Key highlights:

The MKR auction will bring additional attention to the Maker project

Aeternity community events will be conducted remotely

The Loki privacy coin will be upgraded through a hard fork on March 25

The top 3 coins to watch this week

As we move towards the end of Q1, a number of projects are moving ahead with continued development, and this week’s choices are set to benefit from significant updates and announcements that should strengthen their market positions and benefit their communities. The news should also result in increased amounts of attention to each respective currency over the coming weeks.

1. Maker (MKR)

MKR is the native currency of the MakerDAO project, which is a decentralized finance platform that also administers the DAI stablecoin. By using MakerDAO users can lock up their Ethereum, Basic Attention Token and USD Coin holdings in order to receive loans paid out in the Dai stablecoin.

Why Maker?

The sudden drop in the price of Ethereum on March 12 left a number of DeFi protocols with large losses as a result in the sharp drop in liquidity. MakerDAO lost around $4m worth of unbacked DAI, and the losses were recovered by minting new MKR tokens via the MKR auction which began on March 19.

The debt auctions follow a ‘Reverse Auction’ system as bidders bid a fixed amount of Dai, (50,000) for decreasing amounts of MKR. The auction opened up with a bidder lot of 250 MKR for 50,000 Dai, which roughly equated to price of 200 Dai/MKR. The MakerDAO community is also to use USDC as an alternative source of collateral to mitigate any further risks, while MakerDAO will shutdown Single Collateral Dai (SAI) sometime within the next 30 days to cut down on expenses.

Buy/Sell Maker (MKR)

2. Aeternity (AE)

Aeternity is an open source and Turing-complete blockchain that enables real-world data to be interfaced with smart contracts using decentralized oracles. The project uses a novel hybrid Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm and also uses state channels in order to achieve high levels of performance.

Why Aeternity?

The team have pivoted in order to deal with sudden changes as a result of the Coronavius outbreak and the Aeternity Haeckathon in Venezuela has been postponed to March 25-26 and will also take place remotely in order to minimize all risks. The Aeternity team have also tweeted that their Coffee Meetup in Bogota, Colombia on March 26 with ambassador Fabian Hernandez will also be taking place virtually.

Buy/Sell Aeternity (AE)

How to buy Aeternity on Binance?

3. Loki (LOKI)

Loki is a privacy coin built on the Monero codebase, and the project’s goal is to launch a network that will facilitate completely anonymous and decentralized transactions. The LOKI token serves as the medium of exchange on the network in a manner similar to how Ether powers the Ethereum network.

Why Loki?

The project is set to undergo its Valiant Vidar 7.0.0 Fork hard fork at block height 496,969, which is scheduled to occur on March 25 at around 2PM AEDT. The hardfork will include Storage Server upgrades to enable 3-hop onion routing for Session messages, as well as a block reward adjustment which sees 66% of each block reward go to Service Nodes, with 24% to miners, and 10% to the Loki Foundation. The Loki Name System will also allow users to register mappings to make use of unique, human readable names. The team detail the coming hardfork in full detail in their official blog post.

Buy/Sell Loki (LOKI)

How did the coins perform last week?

The seven day period led to mixed results across the market. Two of our last week's top coins to watch did not see major price movements, while one performed very well. WTC made a marginal loss of around 1% and in value and is currently trading at around $0.18. KMD improved by around 12%, and is currently trading at $0.34. NXS made a marginal gain of around 1% in value and is currently trading at $0.11. Over the course of the week, the total cryptocurrency market cap moved from $150B to $168B (+12%).