• Analyst Lark Davis mentions some potential altcoins seeing pretty strong development.
• Just a spoiler here, the top five crypto-list doesn’t include Bitcoin.

As we enter into the eighth month of 2021, the overall cryptocurrency market continues to trade strong. At press time, the overall crypto market is up 6.4 percent with a market cap of $1.63 trillion. Since the beginning of 2021, the year-to-date gains of the overall crypto space stand at more than 100 percent.

Popular analyst Lark Davis has come up with his prediction for the top 5 cryptocurrencies to invest in for the next month of August. So without much ado, let’s get started!

1. Ethereum (ETH)

Currently, Ethereum (ETH) is trading at $2463 with a market cap of $287 billion. Two days back we reported that Ethereum is set for a massive show for the rest of the year. Some market experts are giving targets as high as $8000-$10,000.

Furthermore, the Ethereum community is eagerly waiting for the London hardfork scheduled ahead this week on August 4. What’s getting investors excited is the EIP-1559 protocol implementation which will introduce ETH fee burning, essentially reducing the transaction costs.

This will lead to a deflationary economic structure which according to Lark Davis has a strong positive impact for the long term. Another major thing is the EIP 3657 with founder Vitalik Buterin announcing the expected timeline for merging the Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0.

Read More: Vitalik Buterin gives expected timeline for Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 merge

This is a big positive for ETH investors as it will help to drive the prices higher.

2. Polygon (MATIC)

Polygon formerly MATIC, has had a solid run up this year. The Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution has some good projects up its sleeves. Polygon’s MATIC token is up 100x year to date with 9900 percent gains. As of press time, MATIC is trading at a price of $1.01 with a market cap of $6.7 billion.

Analyst Lark Davis believes that Polygon has still a lot of gas left in it with his long term targets of $5 and $10 in place. The analyst believes that Polygon will benefit as Ethereum continues to face congestion issues as of now. Thus, Polygon will cater to the scalability requirement of users on the Ethereum blockchain.

Thus, as far as Ethereum continues to struggle with scalability-related matters, projects like Polygon shall do well. Besides, Polygon has also received major backing from tech-entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

Polygon has entered into the blockchain gaming and NFT ecosystem through its new division Polygon Studios. This division will focus on bringing the Web 2.0 world to Web 3.0.

3. Terra (LUNA)

The third coin on the analyst’s list is Terra’s LUNA. Its mirror protocol helps users to be market makers for traditional stocks like Apple and Microsoft. Thus, it helps to build the bridge between the crypto world and Wall Street.

Besides, there are some other exciting projects as well! Terra has recently raised $150 million in funding to create its own DeFi ecosystem. Another major thing to watch out for is the upcoming Columbus-5 upgrade on Terra. the three key upgrades coming to the Terra ecosystem are:

1. Burn all seigniorage.
2. Upgrade to Stargate – enabling IBC and protobuf migration (10x-100x tx speed).
3. Ozone and Wormhole Launch.

The Terra’ ecosystem’s dollar-pegged stablecoin is the UST. Thus, if you want to issue the UST, users need to burn LUNA. This will create supply pressure on the cryptocurrency pushing its price higher.

The upgrade to stargate will bring LUNA to the cosmos inter-connected blockchain ecosystem. Thus, LUNA’s IBC (Inter-blockchain communication protocol) will allow users to transfer tokens across zones while running multi-chain smart contracts.

Furthermore, the Columbus-5 upgrade will bring along the Ozone and Warmhole launch. Ozone is an insurance mutual DeFi protocol that will facilitate levered coverage of technical failure risks in the Terra DeFi ecosystem. This will further help to drive ahead Terra DeFi ecosystem growth.

Warmhole serves as a bridge connecting Terra to Solana. Several projects on Solana are already using the UST stablecoin. But for now only the ERC-20 version of UST can be ported over Solana but this increases friction significantly. Warmhole will alleviate this friction by creating a direct bridge from Terra to Solana which will lead to further UST adoption.

4. Polkadot (DOT)

Lark Davis remains extremely bullish on the Polkadot (DOT) ecosystem as of now. At press time, the DOT token is up 13.5 percent and trading at $16.42 with a market cap of $18 billion. The Polkadot (DOT) price shot all the way to $50 during the peak of the bull run in mid-May 2021.

The analyst is very bullish about the ecosystem that’s growing around Polkadot. Kusama, the early-stage deployment on Polkadot and the scalable multi-chain network is getting much popularity. Through its multiple parachains, Kusama has managed to lock up to 10 percent of its native KSM tokens after its first parachain auction.

Thus, Kusama going live is a big bullish indicator for Polkadot as it helps to realize the big dream of getting multiple parachains live on the Polkadot network. Lark Davis also predicts that the parachian auctions for Polkadot will be coming soon. So with all the hype building around, the DOT price can go further to the north.

5. Cardano (ADA)

Cardano registered a solid bull run in 2021 becoming the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap as of date. At press time, Cardano’s ADA is trading at $1.31 and is 60 percent up since the beginning of this year.

The Cardano blockchain has recently seen some token sales happening on its platform. Furthermore, it also becoming the preferred platform for the rapidly emerging NFT market.

Besides, Cardano is making some key moves for future growth and getting more market share. The cFund investment strategy developed by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson is gaining momentum as it gains massive smart contracts ability. The smart contracts on Cardano shall be reportedly live by September this year.

Although Cardano has faced some major delays in its timeline of implementing some key projects, the founder has been working hard on it. Lark Davis believes that the Cardano smart contracts are surely coming by the end of this year, if not September. Overall, it looks like altcoins could take a lead for the coming month.