The Most Exciting Blockchains that are Flying Under the Radar
These emerging ecosystems could play a big role in the next bull run.
When most people talk about blockchains, the big names are the first that come to mind. Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Avalanche, and others lead the way, with Layer-2 solutions like Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism appearing a little further down the list. But just like the cryptocurrencies they support, blockchains are proliferating at an incredible rate.
There are currently dozens of blockchains supporting decentralized applications in crypto. These are the Layer-1 blockchains like Ethereum and Solana, as well as their forks, side chains and rollup layers. Each ecosystem has unique advantages and disadvantages that appeal to developers and teams with different objectives, and each contributes to the growing world of decentralized computing.
As we’ve seen in previous market cycles, emerging blockchain ecosystems present some of the best growth opportunities. As users and investors begin to pay attention to these chains, capital pours in and those who were early reap the benefits. But with so many blockchains, picking the ones that will fly from the ones that will fizzle is a difficult task.
Today, we take a look at some small and emerging blockchains showing incredible potential for growth.
Cube Network
Fast, scalable and interoperable – Cube Network is solving some of the biggest challenges faced by the most popular blockchains on the market. Launched in 2022, Cube is interoperable with all EVM and Cosmos-IBM chains, leverages a randomized Proof-of-Stake consensus method for increased decentralization, and includes built-in rollups on a specialized settlement layer to increase throughput.
While new, some exciting projects are already looking into the Cube ecosystem. Users looking to explore what Cube has to offer can begin swapping today on the chain’s Decentralized Exchanges – DeSpace Protocol’s DeSwap DEX. DeSwap offers liquidity to traders looking to make the switch and features market-leading LP rewards, low fees and a user-friendly experience. Their DEX is also interoperable with several other major chains, making the switch to Cube as simple as can be.
While it’s still early days for Cube, their solution to the challenges blockchains face makes it a worthwhile ecosystem to watch.
Phantasma
With gaming and NFTs capturing such a large portion of crypto markets, blockchains built specifically to support this exciting frontier will play an important role in the future. Phantasma is one such chain, leveraging side chains to support massive transaction throughput and prevent the overall ecosystem from slowing when individual dApps experience transaction overloads.
While Phantasma itself has been around for several years now, it is still yet to garner mass recognition for what the chain is capable of. Don’t let this put you off though – early backers saw eye-watering returns in 2021, and the chain is set to play an increasingly important role in gaming and NFT projects moving forward.
Sui
Conceived and developed by ex-Meta computer scientists, Sui is an upcoming blockchain that aims to process transactions in parallel, rather than sequentially like most other blockchains. This approach allows for higher throughput and significantly reduced latency as the validator pool can distribute transaction processing across the network simultaneously, rather than waiting for consensus on a group of transactions in a block.
They’ve already attracted the attention of some of the biggest names in crypto, and it’ll be exciting to see how their solution grows once it goes live.
Hathor
A list of alternative blockchains wouldn’t be complete without a DAG – Directed Acyclic Graph. DAGs, like Hathor, don’t use blocks and instead create a web of individual transactions that attest to a part of the chain. The result is near-instant settlement, ultra-low fees and unlimited scalability.
Hathor takes these properties of DAGs to the next level by making token deployment as simple as it can be. No coding is required for anyone to launch a cryptocurrency or NFT in less than a minute, opening the door to rapid ecosystem expansion.
While there are still challenges for DAGs to overcome, protocols like Hathor are making incredible progress and will certainly play an important role in the future of distributed ledger technology.
A bright future for blockchains
It’s clear today that the future will be built on a multitude of different blockchains. While some will fail, many will find a niche and grow steadily as mainstream adoption takes off. For investors early enough to spot these opportunities, the rewards can be great.
