Starting 5 (alts) for 2018
As we enter Q2 for 2018, the question still remains when will we see the bull run? BTC entered the
year hovering over 20k in price with over a $820B crypto market. Present day, we have went down roughly 68%,
dragging many if not all of the alts with it. As wealth shifts classes, steady hands get stronger as weak hands get
weaker. Hopefully, not too many of you bought at the heights as this will be a frustrating couple of months for you,
but a learning experience as well. For new and ready investors, this can be an opportune time to make some extra revenue
and sharpen your trading experience. I have composed a list for even the most novice of invesor with $50 in mind
of 5 different alt coins that I feel will make nice returns going in to Q3 and the duration of the year. Grab your pen,
your calculator, and let's see how we can ride these waves.
5. Digibyte
A fork of Litecoin, DGB can handle 280k tranactions per second (tx/s). That is faster than the top 50 coins times 10
simultaneously. It is miner friendly for the users using 5 different algorithms. DGB had popular notoriety amongst gamers last year,
and has spread to more adoption being a preferred cryptocurrency for the coming years. DGB blcoks occur in the network every
15 seconds making it the fastest in the world 40x faster than BTC. Like most trusted cryptos, Digibyte has a QT desktop wallet
than can be downloaded to store your DGB away from exchanges, and can even be transferred to your ledger wallet if you prefer the
hardware approach. With over 4 years of existence and experience on the blockchain, Digibyte stives to focus on cybersecurity and the
payment system for decentralized applications with more increasing adoption. DGB is currently sitting at .01 cents with a 176M market cap.
DGB is also active in real world activities and quite philanthropic in the crypto community rewarding DGB to citizens in African countries and
spreading awareness of the working blockchain. When BTC was up, DGB peaked at a yearly high of .13 with a 1.3B market cap. That's a pretty
impressive over 10x gains. At this present time, DGB circulates with around 10B DGB and around 2.2M a day through exchanges. With a growing
dev team and strong leader in Jared Tate, I see Digibyte being a good play even for the smallest of bags.
4. DeepBrain Chain
Next is DBC, a decentralized computing platform for artificial intelligence. It also serves as a secure data trading platform. One of the mant focuses
of DeepBrain is to lower the cost of artificial computing which is exccedingly high. Chinese engineers built a self-taugh bot to learn the game "GO" which is
a form of chess played on a 17x17 grid where the goal is to get more territory than your opponent. The artificial bot beat the game in lesser and lesser moves in
less than 101 days. The cost to execute the game was thousands of dollars a day, but with the DBC implementation, that cost was lowered by more than 70%.
Also focusing on data privacy, it also enhances computing power making DBC a strong Chinese contender for the time to come seeking more A.I. adoption. Already
gaining more traction, DeepBrain Chain has already worked with Microsoft Azure, Samsung, and Lenovo with more big names coming up. The A.I. has been in development
for more than 4 years working on big projects. It's OS Smart360, which is a voice assistance has been focused on and released 6 months before Amazon Echo and came into
existence before Siri. DBC is still a relatively new coin, launching late 2017 however it peaked at .64 with a 575M market cap a month later. As usual, rises are contingent on the flow
of BTC, but at the time of this edit DBC sits at .03 waiting to be loaded up on and stored in your NEON wallet.
3. Ontology
Coming in at Number 3 is another NEP5 token built on the NEO platform. Ontology is another fairly new platform, but is on this list for a reason. Not an ICO, but rather an air-drop
to those investors who held on to NEO in their NEON wallet (ONT) Ontology is a diverse, integrated, distributed trust network and the infrastructure for building a trust ecosystem.
Ontology's ecosystem was meant to bring the real world into the NEO world making it transparent. ONT and NEO go hand in hand, making the future built on trust without 3rd parties.
.1 ONT was airdropped to NEO holders in your wallet per NEO held, and the other .1 was locked away to be dropped later on in Q2 during Mainnet phase. ONT is now freely tradeable,
and amazingly, is one of the few coins that has held its value against BTC and ETH dips. Ontology meant to complement NEO debuted over $2, and despite dips from Ethereum down to
around $300, ONT has remained at it's price with about $35M trading daily. Bearing resemblence to its partner, NEO, it is rumored ONT holders will receive ONT gas just like NEO gas that can be
used to secure tx and participate in more NEP5 token sales offered on the NEO blockchain. ONT obviously can be stored in the NEON wallet, but can also be stored on the Ledger Nano under
NEO, giving you more security of all private keys. ONT still sits at a little over $2 with over half a billion in market cap. It briefly fell to about $1.90, but chances of seeing it less than a dollar are slim.
Based in Shanghai, ONT is in the center of some of the most hardcore blockchain developers in the Eastern world. Still a rookie debuting this year, it still nice to know one can still be an early adopter now.
Those who missed out on NEO when it rebranded from ANT last year, have a strong chance at hedging bets with due dilligence with Ontology. NEO was .20 this time last year. It sits at a yearly low of $50 now.
Just saying.
2. PIVX
Private Instant Veirified Transactions. PIVX was under $1 last year and has fluctuated, but hit an all time high of over $13 in JAN before slowly finding retracement. PIVX seeks to be the preferred currency for privacy
against its competitors ZCash and Monero. Being a fork of Dash, PIVX also has a holding incentive to investors by offering a masternode. Though not as appealing as Dash, PIVX requires 10k PIVX to secure a masternode
and offer more PIVX every day. The good part is, any amount of PIVX is stakeable, giving you rewards contingent on how many PIVX are stored in the wallet. Another pro is that currently, a DASH masternode will cost
around 500k, while a PIVX one can still be obtained for under 30k. PIVX also offers and InstantSend feature allowing the sender to receive PIVX immediately, but will cost significant tx fees. Countering this though, PIVX offers
in the wallet, zPIV which is the zerocoin counterpart of PIVX. It is basically anonymized PIV in zerocoin form that you can keep privately until you want to send it as basecoin PIV to someone (a public address). It's block time is roughly
60s making it faster than DASH. It also has less than 55M circulating supply with around $1M trading in it daily. PIVX also has experience on its side being labeled first as DarkCoin then rebranding and offering an open source code.
PIVX has a strong underground core following that will keep the coin afloat and be a strong contender come the end of 2018.
1. Cardano
Cardano is developing a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed. It is the first blockchain platform to evolve out of a scientific philosophy and a research-first driven approach.
ADA at the time of this edit, is perhaps the most undervalued coin on the market sitting at .15. Aside from it's third generation blockchain platform, Cardano was debuted around October of last year, and has seen approximately $1.12
in price with over a 1B market cap. Reading through the github, you will find the project is fully open source allowing for developers to tweak and work on the project as they see fit getting attention from some of the top developers from the most
presigious schools worldwide. Later this year, staking is rumored to be a new feature for the project definitely giving it more of a reason to hold on to it. Rewards will be given to holders, and a voting system will also be implemented to keep the chain honest
and transparent. Cardano is still a top ten coin in market cap with just under $4B. Led by reputable mathmetician, Charles Hoskinsin, ADAs community is arguably one of the most exuberant and bullish on the technology aspect. Being Charles is the
former CEO of Ethereum, the anticipation is real to see the new project unfold. The Daedalus wallet allows you to store your ADA along with BTC and ETH. Hoskinson reputation for a strong work ethic and genious platforms put him in the conversation
of the likes of Dan Larimer creator of EOS and Bytshares. Both platforms vie to challenge and work alongside Ethereum so the cryptomarket is going to more than soar as investors flock to new and more promising technologies. Like ETH, ADA serves as
a medium for more projects to be built on top of it while securing faster tx on its network. ADA also has in the works later in the roadmap for more security offering more transactional privacy than its compeititors. Cardano looks to stay at the top 10 if not move to the top
5 coins on the market. With a strong bull run through Q2 and Q3, this coin could easily pass $3. The first week of January, ADA crossed $1 and had a market cap just north of $27B. That was more than the entire market cap of every crypto last year! With a picture of
a bull on the Daedalus wallet, Cardano always leaves a taurean bullish nature that you know it will be a huge competitor for the years to come.
Honorable Mention (Sixth Man)
6. VertCoin
Vertcoin is a digital currency that can be sent between people over the internet. Vertcoin is not controlled by large banks or mining hardware manufacturers and can be mined by anyone profitably. Vertcoin’s algorithm is designed to resist the development of custom mining
hardware and multipool mining, ensuring that transactions are validated by a widely distributed network and avoiding the selling pressure when large mining pools indiscriminately flood the market with freshly mined coins. Being another fork of Litecoin, more like a cousin, VTC
has 4x the supply of LTC and is still faster in transaction time. Truly meant to stay decentralized and a trusted means of payment, VTC was meant for the average user to mine and secure the network instead of staking from larger pools. Along with BTC and LTC, VTC
had implemented SegWit adoption allowing more second layor platforms to be built on it allotting for scalability. Sitting at $1.64 VTC is also at an opportune time to buy once it hits the red, due to its December spike to right under $10. Another feature is its use of the Lightning
Network making it that much more secure and fast and manageable for fees from transactions. Perhaps its strongest feature is its atomic swap, which allows users a decentralized way to exchange their coins from VTC to LTC or BTC and vice versa all from their wallet. VTC has some
of the best devs in crypto originating out of MIT, and branching out worldwide to truly stay a top coin compeititor in payments whilst staying ASIC resistant allowing users to one-click mine from their GPU. Just as how Litecoin is seeking to be the leading payment system in crypto, Vertcoin
is right behind it. As LTC rises the price of VTC should follow as well bringing the market cap back to the first page of CoinmarketCap as investors seek fast transactions as the BTC network starts to congest. This could serve as a good play coming off the bench should your other
choices fail to reach certain marks.
Conclusion
Well there you have it. A solid starting line up for the approximate price of only $50 a coin should net you a nice novice portfolio with enough incentive to constantly check your assets for any potential gains. You do not have to actually put in any fiat if you are still apprehensive, you can just paper
trade and run it as a simulation. Track the daily percentage gains and opening and closes and mark down where you would have gotten in if you had the funds or just to test if profit potential is real for you. Keep this routine for 3 weeks and watch the market cap to see if in any way you could have made
some profit. Always due your due diligence and of course never invest anything that you're not willing to lose. A good rule of thumb is to think of your wallet in a medal system. Bronze medal for 1k 2k coins. Silver medal for 5-10k coins. Over 100k coins will be a gold medal holder just waiting for the slightest
of percentage increase. Remember, it is always lucrative to buy in the dip instead of buying when the coin already has traction. More over, this isn't and should not be considered financial advice but more of a time capsule and a small time capsule to reveal my inner thoughts and hypothesis in the crypto market.
I hope you found motivation in today's passage, and something is sparked to get you to invest and build a cushion for yourself down the line whatever your life goals may be. Stay tuned as my next article will cover the top 5 coins that are underdogs and may surprise investors throughout 2018. It is always fun to
have those X-factor coins. I do not expect every portfolio to mimic my own, and I actually prefer it doesn't as it is more fun to see how other investors were able to make their gains with their chosen players. Anticipation is building for the first bull run of 2018 as more adoption is underway, especially after all taxes
are paid and the middle of the April hump is passed. In this new market, anything truly is possible, so it's best to get ready now, so you will not be left trying to chase the wave later. I wish long health and wealth to all investors and spectators alike, and I hope your players perform for you well in the coming Q2.
See you in the playoffs!
Happy iiinvesting
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