Polkadot pumped 521% last year, will it continue its run in 2021?

One of the biggest crypto projects that faces a lot of  extremely unfair and overblown criticism is Ethereum (ETH),  the second-largest crypto project by market capitalization. If you don’t believe that claim, consider that Ethereum is the only asset in the entire crypto-universe — currently comprising more than 10,000 projects — that has a hit squad metaphorically gunning for it. 

That group of e-currency executioners has been named “Ethereum killers.” 

Right or wrong, we in the crypto media frequently promote these “killers” because they are supposed to collectively take down ETH, under the premise that they handle more transactions per second than the Ethereum blockchain, and at a lower processing fee than Ethereum’s infamous gas fees, which had been hundreds of dollars per transactions at peak traffic times for more than a year. As an FYI, the current ETH gas fee according to Etherscan.io is the equivalent of $2.90 per trade.

Having stated that, the list of usual suspects that the media tends to promote as the most likely ETH slayers are: Cardano, Solana, EOS, and Polkadot. 

While I don’t believe Ethereum is going to be totally taken out by any of those competing projects individually or collectively – I should note that I have an investment position in Ethereum – there is one of these “killers”  that is best-in-class — and that’s Polkadot (DOT).

Polkadot is a multi-function programming platform that serves as a kind of blockchain-based “app store” for application developers including smart contracts. It’s also a solution that shuttles all kinds of data across all kinds of blockchains and networks, and it’s also a cryptocurrency — so it serves as a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. 

Polkadot’s interoperability allows it to exploit the best benefits of every network to which it’s connected — private, public, blockchain-based or otherwise — and that includes the Ethereum blockchain. Polkadot links all of those data islands together safely and securely using its proprietary technology, which enables all kinds of data transfers — not just crypto tokens and coins — to drive speed, utility, and benefit across any connected platform. 

This interoperability solution is a gamechanger for developers who can start to build next-gen applications that get permissioned data from a private blockchain and use it on a public blockchain. It will likely play a critical function allowing cross-chain connectivity for the metaverse once that’s fully operational.  

As of this writing, DOT is trading at $18.87 per coin which is a 65% discount from its all-time high of $53.88 back on Nov. 3 of last year according to CoinMarketCap.com. That same website currently shows DOT’s market cap is more than $18.6 billion, putting it at the No. 12 spot of crypto rankings by total market value. Given its unique utility and innovative tech, it’s reasonable to expect this project’s price to increase as much as 10 times once the metaverse gains traction.

This is not financial advice, only an opinion and any investor needs to do their own research.