanism.

The project has a grants program to help inspire innovation and attract developers to the Harmony mainnet.

Harmony’s cryptocurrency, ONE, jumped from $0.0041 in January 2021, to $0.36, 10 months later in November.

#8 PancakeSwap

PancakeSwap is the world’s most popular decentralized platform to trade, earn, and win cryptocurrency on. As a decentralized exchange, PancakeSwap has the highest number of users, the highest trading volumes, and stakes worth over $12,000,000,000.

The platform allows users to trade cryptocurrencies instantly without registration. PancakeSwap stands out from centralized trading platforms like Binance or Coinbase, as it guarantees 100% ownership of your digital assets.

#7 CryptoPunks

CryptoPunks is one of the NFT giants, a collection of 10,000 unique characters minted on the Ethereum blockchain. The avatars consistently rank highly on the lists of the most expensive NFTs ever sold, usually selling for between $350,000 and $500,000, but some have even been sold for millions. The most expensive avatar ever purchased was sold for $11.75 million.

Created by Larva Labs and inspired by the ERC-721 standard that drives most digital art, CryptoPunks is one of the most successful NFT projects of 2021.

#6 Solana

Solana is one of the top blockchains available at the moment with over 400 DeFi, NFT, and Web 3.0 projects in its ecosystem.

A few of the Solana’s top selling points are its ultra-fast transaction speed and environmental-friendliness – the cryptocurrency’s PoS and PoH verification processes consume significantly less energy than Bitcoin or Ethereum transactions.

The cryptocurrency SOL has seen a significant spike in the final quarter of the year, its current price is $172,65 as of this writing, and over the past year, its TVL has risen by $660 million.

#5 OpenSea

OpenSea is perhaps the largest and the first NFT marketplace to exist. The platform, which was launched in 2017, has been absolutely dominating the NFT market in 2021.

In March 2021, OpenSea raised $23 million in funds and saw transactions grow by over 100 times, and even crossed the $10 billion mark in all-time sales volume.

#4 Polygon

Polygon is a fast-growing blockchain that seeks to solve the most common problems faced by the crypto industry. Polygon is a scaling solution for Ethereum based in India and recently introduced an update to burn its native token, MATIC, with every transaction to generate visibility and achieve a deflationary effect.

MATIC soared at the end of May 2021, hitting a price of $2.45. It has recently recovered by 35% from the crash of December 4th and is currently valued at $2.06 at the time of writing.

#3 The Sandbox

The Sandbox is an open metaverse in which users create and monetize their own in-game experiences. The metaverse gained its fame for selling land and real estate, which recently achieved the feat of accounting for 25% of all NFT sales.

The virtual gaming platform has partnered with celebrated partners, including

Adidas, the Smurfs, The Walking Dead, Deadmau5, Steve Aoki, and Snoop Dogg. Many more famous creators are highly likely to join the project’s ambitions in 2022.

SAND’s price spiked in the last two months, accordingly with the emergence of the metaverse.

#2 Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity is an NFT-based virtual reality game that has over 2 million daily players. Gamers in the popular metaverse have pets named Axies, which they bred, raise, and battle against other creatures.

Axie Infinity is inspired by Pokémon and Tamagotchi, and the game uses a play-to-earn model, which allows users to earn tokens (AXS) while playing. The governance token lets users participate in the decision-making process and take care of the Axie Community Treasury.

The live Axie Infinity price, at the time of writing, is $91.44, with a 24-hour trading volume of $226,477,018. Its highest point was on the 6th of November when AXS reached $160 in value.

#1 Gala

Gala Games is the top blockchain project of 2021. The gaming platform is partially owned and operated by its players, who earn Gala tokens simply by playing, and can use them to decide the future of the game, the entirety of which is determined by the player-owned ‘Node Ecosystem’. Gala Games is easy to understand and navigate, even for those with little to no crypto experience, and this has doubtless played a large part in it’s meteoric rise in 2021.

This year, GALA’s price has risen by an astronomical 40760.00%.

Why You Should Care?

The top crypto projects of 2021, as determined by CoinMarketCap, can help you decide which tokens to research, and what could potentially make for a smart investment in the coming year.