Don’t let their market caps put you off.
Now that Bitcoin has set a new all-time high of $111,000, many of you wonder which altcoins will pump the hardest this cycle.
Shortly, we’ll see capital rotation from BTC to other cryptos.
Today, I’ll focus on more established altcoins instead of small caps, likely to establish a reputation as future blue-chip assets.
Without further ado, let’s begin.
Sui (SUI)
After being initially sceptical, it’s time to seize the opportunity here.
Solana presented itself as a key Ethereum competitor in the 2020/21 bull market.
Many are touting Sui as the major Solana competitor for this cycle.
Sui is a “decentralised, permissionless (public) layer-1 network and smart contracts platform” founded by developers at Mysten Labs, a California-based blockchain and Web3 infrastructure firm.
According to a Sui Foundation blog post from April 2023, its network boasts 297,000 transactions per second (TPS) secured by over 110 validators distributed worldwide.
The Foundation also claims a near-instant finality (time taken to confirm and record a transaction on a blockchain) of 480 ms.
Many from this entity are former Facebook employees who created the Move programming language.
According to Electric Capital, Sui has 760 monthly active developers, including 150 full-time devs (as of Nov. 1, 2024). While well behind Solana, it is increasing, unlike Ethereum, which peaked in July 2022.
EC’s 2024 Developer Report noted that Sui was the year’s eighth most popular ecosystem for new devs.
Last November, the Sui Foundation announced a partnership with Franklin Templeton. The asset manager with $1.5 trillion AUM will use DeepBook, a decentralised central limit order book based on Sui.
It harnesses the benefits of the protocol’s parallel computing and low latency (390 ms), courtesy of last year’s Mysticeti Upgrade.
Besides this, Sui has also teamed up with Oracle Red Bull Racing and has expanded its presence in RWAs. Moreover, its Foundation has partnered with Chainalysis to boost on-chain compliance and has collaborated with universities.
Before getting ahead of ourselves, we must monitor how Sui’s network copes with outages and major exploits.
Last week, Cetus Protocol, the leading decentralised exchange (DEX) on the Sui network, suffered a $223 million exploit that suspended trading and depleted its liquidity pools.
The protocol has since frozen $162 million of these stolen funds, but this raises fundamental concerns about how decentralised these crypto protocols are. That’s a different yet important topic of discussion.
Before you get spooked and dismiss Sui as unreliable, remember that Solana has also dealt with multiple cases of unexpected network downtime, notably in 2022. Its price crashed to $10/SOL in December 2022, and it is now around $175.
Logo courtesy of the Sui media kit.
Ondo (ONDO)
Ondo, a.k.a. Ondo Finance, aims to make institutional-grade products and services universally available through the power of blockchain technology.
One of its main protocols is Flux, which allows people to loan and borrow stablecoins against short-term tokenised US Treasuries. The only collateral available on this platform is OUSG, a tokenised Treasury issued by Ondo Finance.
Last June, Drift, a Solana DEX focused on providing perpetual futures and spot trading with leverage, announced a partnership with Ondo. Access to USDY marks the first RWA option on the perpetual platform, permitting its clients (who hold USDY on Solana) to use tokenised T-Bills as collateral.
Keeping with the theme of relatively new products and tokens, ONDO launched in January last year and hit an all-time high of $2.14 in December. It has since retraced to 96 cents.
However, remember that this and other RWA-themed assets are still in their infancy. The tokenisation of physical assets is expected to exceed $16 trillion by 2030, representing 10% of global GDP.
Thus, provided that Ondo remains secure and continues to improve its services while focusing on RWAs, ONDO will likely continue climbing the ranks and deliver a solid ROI for its early investors.
Image courtesy of Ondo media kit.
Pendle (PENDLE)
Pendle is a yield-trading protocol that allows participants to use wrapped assets, for example, Lido Staked ETH (stETH), to earn more predictable yields via Pendle’s automated market maker (AMM).
In brief, it converts yield-bearing tokens to SY (standardised yield tokens) that work with the Pendle AMM. Subsequently, these assets are split into a principal token (PT) and a yield token (YT).
Pendle provides a helpful summary of its operation in this YouTube video. The relevant information is also outlined in its corresponding documentation portal.
Before Pendle, a common way to earn interest on wrapped tokens was (and still is) through a liquidity pool (LP), which is common among AMMs such as Aave, Curve, Raydium, and Uniswap.
Users who contribute capital to help stabilise and secure these DeFi platforms are proportionately rewarded with wrapped tokens, which can be staked to earn interest on top of this.
Moreover, the system is compatible with BNB Chain, Ethereum, and two L2s: Arbitrum and Optimism. I envisage it functioning on Solana and other L1s soon, further boosting its user base and the volume flowing through it.
PENDLE token is indirectly used as a governance token by converting it to Vote-escrowed PENDLE, i.e., vePENDLE.
It is one of the many burgeoning projects in the DeFi space. According to DefiLlama, its total value locked (TVL) has increased 53% in the past month and is ranked 9th among protocols in this crypto sector.
With approximately $4.5 billion of TVL in Pendle, I expect the demand for liquid re-staking tokens to remain strong as more people aim to compensate for diminishing ETH staking rewards in recent years.
This is mostly due to a higher percentage of coins locked up to secure the network — check out this report from Grayscale for a detailed outline of ETH staking.
Image courtesy of Pendle media kit
Pyth Network (PYTH)
Pyth Network is an emerging player in the decentralised oracle space. It helps provide smart contracts with rapid, secure, dependable data from institutional sources.
Users can also obtain historical market stats from any Pyth feed and apply them to on- and off-chain products via Pyth’s Benchmark feature. Moreover, its Entropy product can securely generate random numbers for blockchain applications.
While PYTH is native to Solana, the protocol claims to offer more than 540 price feeds across over 80 compatible networks, including Ethereum and EVM-compatible alternatives.
Some of these include L1s like BNB Chain, Polygon, Sui, NEAR, and Aptos, with a vast swathe of servicing popular L2s such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base, to name a few.
Wrapped versions of PYTH can exist on these abovementioned networks via a permissionless bridge, notably Wormhole.
Swiss financial institution AMINA Bank declared a strategic partnership with Pyth Network in July, incorporating the latter’s real-time price feeds of digital assets into its systems.
Pyth Network has also announced a collaboration with Sony Group and Startale, a Web3 platform. The former will provide live data feeds to Sony’s upcoming L2 project, Soneium.
Its biggest and most renowned competitor is Chainlink, one of the first decentralised oracle networks to emerge. Despite mediocre gains so far this year, LINK remains a dominant crypto.
However, it’s much newer than Chainlink and has a significantly lower market cap. Thus, you’ll get a cohort of crypto investors seeking an alternative to blue-chip projects and banking on PYTH, outperforming LINK.
I am more optimistic about Chainlink in the long term, but I believe both networks can coexist moving forward, likely focusing on niches for certain industries.
This is plausible because much of PYTH’s activity is on Solana. Chainlink, on the other hand, is still mostly associated with Ethereum.
NEAR Protocol (NEAR)
This major crypto project is at the forefront of chain abstraction, which claims to be a “user-friendly and carbon-neutral blockchain, built to be fast, safe, and able to grow without limit.”
Both chain and account abstraction will help create a seamless user experience with this interoperability (with Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains) and greater flexibility overall.
Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade has ushered in some aspects of account abstraction, allowing regular (externally owned) accounts to temporarily act as smart contracts, i.e., adding programmability to these wallets.
This also allows people to pay for Ethereum transactions using ERC-20 tokens instead of exclusively ETH. See EIP-7702 for specific details.
> Comparison to Ethereum
Click here to learn how NEAR’s access (Full-Access and Function-Call) keys work and their benefits, particularly for an improved UX and simpler onboarding.
Earlier this month, NEAR Protocol announced lightning-fast 600 millisecond blocks and 1.2 seconds of finality on its own chain, no L2s needed.
Blink and it's final.
NEAR Protocol just dropped 600ms blocks + 1.2s finality on mainnet. Blazing-fast performance and secure execution—finally, a chain that delivers both
Some chains talk about fast blocks. NEAR delivers real finality in 1.2 seconds.
No compromises. No… pic.twitter.com/3nQXBQ1E2w— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) May 13, 2025
Aave (AAVE)
Aave is a decentralised, non-custodial liquidity protocol that allows anyone to borrow and lend a wide range of digital assets.
It began as ETHLend (LEND) in 2017, renamed itself Lend as it became multi-chain, and then migrated to AAVE in October 2020.
The platform is available in different iterations: Versions 1, 2, and 3. According to an Aave Docs entry, the latter offers improved capital efficiencies, greater borrowing power, and cross-chain functionality while allowing for high decentralisation.
While its focus is still on peer-to-peer (P2P) borrowing and lending of crypto assets, the protocol is still limited to Ethereum and some ERC-20 tokens. This still includes Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and various stablecoins, such as its latest RLUSD listing.
However, this presents opportunities for Aave, as the market matures and greater liquidity flows through the space to make lending and borrowing pools viable.
Due to its longevity, high security score, evolution (it started on Ethereum but now functions on another 15 EVM-compatible networks) and decentralisation, Aave remains a reliable player in the DeFi space. In contrast, others have failed or faded into the ether.
You will see a major blockchain missing from the Aave Marketplace. Fortunately, a community member submitted a proposal in December 2022 to expand Aave’s V3 to Solana using Neon EVM.
This would allow Ethereum-based dApps to readily utilise Solana’s scalability and liquidity, without learning Rust, the main programming language used for Solana’s smart contracts.
Some will see AAVE as an older crypto, but I see it as a sign of strength and a solid long-term play.
Additional thoughts
Even though we have our favourites from previous cycles, I’ve learned that many investors, particularly noobs, want a fresh narrative and new cryptos to discuss, rather than banking on older ones such as ADA and XRP, to stage a comeback.
There are others I would have liked to feature here, but I chose not to for various reasons.
I was going to feature Helium (HNT), another DePIN crypto. However, based on an assessment from QuickIntel via DEXTools, this project is an alleged scam risk, among other concerns, to warrant an overall security score of 66/99 for HNT.
Nova Labs, the main entity behind the Helium blockchain, settled with the US SEC last month about alleged fraud charges, while neither admitting nor denying the allegations.
These two factors will make prospective HNT investors hesitant to support the project, at least for now.
Then again, if you see this as a good long-term buy, it could be a useful opportunity to take advantage of lower prices.
I previously covered HNT and viewed it as an altcoin with solid potential, but now I have reservations. Nonetheless, its security metrics and overall tech could improve over time, so keep an eye on this token and project.
Monitor Hivemapper (HONEY) and Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUALS) during this bull run. I believe these, alongside their counterparts in the DePIN and AI agents sectors, will also thrive for the remainder of this cycle.
If you buy these, ensure you take profits in BTC to lock in these gains.
For the record, the projects in focus have high security scores, most around 99/99. I checked this and factored in the holdings* of each token’s largest wallets before promoting them.
*Why is this significant? It helps gauge the likelihood and extent of price manipulation by a handful (often less than five) wallets for a given token. All projects have their whales, but some are so heavily influenced by large wallets that it’s important to research who manages these.
Which other crypto assets would you have featured on this list? Comment below.
P.S. VIRTUALS got a passing reference because I increasingly perceive AI agents as this cycle’s de facto memecoins. I forgot which writer said this, but it’s a good analogy.
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Disclaimers
• This blog post is for informational purposes only. It is not financial, legal, or investment advice. You are ultimately responsible for your decisions.
• My opinions in this piece may not reflect those of any news outlet, person, organisation, or entity listed here.
• Please do your own research before investing in any cryptocurrency assets, staking, NFTs, or other products associated with this space.
• These altcoins collectively make up about 12% of my crypto portfolio. I am mostly invested in SOL, SUI, and ONDO in order of USD holdings.
Featured image by oneshot1 at Shutterstock.