Celo, Aave, Synthetix and Kusama have been some of the top crypto performers in the past 24 hours, while Bitcoin and Ethereum struggle to regain their footing.

The crypto market had been ranging in the 24 hours to 11am AEST, with BTC retesting the US$42,000 level at 3am. It was overall little changed closer to lunchtime, changing hands at US$44,985 ($57,800). Ethereum was down slightly, trading around US$3,350 ($4,300).

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XRP was the best gainer in the top 10, rising 8.4 per cent to US$1.53.

No top 100 (or even top 200) coin had hit an all-time high in the past 24 hours, according to Coingolive, although Pax Gold (PAXG) did so yesterday afternoon. Paxos says each Pax Gold ERC-20 token is backed by an ounce of physical gold. The coin is No. 231 on Coingecko.

Celo

Celo was the best performer in the top 100, rising 34.5 per cent to US$6.15 ahead of the No. 62 coin’s “donut” hard fork scheduled for Wednesday.

The Celo Foundation describes Celo as a global payments infrastructure built for mobile, with a suite of native stablecoins like “Celo Dollars” that can easily be integrated into smartphone apps.

The network upgrade will allow full compatibility with Ethereum wallets and make the protocol more compatible with other layer 1 blockchains like Cosmos, NEAR and Solana.

The token is up 682 per cent since its launch a year ago.

Aave and Synthetix

Aave was up 19 per cent to US$613 while Synthetix had risen 16.9 per cent to US$29.97.

The No. 25 token, Aave was formerly known as ETHLend. (The name is taken from the Finnish word for ghost). It’s a defi (decentralised finance) project that allows crypto hodlers to earn interest by providing liquidity to lending pools.

Synthetix is another defi project, allowing users to create “synthetic” tokens that mirror the value of real-world assets like currencies, commodities, stocks and precious metals.

The No. 52 coin, Synethetix was founded by Sydney-based Kain Warwick, who discussed the project on Stockhead’s Crypto Frontier podcast recently.

The double-digit gains by those two projects, coming on top of Yearn.Finance’s strong showing last week, could indicate that the defi sector is ready to take another leg up.

Elsewhere in the defi space this morning, Compound was up 6.6 per cent, Yearn.Finance had gained 10.6 per cent and SushiSwap had risen 6.8 per cent. But Avalanche, Terra, and Uniswap were all down slightly.

Kusama

Lastly, Kusama has risen 15.6 per cent to US$600 ahead of “parachain auctions” for the multi-chain network, dubbed the “wild cousin” of Polkadot for “radical experimentation”.

The auction is for leasing a slot on the Kusama network. Projects looking to build on Kusama and Polkadot include everything from cloud computing services to a protocol for robot-to-robot communication being designed by a Sydney-based company.

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