The crypto performance of Atom and Polkadot

ATOM is the crypto of Cosmos Hub, while DOT is the cryptocurrency of Polkadot. 

Both have seen their market values drop a lot over the past year, but in different ways

The DOT crypto of Polkadot

Polkadot is a complex crypto project that has DOT as its native cryptocurrency. 

DOT was only launched in the markets in August 2020, so a few months after its launch it was dragged up by the last big bull run. 

Thus, there is no pre-2020 data to take as a reference, but up to the time of the triggering of the last big speculative bubble, its price was around or just below $5. 

During 2021, it followed more or less the same general trend as the crypto market, with two peaks, the largest of which in November reaching as high as $55. In other words, it gained 1,000% in less than a year, from late December 2020 to before mid-November 2021. 

Beginning in mid-November 2021, its price began to fall, due to the bursting of the speculative bubble, so that it is now at about $6, a loss of 88% from the highs. 

The current price, however, is still slightly higher than pre-bubble, although the 2022 low was touched in late December just above $4.2. 

This is therefore a classic speculative bubble that took a little less than a year to inflate, and a little more than a year to deflate, leaving the final price at virtually the same starting levels. 

At this point, it is safe to assume that DOT’s bear market is over, for now, and that the price can move freely again without the interference of big speculation. 

The ATOM crypto of Cosmos

Cosmos is a crypto project in some ways similar to Polkadot, and which has ATOM as its native cryptocurrency. 

ATOM’s trend, however, has been a bit different than that of DOT. 

It debuted in the crypto markets in early 2019, and until November 2020 had never managed to stay consistently above $6. 

With the speculative bubble that began in late December 2020, the price soared, spiking four times. The first, in May 2021, coincided with that of many other cryptocurrencies, such as Dogecoin, while the second was in September of the same year, alongside a handful of other cryptocurrencies including Cardano. 

The third peak took place in November, along with the generic crypto markets, but then made an even bigger fourth peak in January 2022, almost on its own. 

This fourth peak of the latest major bull run is anomalous for two reasons. First, typically other cryptocurrencies have made one or two spikes, or at most three. Second, by January 2022 the speculative bubble had already begun to burst, so the price of ATOM made its all-time high while the collapse of other cryptocurrencies had already begun. 

This spike brought the price to $44, that is, with a gain of more than 600%, but lower than that of DOT, for example. In other words, the magnitude of the speculative bubble on ATOM’s price also seemed abnormal, compared to that on other similar cryptocurrencies, because it was smaller. 

The current price of $13 is 70% lower than the all-time high, but more importantly it is more than double the starting price. Then again, the January peak was not the only 2022 anomaly in ATOM’s price. 

The other anomaly has been the growth since late June. The 2022 low price of ATOM was touched on 19 June right around $6. This can be interpreted as the fact that the 2021 speculative bubble on the price of ATOM was slower to inflate (almost 14 months), but much faster to deflate (just over 5 months). 

Then, once it was back to $6, it started to rise again in late June last year, so much so that by September it exceeded $16. 

It almost seems to have followed Ethereum’s trend in 2022 more than that of Bitcoin and the crypto market in general. However, it suffered a major slump in November with the FTX bankruptcy, which caused its value to almost halve in just over a month. After falling below $9, however, it began to rise again in late December, to the current $13. 

The latest news on ATOM and Polkadot

Polkadot recently announced version 3 of its cross-chain messaging format, the Consensus Message Format (XCM). This is the protocol that enables interoperability between blockchains, part of the heart of the project, and this reveals that development is continuing. 

After exactly 15 months in development, @polkadot XCM version 3 is merged. This enables bridges, cross-chain locking, exchanges, NFTs, conditionals, context-tracking and more. https://t.co/dqcLXOmDa9

— Gavin Wood (@gavofyork) January 17, 2023

As for ATOM, Terra Classic recently stated that it will launch its Mars Protocol lending protocol precisely on the Cosmos Hub network. 

This means that Cosmos will also be used for DeFi protocols, although for now the TVL does not even reach $700,000. 

It is worth noting that at this time there is no big news for either project, although at least their development is still progressing.