Solana and Avalanche Take the 2023 Throne with 620% and 290% Price Growth + More News

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of crypto and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s news.

In this edition:

• 2023 Winners: Solana and Avalanche Take the Throne with 620% and 290% YTD Price Growth
• Waterfall Network Announces New Testnet 8
• Gox Double-pays Creditors Via PayPal, Asks for Money Back

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2023 Winners: Solana and Avalanche Take the Throne with 620% and 290% YTD Price Growth

AltIndex looked into the best performers among the top 10 coins by market capitalization in 2023, year-to-date (to be precise, between January 1 and December 21). It found that Solana (SOL) is the biggest crypto winner among the top 10. Its price surged by 620% in this time frame. Avalanche (AVAX) came second with a 290% growth.

In January, the price of SOL stood at $12.12. On December 21, it hit $87.3. This 620% increase “shows that Solana saw four times bigger price growth than the world’s largest crypto, Bitcoin.”

But things in crypto change fast. By the time of writing this article, less than a week later, the SOL price rose to $113, and it’s currently up 910% over the past 12 months.

Thanks to this increase, Solana added more than $32 billion to its market cap, rising from $4.3 billion in January to almost $37 billion on December 21. It continued to climb. At the time of writing the article, it’s up to $48.46 billion.

Avalanche ranked as the second-largest crypto gainer in 2023. The price of an AVAX token soared by 290%, rising from $11.7 to $45.7 on December 21. Since then, the price dropped slightly to $44. However, AVAX recorded an increase over the past 12 months of 276%.

Its market capitalization has increased by an impressive $13 billion since the beginning of the year and now stands at $16 billion.

Bitcoin (BTC) went up from around $17,400 in January to $42,730 today. Its current market capitalization is $836.28 billion.

“After being at the center of the crypto price crash, losing millions of active addresses and billions in market cap, BTC drew a lot of attention from mainstream investors this year, helping it double in value,” AltIndex argued.

Cardano (ADA) and Ethereum (ETH) round the list of the top five crypto performers, with 140% and 85% price increases until December 21, respectively.

And in terms of the last 12 months, on December 27, ADA is up 129% to the current price of $0.6, and ETH is up 85% to $2,247.

These five top-performing cryptocurrencies make up most of the market value: 72% to be more price, with BTC taking the largest chunk of this pie.

Waterfall Network Announces New Testnet 8

Waterfall Network, a layer one (L1), scalable, decentralized smart contract platform, today announced the release of its Testnet 8.

Per the press release shared with Cryptonews, this is the final testnet before the protocol’s publicly accessible mainnet, which is launching soon.

Testnet 8 represents the latest version of the Waterfall protocol with optimizations and fixed bugs that have allowed the network to achieve loads of 10,000+ transactions per second, it said.

Other improvements include faster synchronizations in parallel, improved search for new peers, automatically unlocked validators, improved reliability in optimistic consensus, randomness creation, new transaction gas estimates, and storage optimization.

In anticipation of the launch of the main network, and based on ongoing user feedback, Waterfall will also continue to develop and implement fast synchronization, simpler mnemonic phrase mechanisms, and reduced consumption of disk space.

Waterfall will also release a Testnet 8 hard fork where it will test fork mechanisms and implement stake delegation functionality.

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“The many stages of the testnet have proven integral toward developing a public mainnet that will allow for the most efficient means of creating a protocol with virtually unlimited scalability,” said Sergii Grybniak, Blue Wave CTO and Waterfall Head of Research.

Waterfall protocol is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible, serving the huge existing Ethereum developer base without having to learn new programming languages, the announcements says.

Its protocol incorporates the “Directed AcyclicGraph (DAG)” technology that allows for “virtually unlimited scalability” and portability of decentralized applications (dapps) with low processing power requirements. This allows anyone to run a validator node from low-cost laptops and later mobile phones.

Mt. Gox Double-pays Creditors Via PayPal, Asks for Money Back

The Mt. Gox trustees sent an email to numerous creditors, who then posted it on Reddit, asking back for some of the money it sent.

The Rehabilitation Trustee transferred money to the creditors via PayPal as the first repayment in the civil rehabilitation proceedings of MtGox, it said.

“However, due to a system issue, the transfer of money to you was inadvertently made twice,” the email stated.

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The first transfer was the official repayment, the Trustee added, but the second transfer was an error. “Please note that you are not authorized to receive the second transfer and are legally obligated to return the above amount to the Rehabilitation Trustee,” said the email.

It requested the recipients to immediately refund the second amount via PayPal’s “Refund” feature.

In 2014, crypto exchange Mt. Gox suffered a massive hack that saw 850,000 bitcoin (BTC) stolen. Trustees recovered roughly 20% of the hack. Nearly ten years after the hack, the victims have finally started to receive repayments.