As we move through the month of June and continue on with the halfway point of the year, this week’s choices are set to benefit from increased trading activity and speculation as the result of significant developments and network upgrades that should strengthen their market positions and also result in increased amounts of attention to their respective currencies over the coming weeks.

Zilliqa (ZIL)

Zilliqa is a high-throughput public blockchain platform that is designed to scale and incorporates a sharding technology that allows users to develop smart contracts and dApps directly on their platform. The project is seen as one of the most likely to solve the scaling issues that plague most blockchains, and makes use of a novel consensus protocol that increases transaction rates as the network expands with more transactions per second being processed as more mining nodes join the network.

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Why Zilliqa?

After launching their mainnet at the end of January, the Zilliqa team are set to unveil smart contracts on their platform on June 10. The smart contract launch should prove pivotal for the project as it has been touted as a fast and efficient alternative to Ethereum that has already solved the sharding problem. The team elaborate on the launch here and the enabling of smart contracts will allow the team to onboard projects and developers ready to host applications on their platform.

Cardano (ADA)

Cardano is a blockchain led by former Ethereum veteran Charles Hoskinson and developed by the IOHK firm. Cardano aims to be the next generation blockchain project and is slated to become a full-fledged smart contract platform with a library of protocols that developers can use to build decentralized apps. The platform retains a strong academic foundation and uses ADA as its native currency.

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Why Cardano?

The team continue to work towards launching the full version of the platform and the Cardano Shelley Testnet Is set to be activated sometime within the next couple of weeks. Shelly will be tested by a small number of developers, and will be deployed on the mainnet in August once its reliability has been confirmed. Shelley will also employ the Ouroboros Genesis Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, and enable smart contracts and the development and hosting of decentralized applications. The move to Shelley brings Cardano a step closer to launching and enabling fans of the project to stake their ADA tokens.

Stellar Lumens (XLM)

Stellar is a crypto platform that’s designed to enable fast, secure, and low cost money transfers. Designed for individuals as well as enterprises, Stellar makes it possible to send money across borders and facilitates low-cost payments between currencies as transactions sent via the Stellar network take an average of 2-5 seconds to clear, while the base fee for sending a transaction currently stands at 0.0001 XLM.

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Why Stellar Lumens?

Sentiment around Stellar remains positive as the project moves closer to launching its World Wire functionalities in collaboration with IBM. Network validators will soon vote to upgrade the Stellar Network to Protocol 11, and the vote will take place on Monday, June 10 at 16:00 UTC. The proposed protocol improvements include better transaction pricing and increased network capacity, and the team explain what they mean for developers, users, and businesses on their official blog.

How did the coins perform last week?

EOS had a tough week and fell by 19.5% in value over the week and is currently trading at around $6.36. NEO also declined in value, and lost around 15.5% in value, and is currently trading at $12.10. BCH also declined in value and fell by around 12% over the week, and is currently trading at $394. Over the course of the week, the market declined from $276B to $254B.