The B ankless analysis team recently made predictions on the rise and fall of 16 tokens in the next three months, including mainstream tokens and popular tokens on the L1 track, L2 track, LSD track and other tracks. This article will compile the predictions and reasons of the Bankless analyst team for readers’ own reference.
L1 plate
Solana (SOL)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Meme market is not doing well and selling pressure increases
- Forecast time period: June 21, 2024 to September 21, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $132.79
- Predicted currency price performance so far: up 5.88%
The Bankless analysis team expects that as the meme coin craze further subsides, SOL's subsequent performance will be worse than that of ETH.
Although SOL performed spectacularly between October 2023 and March 2024, with the price subsequently peaking at $200, the novelty of the ecosystem appears to have peaked, with key on-chain metrics including daily active addresses and DEX trading volume ) remained stagnant throughout June.
Solana has seized the spotlight of Meme coin issuance in this cycle with its two characteristics of low fees and unified global status, but the performance of Meme coins has been unsatisfactory in recent weeks.
The top native meme coins on Solana, WIF and BONK, have fallen by more than 50% from their May highs, while other meme coins have performed even worse. Most of the previously popular celebrity meme coins are close to zero, although some believe that the meme craze has subsided. Solana is making a healthy move towards mass adoption, but as Solana users become increasingly aware of the limited profits they can make from on-chain Meme coins, they may consider cashing out, leading to deterioration in Solana fundamentals and increased selling pressure on SOL .
Polkadot (DOT)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Huge improper expenditures coupled with increasing token inflation
- Forecast time period: July 3, 2024 to October 3, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $2.38
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 7.98%
The Bankless analytics team believes its foundation may go bankrupt sooner than expected, as future spending and DOT inflation will further depress the token price.
On June 28, the Polkadot Web3 Foundation released its largest financial report to date as part of its OpenGov initiative, which was implemented a year ago to allow the community to better understand and control the chain's governance process.
In the first half of 2024, Polkadot's fiscal year net loss was approximately 17 million DOT (US$108 million). Assuming that the price of DOT (accounting for 96% of the financial value) remains unchanged, according to the current consumption rate, funds can only maintain the project for two more years. years of operation.
The largest spending category was “promotion,” totaling $37 million, which included some outrageous projects such as: $10 million for sports team sponsorships, $7.9 million for conference events, and $478,000 for an animated logo on the Coinmarketcap homepage , and $180,000 for promotional livery on private jets.
While the Polkadot ecosystem spent a lot of money in 2024 in an attempt to gain traction, its token fell by more than 50% against Ethereum in the first six months of the year.
Toncoin (TON)
- Viewpoint: Neutral
- Reason: Possible for future growth, but over-reliance on Telegram
- Forecast period: June 17, 2024 to September 17, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $7.88
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 4.42%
The Bankless analysis team acknowledges that the network is poised for future growth, but is concerned that at a fully diluted valuation of $40 billion, the investment value of the company's dedicated blockchain is unclear.
While the TON network has previously struggled to gain effective adoption, its growth has accelerated exponentially as its creator, Telegram, has brought more and more utility to the network.
Telegram launched a self-hosted crypto wallet last September to allow users to easily access the TON network. In February, Telegram doubled down on its push for cryptocurrency adoption, announcing it would allow advertisers to use TON to purchase channel promotions and share 50% of the fees with channel operators. Then in April, Telegram partnered with Tether to allow its wallet users to transfer USDT for free.
In 2024, the TVL of the TON network soared by 4200% to $610 million, and the number of daily active addresses also increased significantly.
The TON network appears to be in the early stages of establishing a unique and viable on-chain ecosystem; its native Notcoin Meme currency has reached a valuation of $2 billion, and more than 150 million addresses participate in Hamster Combat, a point-and-click money-making game. The game promises to airdrop tokens to participants.
While the TON network has certainly managed to gain a lot of growth so far, the future of TON is still somewhat unclear. If Telegram's model of generating revenue through a proprietary blockchain proves successful, other companies may eventually launch their own networks to compete with the TON network. But it is undeniable that there is a strong first-mover advantage in bringing in new users now, making the TON Network a universal blockchain solution for other companies looking to experiment on-chain.
Avalanche (AVAX)
- View: Bullish
- Reason: AVAX futures are expected to be listed, and there is little resistance to the approval of spot AVAX ETF
- Forecast time period: June 28, 2024 to September 28, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $27.99
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 8.41%
The Bankless analysis team expects the token to perform well in the coming months as the market begins to digest the previously unexpected ETF approval narrative.
On June 28, Coinbase Derivatives, as a designated contract market (DCM) registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), submitted certification documents to its regulator to list SHIB, LINK, AVAX, XLM and DOT futures.
While the recent filing of the spot SOL ETF has fueled hopes that Solana will be the next crypto asset to be offered to traditional finance, the SEC has maintained in multiple lawsuits against cryptocurrency exchanges that SOL is a security, plus Lacking a regulated futures market, the likelihood of its approval is slim.
In contrast to SOL, AVAX has not yet been designated as a security by the SEC; future approval of CME futures clears the way for spot AVAX ETF approval, just like BTC and ETH.
Near(NEAR)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Short-term hype with AI will lead to no competitive advantage in the long run
- Forecast period: June 25, 2024 to September 25, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $5.5
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 5.48%
While Near has attempted to position itself as a project for the track by capitalizing on the emerging (and yet unconfirmed) AI x Crypto hype at NVIDIA's March developer conference, the network has currently seen few noteworthy developments in AI development.
Although Near founder Illia Polosukhin has worked as an AI researcher before, the reality is that any blockchain that can provide fast consensus can become the basis for AI development, and his project has a larger user base and more TVL. There is no competitive advantage in L1 projects.
Despite NEAR's strong short-term performance, if there are no unique ecological applications that attract enough users and capital to join, the token is likely to underperform major competitors such as ETH and SOL again in the near future.
L2 plate
Arbitrum (ARB)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: L2 track is saturated, token unlocking brings selling pressure
- Forecast time period: June 27, 2024 to September 27, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $0.82
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 5.26%
The Bankless analysis team expects that ARB may outperform other L2s in the coming months, but the overall industry value dilution and the unlocking of ARB should make the token price perform worse than ETH.
The Arbitrum DAO proposal aims to distribute 50% of the remaining orderer fees to ARB delegators on its Tally governance center, paying stakers an annualized yield of approximately 7% in ETH. Staking rewards are not expected to be enabled until September, while support for ARB’s liquid staking tokens will also be launched, allowing delegators to earn additional income in DeFi.
Although the addition of non-inflationary real income in ARB creates additional economic value for holders, there is no guarantee that the ARB token will perform better than ETH. The launch of each new L2 token and unlocking of existing tokens creates selling pressure from investors, diluting all L2 valuations as L2 technology becomes increasingly commoditized and decentralized.
Arbitrum alone is unlocking 100 million tokens per month to its team and investors, while the Arbitrum DAO holds 3.5 billion ARBs that may be distributed to the market and is already being used for a controversial game over the next three years. The incentive program allocates 225 million ARBs.
Blast (BLAST)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Unsatisfactory valuation, high selling pressure after airdrop
- Forecast time period: June 26, 2024 to September 26, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $0.02
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 25.08%
The Bankless analysis team predicts that future incentives will not inspire the interest of users as they did in the past, leading more and more holders to begin to realize the potential unsustainability of the network.
Shortly after BLAST was launched on June 26, its fully diluted valuation was approximately $2 billion, ranking eighth among Ethereum L2s, well below the top low-circulation L2s, and even lagging behind lower adoption but higher circulation Higher L2, such as Mantle and Immutable.
Throughout June, many Blast native ecosystem assets were sold off heavily. Although BLAST attempted to rebound after its listing, it was unsuccessful, indicating that users were cashing out to look for other opportunities. The main motivation for users to deposit into Blast is to win airdrops. The unexpectedly low valuation of BLAST reduces the attractiveness of future incentives. As on-chain fundamentals deteriorate in the next few months, BLAST will face huge selling pressure.
StarkNet(STRK)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Competition is intensifying, and there are no ecologically popular applications to support development.
- Forecast time period: June 18, 2024 to September 18, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $0.75
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 0.07%
The Bankless analysis team expects that the token will continue to underperform ETH in the absence of a sudden explosion of applications in the Starknet ecosystem.
Although STRK’s airdrop at the end of February briefly enlivened the chain, the ecosystem’s glory days appear to have long passed. Several key indicators of Starknet, including daily trading volume and active addresses, peaked in September 2023 and later failed to regain their highs even with airdrop incentives.
Competitor Zero Knowledge Rollup ZKsync announced that it would open the ZK token claim on June 17. The launch of ZK caused the price of STRK to plummet by nearly 30% within a few hours of its release.
Although Starknet implemented the Cairo virtual machine to allow developers to bypass the technical limitations of the EVM chain, this approach made it difficult for both users and developers to interact with the ecosystem. Although there are views that this will be beneficial to the development of certain areas such as full-chain games, the Starknet ecosystem has yet to see breakthrough applications that can inspire the use of persistent chains.
The launch of ZK provides investors with a liquidity token that can be purchased with a zero-knowledge proof technology narrative, undercutting STRK’s technology-centric narrative. At the same time, the large number of new L2 tokens and expected industry token unlocks represent the supply that must be absorbed in the future, which will dilute the valuation of all Ethereum rollups.
Optimism(OP)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: User perception of new functions is low due to the impact of the general environment.
- Forecast period: June 11, 2024 to September 11, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $2.14
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 16.84%
Although the release of the fault-proof function is an important step towards realizing a "super chain" on Optimism, which allows anyone to challenge incorrect information released by the sequencer and withdraw ETH/ERC 20 without permission, it fails Have a positive impact on OP token prices. Ironically, the OP token has actually slightly underperformed its competitors MATIC and ARB since this major upgrade was announced.
Crypto users have historically paid little attention to the security status of the L2 they transact on, with large numbers of TVL migrating to insecure "Stage 0" rollups (just glorified multisig). While Optimism now enjoys a similar "Stage 1" classification to Arbitrum One, this achievement is only the minimum requirement. Vitalik said in March that by the end of 2024, only Stage 1+ networks would be allowed to bear the title "rollups."
On the contrary, in the environment of new L2 token issuance and token unlocking, the future performance of OP tokens will be lower than ETH.
LSD plate
ether.fi (ETHFI)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Competition intensifies, TVL stagnates
- Forecast time period: July 2, 2024 to October 2, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $6.5
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 7.54%
The Bankless analytics team expects that a significant portion of its funds will soon be rotated to Symbiotic Retaking via Mellow Finance, thus undermining the growth due to high valuations and causing the token price to fall further.
Top liquidity re-hyping project ether.fi’s TVL essentially stagnated in June, with monthly growth of just 7%, the lowest growth rate since October 2023. Although ETHFI's pledge amount is less than 80%, its fully diluted valuation is still 40% higher than LDO. This mispricing is common among all LRT issuers and is caused by the low circulation of their tokens and investors’ optimism about the industry’s growth potential.
Although ether.fi is trying to expand its business beyond the suite re-pledge protocol by establishing a “Liquid” strategy vault and a proprietary credit card, the protocol’s re-pledge model with EigenLayer as its core faces fierce competition from other re-pledge models.
Pendle Finance (PENDLE)
- View: Bullish
- Reason: Good fundamentals, potential airdrop
- Forecast period: June 24, 2024 to September 24, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $5.58
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 1.81%
The Bankless analytics team expects the token to continue to outperform as the protocol is able to generate higher yields and capture potential airdrops.
In the first half of 2024, PENDLE was undoubtedly one of the best-performing liquid crypto assets based on fundamentals (i.e., not Meme coins), with over 500% year-to-year gains at its peaks in April and May.
Although the arrival of Ethena and EigenLayer airdrops may have a negative impact on Pendle, the fact is that the protocol TVL increased by more than 50% from the lows in May and exceeded $7 billion multiple times in June.
Lido(LDO)
- View: Bullish
- Reason: Pledge and re-pledge develop together, with huge potential in the future
- Forecast period: June 12, 2024 to September 12, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $1.88
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 7.98%
The Bankless analysis team predicts that the market has underestimated the powerful role stETH plays in re-hypothecation.
Rehypothecation has been an important narrative in the crypto industry in 2024, increasing returns by rehypothecating assets with minimal additional risk. LRT (Liquid Restaking Tokens) works similarly to Lido's stETH, but adds re-staking benefits and airdrop incentives (from EigenLayer and LRT issuers).
In response to competition, Lido partnered with Mellow Finance, an LRT platform leveraging Symbiotic, an EigenLayer competitor and supported by Lido's core employees and investors, to re-hypothecate its LST.
A large part of the users who deposit into the EigenLayer ecosystem do so for airdrops, so depositors can easily switch to Symbiotic because of the airdrops.
Because Lido has invested in Symbiotic, they have an incentive to drive the development of the Symbiotic ecosystem, which means these whales can deposit large amounts of stETH into Mellow's vault to build the most liquid stETH re-staking protocol.
Lido positions itself as the ideal staking solution, able to serve market participants with varying risk appetites, by offering both a normal ether staking product and a slightly riskier liquidity re-staking protocol.
Other sectors
Worldcoin(WLD)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Huge amount of money to unlock, no key progress in the ecosystem
- Forecast time period: July 1, 2024 to October 1, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $2.34
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 7.26%
The Bankless analysis team expects the WLD token unlocking to further drive down the price, and this selling pressure will be more pronounced when there is a lack of focused progress in the ecosystem.
NVIDIA has achieved significant share price growth in the first three months of 2024, fueling enthusiasm for AI. Although WLD, as an AI-related cryptocurrency, did not start to perform until early February, the price also increased by 440% in just one month.
Worldcoin is arguably one of the most notorious low-volume, high-valuation tokens of this cycle, a trait that makes it easier to manipulate prices and attract investor interest. But the internal unlocking starting from July 25 will increase the selling pressure.
Although Worldcoin stated that it plans to create real-world utility for WLD and its authentication model in the future, the project has made little significant progress in practical adoption, and its core authentication process has been hampered by the existence of a black market for user identities. faced significant doubts.
Velodrome（VELO）
- View: Bullish
- Reason: Good intellectual property rights guarantee brings long-term benefits to the holder
- Forecast time period: June 20, 2024 to September 20, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $0.11
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 9.21%
The Business License (BSL) obtained by Velodrome limits counterfeiting and forking of the exchange, allowing only licensed participants to operate. This feature prompted Base's native Aerodrome fork to allocate 40% of the initial AERO supply to veVELO stakeholders in return for being agreed and approved by the DAO.
Coinbase listed VELO and AERO in February, and while both tokens have surged since then, AERO has far outperformed on the back of Base Season hype and Coinbase's direct investment through its Base Ecosystem Fund its predecessor.
While the AERO token has attracted a lot of attention due to its recent good performance, VELO holders will enjoy the benefits of BSL by staking, and may receive long-term benefits from future fork projects that wish to use its code base to deploy .
Ethena (ENA)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Insufficient revenue generation capabilities and security guarantees
- Forecast period: June 14, 2024 to September 14, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $0.72
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 37.22%
The Bankless analysis team believes that Ethena's future revenue generation capabilities and security are insufficient.
Ethena's deposits have also risen in recent weeks due to the company's decision to reduce the revenue cut rate on its insurance fund from 50% to 20%, increasing returns for staking USDe holders.
Spot BTC ETFs do see significant institutional adoption, but this is primarily from hedge funds, which may be employing the same revenue-generating strategies as Ethena — increasing the competitiveness of these once lucrative trades.
With the spot ETH ETF expected to begin trading this summer, giving hedge funds a second crypto asset to arbitrage, the basis Ethena generates through its risk-free arbitrage strategy is likely to continue to compress.
Returns generated from short Ethena perpetual futures fell significantly in June, with sUSDe only generating half as much compared to the period before these changes were implemented, despite increasing the percentage of revenue paid to stakers.
Ethena’s liabilities may have expanded to an all-time high, but the insurance fund to cover losses in the event of negative interest rates or the loss of user assets represents only 1% of that deposit base, and when times worse than negative interest rates emerge, , ENA’s situation became dangerous.
Curve Finance (CRV)
- View: Bearish
- Reason: Current token model is not sustainable
- Forecast period: June 13, 2024 to September 13, 2024
- Coin price at time of prediction: $0.28
- Predicted currency price performance so far: down 3.24%
The Bankless analysis team said that although the founder was forced to stop losses and triggered a decline, Curve's high-inflation token model may not be sustainable.
Founder Michael Egorov previously had nearly $100 million in outstanding stablecoin borrowings, collateralized by 350 million CRV, spread across five different lending protocols. Subsequently, depositors of these protocols began to withdraw liquidity from the CRV market, whether out of spite or fear of bad debts caused by liquidation, and CRV collateral utilization and borrowing rates soared, further squeezing Egorov.
While Egorov’s liquidation is now largely complete and the CRV oversupply issue has been resolved, there’s no guarantee that the token price will only rise from here on out. The project's inflationary token model has put tremendous pressure on CRV since its existence, causing it to remain weak relative to Ethereum.
Curve incentivizes users to lock CRV for a long period of time to earn more token issuance and platform fees. The protocol’s TVL has seen outflows of nearly $300 million in June. As the price of CRV decreases, it reduces the value of rewards and negatively affects the fundamentals of the token, potentially triggering a TVL death spiral.
