My favorite crypto investment is Gridcoin. It's mined through computational science and has a real world purpose - supporting scientific research. Gridcoin network has more than 90 000 hosts crunching for science and a healthy and constantly growing ecosystem, based on large BOINC community.
There are commercial projects such as SuchFlex (http://suchflex.com) which are already using Gridcoin and BOINC projects which goal is integration with digital currencies are already in development (like DrugDiscovery@home).