The AltLayer Adventure
So to give you some background to this post, last year was my first foray into ALTs and micro caps. Before that the portfolio was mainly Bitcoin and a few L1s so this was all new to me. I spent a lot of time trying to learn how to research properly, what to actually research, where to go to find the information and then to use what I had learnt, buy the token.
Most of the tokens I used these research tools for were already established and a few did well, from those that did well I took my initial investment out and some profits and then left them to do, well whatever. I did run through these ALTs in a different post but there is one Altcoin in particular that I thought I had researched really well and had really high hopes for.
Which Alt coin
Well the Alt coin I am talking about is https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/altlayer/
I started looking at this token before it was listed and set out to buy it the moment it was listed, which is what I did. I picked this one because
- I thought it had a great use case
- The team looked good
- The backers looked good
- The funding looked great
What use case
Well Altlayer is a decentralized protocol that was designed to enhance the scalability and security of blockchain applications through rollups.
One of its standout features is the implementation of ephemeral rollups, which allow for quick and scalable application-specific rollups.
AltLayer is an open and decentralised protocol for rollups. With AltLayer, we bring together a novel idea of Restaked rollup which takes existing rollups (spun from any rollup stack such as OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, ZKStack, Polygon CDK, etc.) and provides them with enhanced security, decentralisation, interoperability and crypto-economic fast finality. Altlayer offers Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, which helps developers save time and resources, allowing for rapid experimentation and innovation in a fully open and permissionless environment.
Who are the team
The team behind Altlayer is led by Dr. Jia Yaoqi, a former director at Parity Asia and co-founder/CTO of Zilliqa. The team consists of blockchain experts and award-winning researchers with experience from leading projects like Parity, Zilliqa, and Synthetix. With new funding, the project is expanding its team across technology, business, and marketing.
The backers
The funding
In July 2022, AltLayer secured $7.2 million in seed funding, led by Polychain Capital, Breyer Capital, and Jump Crypto, in August 2023 another $1.2 million and in February 2024 a further $14.4 million. Sounds like a lot to me!
So how is it going
https://coinmarketcap.com/
If you remember I acquired this on day 1 so it isn't looking so great although I could have doubled my money by selling in either March or April, now perhaps I was being greedy or didn't pay attention.
https://dune.com/
Next I thought I should take a look at the holders to see if evryone was getting rid of ALT, it looks like the small holders dropped off a cliff but medium and large holders look to be picking up again. I see this as a positive sign so perhaps there is still hope.
If I have done my market cap sums correctly and IF no new money goes into Alt layer and the market cap reaches only its old all time high, the price I could expect will be $0.27 (which would be a small loss) so again this will be interesting to see if I have got this right or not. Now only time will tell.
Now I know your not supposed to marry your bags and I am prepared to sell but this token is one that I believed I had researched thoroughly after developing a spreadsheet with all my research pointers and actually waited for the tokens release date to buy it, so to me this is a real test to see if I researched correctly or not.
I would love to know your thoughts, have I missed something? What else should I look for? How do you research your tokens?
As always, thank you for reading and please feel free to comment.
