Market siphoning: How will altcoins perform going forward?
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Market siphoning: How will altcoins perform going forward?
Bankless predicted the price trends of 10 tokens.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsSource: Bankless
Author: Golem
Bitcoin entered October on a bearish note, dropping as low as around $59,000. However, in recent days, BTC has rebounded strongly, reaching a high near $68,422 yesterday. With the broader market turning positive, how might altcoins perform for the remainder of October?
Shortly before and after the start of October, the Bankless analysis team made price predictions for 10 altcoins—five bullish and five bearish. This article compiles those forecasts and their reasoning, and summarizes the outcomes of the October-expiring predictions for readers’ reference.
October Expiry Prediction Accuracy: 70%
Excluding neutral tokens, 10 tokens predicted by the Bankless team had their forecast periods expire in October. The results are as follows:
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Bullish prediction but price dropped: Instadapp (INST) fell 43%;
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Bearish prediction but price rose: Maple Finance (MPL) increased by 43.56%, BNB Chain (BNB) rose 2%;
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Bearish prediction matched actual decline: Ondo Finance (ONDO) dropped 25.28%, Livepeer (LPT) fell 27%, ETH Name Service (ENS) declined 36.71%, Celestia (TIA) dipped 1%, Polkadot (DOT) dropped 36.46%, ether.fi (ETHFI) fell 40%, Worldcoin (WLD) decreased by 26.07%.
The most notable contrarian cases were Instadapp (INST) and Maple Finance (MPL), while ether.fi (ETHFI) delivered one of the highest gains among bearish calls. Overall, the prediction success rate for October-expiring tokens remained at 70%.
Bullish Predictions
dYdX (DYDX)
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Sector: DeFi
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Reason: Launch of U.S. election prediction market may boost DYDX staking yields
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Prediction period: October 16, 2024 – January 16, 2025
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Price at time of prediction: $0.96
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Price performance since prediction: +1.28%
Prior to this, the Bankless analyst team turned bearish on dYdX on July 23 due to concerns about declining usage metrics, after which DYDX fell 26%. Now, however, a bullish catalyst has emerged: dYdX recently launched a "TRUMPWIN-USD" trading market, allowing traders to go long or short on whether Trump will win the U.S. presidential election with up to 20x leverage.
While extreme volatility in prediction markets may require forced deleveraging or closing winning positions early to prevent insolvency before event settlement, it's undeniable that such high-leverage contracts will attract significant speculation. Although the product is still new, demand for political prediction markets has surged—Polymarket, a competitive prediction platform, has already doubled its monthly metrics. As the U.S. election draws closer, this trend is almost certain to accelerate.
DYDX stakers' yields are positively correlated with growing demand for perpetual contracts on dYdX. Given that leveraged U.S. presidential election markets could be a compelling product, staking yields—and consequently, the token price—may rise in the coming weeks.
Jupiter (JUP)
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Sector: DeFi
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Reason: Backed by Grayscale; strong product-market fit
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Prediction period: October 15, 2024 – January 15, 2025
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Price at time of prediction: $0.88
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Price performance since prediction: -3.66%
On October 10, Grayscale added JUP to its “Assets Under Consideration” list, marking the token as a potential candidate for future investment products.
Jupiter is an all-in-one exchange deployed on Solana. Its core product is a DEX aggregator that automatically routes user trades to pools offering the best execution prices. While Jupiter currently doesn’t charge swap fees and its smart contracts do hold assets, the exchange processes hundreds of millions of dollars in spot swaps daily and could easily monetize its order flow in the future.
Despite having a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $9 billion—15% higher than Uniswap—this premium may be justified by Jupiter’s complementary offerings, including highly leveraged perpetual futures (offering up to 28% APR on $700 million in liquidity) and a robust token launch platform.
Thala (THL)
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Sector: DeFi
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Reason: Leading protocol in the Aptos ecosystem, positioned to benefit from ecosystem growth
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Prediction period: October 7, 2024 – January 7, 2025
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Price at time of prediction: $0.51
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Price performance since prediction: +6.14%
Although Aptos has received little attention due to underperformance throughout 2024, there is growing hope that APT could become the next beneficiary of an L1 rally, especially as the ecosystem has shown healthy momentum since mid-September.
Thala (THL) is a comprehensive DeFi application offering token swaps, liquid staking, and over-collateralized stablecoins. By total value locked (TVL) on the Aptos network, it ranks as the largest investable application and the third-largest protocol overall.
Built using Move—a programming language unique to networks like Aptos and Sui—Thala faces competition on both chains but avoids direct encroachment from mature EVM alternatives like Uniswap. Technically, Thala can also be deployed to other Move-based networks such as Movement.
Aptos (APT)
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Sector: L1
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Reason: Strong fundamentals
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Prediction period: October 4, 2024 – January 4, 2025
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Price at time of prediction: $9.13
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Price performance since prediction: +9.97%
Aptos has struggled since early 2023 but bottomed out in August and nearly doubled in the two months prior to this analysis.
Despite immature use cases and a valuation significantly higher than Ethereum’s, Aptos shows positive on-chain fundamentals. Daily active addresses have steadily increased, and TVL has reached an all-time high.
With a theoretical maximum throughput of 160,000 transactions per second (TPS), Aptos is among the fastest blockchains in crypto—making it well-suited for high-bandwidth applications in emerging sectors like DePIN.
Axelar (AXL)
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Sector: Infrastructure
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Reason: New cross-chain functionality allows it to capitalize on the recent L1 boom
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Prediction period: October 3, 2024 – January 3, 2025
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Price at time of prediction: $0.65
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Price performance since prediction: +23.15%
Axelar launched its Mobius Development Stack (MDS) on October 3—a new cross-chain interoperability standard leveraging the AXL token. MDS provides a suite of open tools and protocols that developers claim will “unlock a whole new omnichain design space and bring new dimensions to Web3 development.”
Using Axelar’s Interchain Amplifier, developers can easily create bridge connections between new chains at the smart contract level without major protocol changes. This enables default support for Flow, Hedera, Solana, Stacks, Stellar, Sui, and XRP Ledger.
Under the MDS framework, AXL retains utility functions and can be staked by network validators to process transactions. The structure also allows re-staking using ETH or BTC collateral to enhance security guarantees.
The Bankless analyst team is bullish on AXL, believing the token is well-positioned to ride the wave of strong performance from recent L1s, potentially accelerating network exploration and bridging activity.
Bearish Predictions
Uniswap (UNI)
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Sector: DeFi
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Reason: Still requires bridging; swap experience may be poor
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Prediction period: October 10, 2024 – January 10, 2025
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Price at time of prediction: $8.35
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Price performance since prediction: -9.1%
On October 10, Uniswap launched Unichain—a general-purpose rollup built on the OP Stack—aiming to become a liquidity hub for crypto and address the inevitable liquidity fragmentation arising from Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap.
The network plans to use trusted execution environments (TEEs) secured by UNI validators, who provide fast pre-confirmations and earn network fees, reducing user transaction latency from 1 second to just 200–250 milliseconds. It also fulfills the long-awaited goal of making UNI the native gas token for the network.
However, swapping on Unichain still requires time-consuming bridging transactions. While native interoperability within the OP Stack promises to drastically reduce bridging times and costs across OP Stack chains, the need for bridging fundamentally degrades the swap experience.
The Bankless analyst team remains bearish on UNI, arguing that despite Unichain’s ambitious vision for an interoperable future and its utility enhancements for UNI, the requirement to bridge creates a worse user experience. Profit-sensitive on-chain traders are unlikely to adopt Unichain if it means poorer execution and longer wait times. It’s hard to envision this experiment achieving anything beyond increasing liquidity fragmentation and worsening trade execution.
Wormhole (W)
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Sector: Infrastructure
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Reason: Low appeal of new airdrop incentives, declining volume, market struggles to absorb future token unlocks
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Prediction period: October 2, 2024 – January 2, 2025
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Price at time of prediction: $0.36
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Price performance since prediction: -17.48%
Back in August, the Bankless analyst team expressed bearish sentiment toward W. Whether Wormhole’s new airdrop campaign will meaningfully drive adoption remains uncertain, and the market may struggle to absorb upcoming token supplies.
While the token price rose alongside the broader crypto market during the month, Wormhole’s trading volume plummeted 36% from August to September ($255 million). The price did spike shortly after Securitize—the blockchain infrastructure partner behind BlackRock’s BUIDL—announced it would use Wormhole for cross-chain functionality in its tokenized asset products.
In addition, South Korean exchange Upbit listed the W trading pair on October 2, triggering an immediate 30% surge. However, the price soon reversed after trading commenced.
The Bankless team maintains its bearish stance on W in October, remaining skeptical about the effectiveness of future airdrop incentive programs, doubting whether high-profile partnership announcements can reverse declining volumes, and viewing the FOMO-driven rally from the Upbit listing as fleeting.
EigenLayer (EIGEN)
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Sector: Infrastructure
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Reason: Token overvalued; actual yields from AVSs likely to be disappointing
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Prediction period: October 1, 2024 – January 1, 2025
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Price at time of prediction: $4.00
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Price performance since prediction: -16%
At the time of analysis, EIGEN had a market cap of $740 million and a fully diluted valuation approaching $6.7 billion. Despite restaking being hailed as the future of crypto-economic security, EigenLayer’s lofty valuation may prove difficult to justify in the coming months.
Fundamentally, EigenLayer and its applications should be valued based on revenue-generating potential. However, without real-time active validation services (AVSs), these figures remain speculative, and the profit outlook for the entire EigenLayer ecosystem is questionable.
Even under the most optimistic assumptions, leading AVSs may generate only single-digit percentage yields. Crypto investors would then have to absorb high token inflation used to subsidize these low returns—an inherently unsustainable model, especially for new services with few or no live integrations.
ether.fi (ETHFI)
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Sector: LST
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Reason: Overvalued token; market may struggle to absorb large future unlocks
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Prediction period: September 30, 2024 – December 30, 2024
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Price at time of prediction: $1.82
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Price performance since prediction: -8.24%
In July, the Bankless analyst team turned bearish on ETHFI, expecting outflows in total value locked (TVL) as users chase other airdrop opportunities and distribute more tokens—undermining growth expectations that supported ether.fi’s high valuation and leading to lower prices.
However, instead of losing market share and TVL to competitors, ether.fi successfully grew deposits through innovative restaking tokens and continuous airdrop campaigns. That said, its perpetual token emission policy has had a clear negative impact on price. The team and investor unlock schedule begins on March 17 next year—an event that will undoubtedly draw attention in 2025. While airdrop incentives have proven effective in retaining deposits, ether.fi’s fully diluted valuation already exceeds that of Lido.
The Bankless analyst team remains bearish on ETHFI, arguing that given the token’s extreme overvaluation relative to LDO, the market will struggle to absorb its ongoing airdrop emissions.
Solana (SOL)
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Sector: L1
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Reason: Ecosystem stagnation; likely to underperform other L1s
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Prediction period: September 26, 2024 – December 26, 2024
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Price at time of prediction: $156.15
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Price performance since prediction: -1.84%
As early as June 21, the Bankless analyst team turned bearish on SOL, anticipating that waning enthusiasm for meme coins within its ecosystem would lead to underperformance in the following months.
In hindsight, the timing wasn't ideal—the call came just days before SOL rebounded from its range low. Though SOL retested that low multiple times afterward, the ecosystem remained visibly stagnant during this period.
Since the broader crypto market peaked in March, Solana’s TVL has plateaued. Network fee revenue has been on a downward trend. While its native token has outperformed established meme coins like BONK and WIF in recent months, this is actually a risk-off signal suggesting the ecosystem’s golden era may be over. For a token whose value proposition hinges on investor outperformance, this is a worrying outlook.
The Bankless analyst team maintains its bearish view on SOL, believing that in the foreseeable future, the relative appeal of other L1s will grow, weakening investor confidence in the Solana narrative.
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