4 Cryptocurrencies That Can Make You Richer Following the January
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January was a rough month for virtually all asset classes, with the benchmark S&P 500 and technology-driven Nasdaq Composite enduring their worst corrections since 2020.
But it was an especially difficult month for cryptocurrency investors, who witnessed the aggregate value of digital currencies plummet from $2.26 trillion on Jan. 3 to (briefly) less than $1.5 trillion three weeks later. Even though volatility is common, wiping out a third of all cryptocurrency market value in 21 days certainly qualifies as a crash.
When it comes to stock market crashes and corrections, downside moves always beget opportunity for patient investors — and the same may hold true in the cryptocurrency space. Even though downside catalysts remain, the following four cryptocurrencies have the potential to make investors richer following the January crash.
![A toy white rocket set atop piles of coins and paperwork displaying financial metrics.](https://g.foolcdn.com/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fg.foolcdn.com%2Feditorial%2Fimages%2F663683%2Frocket-coins-calculator-financial-metrics-to-moon-crypto-invest-getty.jpg&w=700&op=resize)
Image source: Getty Images.
Cardano
One well-known digital currency aiming to bounce back following a rough start to 2022 is Cardano (CRYPTO:ADA), a chief rival to the highly popular smart contract-driven Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) blockchain. Cardano’s ADA token is down about 20% since the year began, as of late evening Jan. 29.
There look to be two factors that have investors excited about Cardano’s long-term prospects. First, there’s the Goguen update, which went live this past September. Goguen introduced smart contracts to Cardano’s blockchain, thereby allowing more complex transactions to take place. Smart contracts being the protocols that verify, enforce, and facilitate an agreement between two parties. This upgrade lets Cardano’s network support financial and nonfinancial applications, and could be the dangling carrot that encourages decentralized application (dApp) developers to choose Cardano.
Secondly, Cardano’s blockchain offers the possibility of jaw-dropping scalability. Among the many future upgrades engineers plan to deploy is one called Hydra. With Hydra, transactions would be funneled off the main blockchain to staking pools known as Hydra Nodes. With these transactions removed from the main chain, the network could scale quickly without being bogged down. In theory, the number of transactions Cardano could handle per second would lap established payment processors like Visa.
Although there’s no timetable for the Hydra upgrade, it has make-or-break potential for this popular digital currency.
![A person touching an encrypted block on a digital screen that's part of a larger encrypted blockchain.](https://g.foolcdn.com/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fg.foolcdn.com%2Feditorial%2Fimages%2F663683%2Fblockchain-technology-crypto-encrypted-decentralized-application-dapp-getty.jpg&w=700&op=resize)
Image source: Getty Images.
Algorand
A second cryptocurrency that’s been pummeled from the January crash and looks to have a solid chance to turn things around and make investors richer is Algorand (CRYPTO:ALGO). ALGO coins are down almost 43% on a year-to-date basis.
The secret sauce to Algorand’s long-term utility is a combination of network efficiency, interoperability, and its unique consensus mechanism. In terms of the former, Algorand was processing more than 1,100 transactions per second (TPS) in December, with a transactional finality of just under 4.4…
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