Which Token Would Be the New Entrant in the Top 10 Cryptocurrencies by the End of 2022?

By L. Sebastian Purcell

I’ll give you five ideas.

1. Which coins might drop out?

I wanted to pause to answer this question right now because it’s worth noting how many slots could open up in the top 10.

I’ve got an outline of the crypto space that I think still holds in this piece, so the following is premised on that view, namely that the primary game right now is for the platform wars. Notably, we might end up with quite a few, but some of those will still be more important than others.

What I see right now is that Cardano (ADA) is way up there on the list and, unlike BNB, SOL, LUNA, or AVAX it isn’t even close to running fast enough (at 250 transactions per second). A quick check on its website and you’ll learn that it’s at phase 4 (Basho) — the scaling phase. It won’t complete that until the beginning of 2023 (maybe).

At that point, it’ll have to start growing an ecosystem. The “platform wars” will probably end in 2023 when ETH upgrades to ETH 2.0, so I don’t know if it’ll make it as a primary platform.

The other coin that looks quite dubious to me is XRP. They might well beat their lawsuit, but the coin is relatively old technology. It’s not a platform token, but a single-use case. Yes, they are expanding, but please have a look at the tokenomics, specifically, the relationship between XRP and Ripple isn’t simple.

In any case, I don’t think that XRP will be able to compete well with platform coins. Going forward, probably the top 10 will only be platform coins and stable coins—which are basically the backbone of the crypto world.

I don’t see a lot of other movement right now. ETH might flip BTC eventually, but BTC will obviously be a top 10 coin for the foreseeable future.

2. Two Obvious Choices

Given that analysis, two obvious contenders emerge as possible top 10 coins.

• Polkadot (DOT)
• Polygon (MATIC)

Polkadot faces scaling difficulties similar to ADA, but it was a recent top 10 coin, and each time a new parachain is launched (these are side chains for more specific use cases that allow DOT to scale) it causes a buzz.

I think it’s almost indisputable that DOT will move back into the top 10 for a bit, though it might not remain there for long.

MATIC is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. Yes, ETH is slow, but as soon as you move your tokens onto MATIC you find a usable network. Presently, LOTS of NFT projects are launching on MATIC because they want longevity + speed.

MATIC is fast, and because it’s on ETH, it’s also likely to be around as long as ETH is. That’s about as certain as things get in the crypto world.

3. Three “Moonshots”

These aren’t real “moonshots.” These coins are all pretty well established. I’m only labelling them “moonshots” because they have quite a bit to move to get into the top 10.

In order of market cap size we have:

• Algorand (ALGO) – an amazing Layer 1 that’s already fast enough to scale, has sovereign nation buy-in (e.g. El Salvador), and has a growing ecosystem
• Fantom (FTM) – an interoperable “layer 2” for decentralized finance that’s already the backbone lots of those OHM forks and other crazy DeFi ideas
• Harmony (ONE) – a Layer 1 that has the world’s fastest-growing Play to Earn game on it.

Of those, ALGO has the best chance of breaking into the top 10 by a lot, but they are all interesting projects.

4. Concluding Thoughts on Possible Returns

The question you might have in mind now is: how much money could these coins return if they end up in the top 10?

Let’s follow a slightly atypical if more intuitive path. I’m going to leave down-side cases out of this analysis, since if we hit a crypto winter, basically everything loses money. That’s a different exercise.

For the reasons I elaborate here, I generally expect cryptos to continue to climb along with the broader macroeconomy. I don’t think crypto winters will be less acute (we’ll definitely see 80% crashes), but they will be less frequent.

Presently, the top 10 market cap entry barrier is just about $30 billion—that’s with a $2.25T total market cap. We’ll use that as our baseline.

If this bull run continues so that the total market cap reaches $4 (33% above the previous all-time high), then the top 10 should be about $53.3 billion.

If the bull run continues so that the total market cap reaches $6 trillion (doubling the previous all-time high), then the top 10 should be about $81.3 billion.

Here are your results.

• DOT – Base – 11% ; Mid – 97%; Growth – 201%
• MATIC – Base – 17.6%; Mid – 110.9%; Growth – 218.8%
• ALGO – Base – 111%; Mid – 270%; Growth – 465%
• FTM – Base – 667%; Mid – 11.84x; Growth – 18x
• ONE – Base – 10.71x; Mid – 19x; Growth – 29x

Of course, none of those have to make it in the top 10. But there are some nice possible returns in that mix, given that we’re looking at just 1 year’s worth of returns.

At present, that’s my top 5 for that kind of move.

Here’s what others had to say:

Mário Ševčík
A really solid article. Cardano might have looked good at the beginning of the year but you really need to follow the space and adapt. At this stage it’s really nowhere close to Solana, polka or Ethereum.

Valeriy Velchev
EGLD is the best, but it takes time. Maybe 2023 will enter the top three. What is your opinion about EGLD?

Matthew Bryson
DOT, ALGO and MATIC are my picks for this year. I believe the long term interoperability of DOT keeps it in the top 10. ETH 2.0 scares me for the use of Matic and it’s ability to long term be a top 10 coin but it’s very good. ALGO is low market cap in comparison to others, secure and will boom in next bull run providing more potential gains the Dot and Matic.

Andrew Ray
Thanks a lot for the detailed answer. Much respect for you sharing your old answer with the prediction as well and most were spot on! Cheers to great year ahead!

Ryan Downing
I like Cardano because it has a strong community backing it and I’m interested in seeing its ecosystem grow. Tons of projects are coming and like Sundae swap, Liquid (sic), and Meld. Yeah it’s a slow moving ecosystem but I’d rather see things done responsibly correct than a break and fix later method. If crypto is huge in 10 years, onboarding users onto its ecosystem in the easiest and safest way is where Cardano will benefit the most. They are truly trying to design an ecosystem that will be user friendly for beginner crypto investors and traditional investors. I don’t think they are missing the boat on what other layers 1’s are doing since the we are still at 1998 internet Web 2.0 investing if you want to compare Web 3.0 crypto to 2.0 internet. It’s still the starting line for crypto (almost) so I wouldn’t start calling out losers and winners just yet.

Luna does interest me a lot because of the relationship of Terra UST and and the Luna coin. If stable coins and to a much larger extent defi continues to grow in the future, UST and the built in deflationary burn mechanism of the Luna token to mint new UST should benefit Luna’s growing coin price IMO. Do you have a Luna price prediction for 2022?

Nilofer Lakhani
Surprised you left LUNA off your top 5 – great article, always learning with you. thanks.

Touraj Amirkhosravi
Very helpfull. Many thanks to Sebastian that have given great ideas on crypto market. I am not on stock market, so I don’t mention about stock marmet. I know nothing is %100 in investing market, but with great percent of probility be is right and good luck for him I will be thankfull whatever happens.

Editor’s Note:

Start investing In cryptocurrency with Bitxchange www.bit-xchange.org. If you’re new to the world of crypto and figuring out how to buy cryptocurrencies, then cryptocurrency exchanges like Bitxchange can help you to easily buy and sell crypto.