With more than 1,300 alt-coins — basically any digital currency that isn’t bitcoin — to choose from, it’s no easy task uncovering potential winners. A four-part screener can be useful to determine which alt-coins may be worth an investment.
Study the team behind it. “Where do they come from? Have they been involved with other cryptos before? Are they backed by anyone, and what kind of experience do they bring? The alt-coins that have done the best and have the highest market caps have the most proven teams.”
Take a look at the why. “How useful is this? Are they trying to solve a problem that doesn’t need solving? Some alt-coins coming out are simply ridiculous.”
Determine where they are in the process. “I look at the road map of the alt-coin and see how far along are they. Do they have a test-net or a beta? Are there new features being released? Are there soft or hard forks coming up?”
Assess the valuation. “Since alt-coins get pumped and dumped a lot, I look at the current market evaluation and see if they are priced right. A lot of alt-coins are priced way too high and I tend to stay away from them.”
With that in mind, here’s an overview of 25 cryptocurrencies that we think may be worth watching in 2018. Like bitcoin, all cryptocurrencies are subject to extreme volatility and risk — so if you intend to invest, it’s well worth doing your due diligence and reading up more on each one.
It’s nearly impossible to predict which coins will perform best in the upcoming year, and no matter what our selections are of course we will inevitably have someone post “you forgot …” No, we didn’t. So don’t be that guy. We have a solid track record with our past picks, and these are the coins we feel have the highest upside potential in the next year.
This is not a Top 25 List of the Best Cryptocurrencies, you can easily find the same 10 picks in 50 different blog posts.
- Cardano (ADA)
cardanoThe first blockchain backed by a “scientific philosophy”
• Market capitalization: $ 4,435,810,644
• Price (12/14/17): $ 0.171088
• Who created it ?: Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK)
Tung believes that “this new generation platform has the right equipment, dedication and money to create a real contender for Ethereum.”
- Iota (MIOTA)
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Market cap: $12.66 billion
Performance in 2017 (since start of trading in June): +623%
Who created it? David Sønstebø, Sergey Ivancheglo, Dominik Schiener, and Dr. Serguei Popov, a team of entrepreneurs, mathematicians and developers
The skinny: lota’s big draw is that it doesn’t have any trading fees, miners or blocks. For every transaction you make, your processing power is used to validate two other transactions, making every Iota owner also an Iota “miner.”
Essentially, Iota focuses on becoming the backbone for secure machine-to-machine payments in the Internet of Things economy and is unique in that it is hailed as the first crypto created without the use of a blockchain. Instead, it is based on a distributed ledger architecture called “The Tangle,” an innovation that is credited for allowing Iota to achieve three major crypto milestones: zero-cost transactions, offline transactions, and infinite scalability.
Word of its latest partnership with Microsoft just gave it a big boost and propelled it into the top tier of the most valuable cryptos.
The maximum supply of MIOTA is just under 2.8 billion, and the entire maximum supply is currently in circulation.
- Verge (XVG)
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Verge is open source project (see github here) as we are used to see in cryptocurrency market. There is no company behind Verge. The community is the power and the fuel for development and future as well.
The development is funded so far by developers themselves (especially by their time) and by donations. Sure, we are in early stage of Verge so far. They might be opening Merchandise store soon and Multi-Algorithm Pool Mining for boost the money flowing.
If you read about Verge for the first time and asking, “How come that I haven’t heard about them sooner if they are so successful and revolutionary?”, I totally understand. The real issue is marketing strategy and we need to know that there will be always priority in development instead of marketing. And that is a good set up, I think.
Most of the current cryptocurrency that claim themselves as a anonymous and private crypto they only mask or hide transaction on their network. The real issue here is IP address of users. If you can’t protect user’s IP address you just shouldn’ t claim your project private or anonymous based. The only cryptocurrency other than Verge that follow this rule is Monero.
Verge has a transparent ledger that allows anyone to view all of its transactions, but protects user identities and locations by integrating both Tor and I2P to not expose IP addresses.
- Ripple (XRP)
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When managing transactions, most crypto technologies are based on decentralisation. However, Ripple has a more traditional approach and it takes the idea of banking and in particular SWIFT transactions and provides a much needed upgrade by utilising blockchain technology.
Currently, when sending cross border fiat transactions money goes through multiple intermediaries. This can take weeks to complete. The process is not only limited to those banks ‘in the loop’ but is also riskier because when unaffiliated banks are working with each other, they have to issue IOU’s, which means a sending bank has less security should a receiving bank suddenly collapse.
Ripple addresses all these shortcomings by providing cheaper, instant transactions. These transactions are initiated using a single currency, XRP.
Ripple and XRP are two parts of the same project. However, given XRP’s integral role and future use cases as a currency used by the general public, the price of XRP has rocketed in the last few weeks, more than quadrupling since we initially covered it- reaching nearly $0.80 at the time of writing this article.
Ripple was introduced in 2012, and there are also over 100 banks worldwide that are currently working with the Ripple team and trailing the system, including CIBC, ATB Financial, UBS, Reisebank, Santander, UniCredit, BMO Financial Group, Shanghai Huarui Bank, Abu Dhabi Bank, Standard Chartered, etc.
The technology will likely become the new defacto standard for financial institutions and banks wanting to transfer funds worldwide. In the future, it will become the currency of choice recommended by banking institutions and governments for general use. This makes Ripple well worth a sizable investment now.
- Bitcoin Cash
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Transactions with lower rates and faster confirmations
Capitalization: $ 30,489,677,562
Price (12/14/17): $ 1,808.89
Who created it ?: Bitcoin Cash was created by a team of people who forked the bitcoin blockchain. Now it is controlled by multiple independent developer teams.
Bitcoin Cash is one of the newest of cryptocurrencies, developed in August 2017 as a bitcoin hard fork. What is that? Essentially a new version of bitcoin that is incompatible with the original bitcoin.
Bitcoin Cash was created because some users were frustrated by high rates and slow processing times. Because Bitcoin Cash has a larger block size limit, its creators say that the cryptocurrency has more capacity to handle transactions with lower rates and faster confirmations. However, on the other side of that reasoning are Bitcoin loyalists who believe that increasing the size of the blocks jeopardizes the decentralized nature of the cryptocurrency. The philosophical division between bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash was rightly described by Forbes as ” Cypherpunk vs. Silicon Valley . ”
The biggest challenge facing Bitcoin Cash right now is adoption: to be valuable, you must convince companies to accept both bitcoin and the rival payment network. It also needs to convince the miners to participate in the transaction compensation process.
In mid-November, Bitcoin Cash briefly outperformed Ethereum’s market capitalization to become the second most valuable cryptocurrency. Since then he has returned to third place. Its current supply is currently 16.8 million, out of a maximum supply of 21 million.
Official Site: https://www.bitcoincash.org/
- Stellar Lumens (XLM)
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On its website, Stellar Lumens advertises itself as an open-sourced, distributed payments infrastructure, built on the premise that the international community needs “a worldwide financial network open to anyone.” Stellar Lumens will fill this need, connecting individuals, institutions, and payment systems through its platform.
In doing so, the Stellar Lumen’s team wants to make monetary transactions cheaper, quicker, and more reliable than they are under current systems. In addition, their protocol would connect people from all over the world by allowing for more efficient cross-border payments.
Stellar Lumens bears that beautiful buzzword that has become the hallmark of blockchain technology: decentralization. The Stellar network runs on a web of decentralized servers supported by an international consortium of individuals and entities. These servers support the distributed ledger that keeps track of the network’s data and transactions.
In practice, the Stellar protocol will function like a more inclusive, more flexible PayPal. To start using Stellar, you would need to upload funds to an anchor on the network. Much like a bank or PayPal, this anchor then holds your money and issues credit to your virtual wallet in its stead.
If Ripple was built for financial institutions and banking giants, then Stellar Lumens goes to work for the common man. It has the potential to revamp how we process peer-to-peer transactions on a global scale.
Its versatility and use cases make it function like a financial Swiss Army Knife. With Stellar, you can handle micro-payments with nominal fees, send remittances without fretting over currency exchange or bank transfers, and settle payments in real time (2-5 seconds).
- NEO
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The “Ethereum of China”
Market capitalization: $ 3,029,058,500
Price (12/14/17): $ 46.60
Who created it ?: Da Hongfei, CEO of Onchain and blockchain evangelist in China, together with his co-founder Erik Zhang
Tung predicts that Neo, nicknamed the “Ethereum of China,” will explode if China eases its stance on ICOs and bitcoin. Ethereum is n. ° 2 behind the bitcoin in terms of market capitalization at $ 61 billion. So, obviously, Neo has a long way to go.
Founder Da Hongfei recently participated in CNBC to allay fears that cryptos will overheat. “I would say there is a bubble in this industry, but I would say it’s okay,” he said. “Any technology that is so disruptive, will definitely generate bubbles, as happened with the train or the car.” Neo has been around since 2014, when it was called “Antshares”. Yes, it has been changed to refer to Matrix.
The current NEO supply is currently at 65 million, out of a total of 100 million coins.
Official Site: https://neo.org/
- Ethereum (ETH)
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Ethereum is a true outlier and it is the only crypto-currency believed by experts to be able to overtake Bitcoin Market cap in the near future. Ethereum started in 2013 and had 40x growth rate over the last two years. Obviously we believe Ethereum to be a superior cryptocurrency than many in this list ahead of it but this list again is for the highest % upside in 2018.
Its platform allows creating a smart contract that runs on a decentralized network and runs exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, fraud, censorship or any third party interface. The team behind Ethereum is really exceptional. They are doing an amazing job to show the real potential of the Ethereum. Also, the degree of adoption of Ethereum is phenomenal at the moment. Many developers are working on apps that use the potential of smart contracts. If one cryptocurrency can make it big, it’s Ethereum. If already went over 1000% over the course of couple of months and it could go 1000% more over the next few months – that much potential this cryptocurrency has.
- Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin has been described as the real alternative to bitcoin.
• Market capitalization (12/14/17): $ 15,670,603,761
• Price (12/14/17): $ 286.61
• Who created it? : Former Google employee (and now a notable star in the cryptocurrency universe) Charlie Lee
Created by Lee in 2011, it was announced as an alternative to bitcoin. Lee essentially set out to reduce the time required to confirm new transactions and modify the way bitcoin was mined to ensure anyone could participate. “My vision is that people would use Litecoin every day to buy things. It would just be the payment method of choice, “Lee said once.
Litecoin is also designed to produce more coins: it has a limit of 84 million coins, compared to 21 million bitcoins. Around 54 million coins are currently in circulation, compared to the current 16.7 million Bitcoin circulating units.
“Today is my last day at @coinbase! I will miss working with you all. I am going to shift my focus to Litecoin now. To the Moon!” – Charles Lee
Litecoin is one of the most popular altcoins in the cryptocurrency market. It provides faster transaction confirmations (2,5 minutes on average) than Bitcoin and has significantly lower payment costs. Litecoin has implemented the Segwit scaling solution and the Lightning Network. It is therefore no surprise Litecoin has such a large community surrounding it.
When Bitcoin has slow transactions and high fees, Litecoin is becomes the cryptocurrency for everyday use. Lots of donations are done with Litecoin, as well as micro-transations and nowadays even middle-sized transactions. Litecoin is becoming more and more popular because the development team does their work well and simply keeps Litcoin working.
Official Site: https://litecoin.org/
- Bitcoin (BTC)
CCN reported that billionaire investor and hedge fund legend Mike Novogratz has predicted the price of bitcoin to easily surpass the $40,000 mark by the end of 2018, in the short-term.
The basis of Novogratz’s prediction is the entrance of tens of billions of dollars from the traditional finance industry and institutional investors into the bitcoin market through bitcoin futures.
“Bitcoin could be at $40,000 at the end of 2018. It easily could. There’s a big wave of money coming, not just here but all around the world,” said Novogratz.
The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), which has become the first major options exchange to list bitcoin futures on December 14, has already demonstrated a rapid increase in demand from institutional investors and retail traders.
On the CBOE trading platform, bitcoin is being traded with a $1,000 premium. XBT/H8 is currently being traded at $18,900, more than $1,070 higher than the price of bitcoin listed on US-based bitcoin exchange Gemini, the official partner of CBOE.
Analysts including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong have emphasized on several occasions that approximately $10 billion in institutional money is awaiting to be invested in bitcoin. But, the daily trading volume of the global bitcoin exchange market is more than $16 billion, which is substantially higher than the amount that will be invested by institutional investors by the end of 2018.
- OmiseGo (OMG)
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OmiseGo has released a roadmap for 2017 / 2018 year that shows various features and enhancements that will be to OMG users. In Q4 2017, first wallet SDK prototype will be released for workshop testing and development. This is followed by the release of wallet SDK public release in Q1 2018.
After that, public blockchain will be released to the OMG users which will make staking possible. Then in Q3 2018, cash in/out touchpoint interface with payment gateway will be released.
Plasma development and introduction are expected to be done in Q3 2018 as well.
Hence, 2018 will be the year of OmiseGo. Definitely, OmiseGo is a cryptocurrency to invest in 2018.
- Stratis
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Stratis is an end-to-end blockchain development platform that allows for complete sidechains that are non-disruptive to the primary blockchain. Stratis was one of the biggest risers in April and May of this year, and it is currently sitting comfortably at 8th position on CoinMarketCap.
The project opens up a world of possibilities for developers, and is seen as a direct competitor to Ethereum. Ethereum allows for smart contracts. However, they all exist on the primary blockchain. Smart contracts on Stratis eliminate this risk and live on their own true sidechain.
Its language choice is what gives this project a clear advantage. It allows developers to code decentralized apps in an existing, widely adopted programming language, C#, which is a huge advantage because it allows any current C# developers to begin exploring the platform, its uses and blockchain power with a minimal learning curve. This will undoubtedly lead to faster adoption and growth. Also, the project has backing by Microsoft and a very active development team. All these features make Stratis a winning project to invest in.
Stratis also recently announced its “Breeze Wallet”. This is a specialist wallet that aims to increase the privacy of both Bitcoin and Stratis platform users. This Bitcoin wallet will have Tumblebit built in, which is an incredible deal and will raise awareness of Stratis tenfold. This will likely trigger a price hike.
- Ethos (ETHOS)
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ETHOS – Universal Cryptocurrency Wallet
ETHOS aims to create an easy entry platform for the masses, consumers and businesses, into the crypto space. They want to make it easy and safe for “regular people” to trade cryptocurrency and also give them support to make informed decisions.
Currently the learning curve into cryptos with fairly high for the normal consumer.
Thousands of cryptocurrencies with no easy access (ALTs)
Many different wallets
Keeping track of Private keys
Crypto exchanges
With the ETHOS Universal Wallet the idea is to have access to a multitude of smaller cryptos together with the ability to directly buy/sell and transfer these coins anywhere in the world. The idea is also to include technical analysis support within the wallet to be able to study trends in the available coins.
Ethos is pioneering a ‘mobile-first’ approach that will…create a bridge between the past and future of finance.
– FORBES
- Lisk (LSK)
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Lisk also ranks as an altcoin with the 14th largest community and 13th most active development Research-wise, Lisk has a higher ‘knowledge’ entry barrier for non-coders, so to fully understand and appreciate how it works, a background in programming won’t hurt. Like other altcoins, Lisk is also not immune to volatility. Since this cryptocurrency is very new, only time will tell if Lisk has what it takes to take off among mainstream Javascript coders, but there are certainly positive signals that they are heading in the right direction.
Furthermore, Lisk has entered into a partnership with Microsoft Azure, which means that developers worldwide can develop, test, and deploy Lisk blockchain applications using Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and infrastructure. I would say LSK is a riskier investment than Ethereum’s ether as the demand for the development of smart contracts, especially from the financial industry, is huge.
Lisk uses JavaScript as a programming language, which is popular among tech giants such as Microsoft and Google, the likelihood of its developer base increasing and adopting Lisk as a network to build applications on is quite high.
2017 will go down in history as the year blockchain went mainstream. But so far, it’s also been the year cryptocurrencies grappled with lag and transaction times. Cryptocurrencies have rocketed up in value, but the downside has been stagnation on the blockchains, with higher transaction times and fees. There’s no easy fix yet, as the recent Bitcoin Segwit2x battle illustrated. But one up-and-coming token has made fixing this problem a pillar of their system, among myriad other features. Lisk is one of the most intriguing and versatile cryptocurrencies on the market today. It’s also currently in our list of top performing ICOs in terms of ROI.
- Substratum (SUB)
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Substratum is an open-source network that allows anyone to allocate spare computing resources to make the internet a free and fair place for the entire world.
Information wants to be free, not locked down by censorship or net neutrality laws. Substratum provides tools anyone can use to help keep the internet accessible through decentralization.
- Monero (XMR)
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The appeal of Monero?: Anonymity.
Capitalization of the market (12/14/17): $ 4,748,175,394
Price (12/14/17): $ 307.44
Who created it ?: Like Bitcoin, the creator of Monero is anonymous.
The main attraction of Monero cryptocurrency is anonymity. With Monero, the details of each transaction, including the sender, the recipient and the size, are recorded in a public ledger, but are obfuscated, to make them impossible to track. With Monero in theory there is no way for anyone else to connect the points between the sender, the receiver or the size of the transaction.
Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency to scale, was originally touted as providing users with anonymity. The cryptocurrency’s protocol attempted to offer a high level of privacy by shielding user identities behind pseudonymous addresses, randomly generated strings of numbers and letters. However, this approach proved ineffective.
While some thought that bitcoin kept their transaction history completely private, organizations such as law enforcement agencies have used blockchain analytics to track bitcoin transactions.
In the years after bitcoin was released, certain cryptocurrencies were developed specifically to provide users with a greater chance of remaining anonymous. Dash, for example, harnesses a feature based on CoinJoin, which combines funds from several users to reduce the chances that any one user’s identity will be detected.
This cryptocurrency’s launch generated significant hype, but its privacy feature is optional, and many users have refrained from leveraging it. At the time of report, 28% of transactions were shielded.
Monero, by contrast, is private by default, and it has achieved the widespread adoption of those interested in using cryptocurrencies to remain anonymous.
- NEM (XEM)
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The elevator pitch for NEM is simple: 1) Take what Bitcoin is doing for payments, and 2) apply it to all technological infrastructure.
It is very similar to the work Ethereum is doing with “smart contracts,” except that NEM bills its features as “smart assets.” Here are a few potential use-cases:
Health records
Supply chains
Notarizations
Stock ownership
Royalty payments
Legal records
Loans
Inspections
According to the company’s marketing materials, a handful of businesses have already adopted NEM. “Tests across millions of accounts have demonstrated why it is one of the best performing systems in the industry,” reads one of their presentations.
Part of that is just bluster. However, there are some intriguing aspects to NEM, such as its API interface. Without getting too technical, let me quickly explain what this API does.
Imagine that you are running a Fortune 500 company. You hear about blockchain–how it can increase security, lower costs, improve efficiency–and you decide to migrate some portion of your digital infrastructure.
In most cases, you’d need to hire a special programmer. Someone who understands the coding language of “smart contracts.” But then you discover NEM.
Your software team eagerly explains to you that NEM allows them to code in any language. There’s no need to tear everything down, no need to build it back up from scratch. It works with Java, C++, whatever they want, really.
“How is that possible?” you ask.
“Easy,” they answer. “NEM has a magic API.”
NEM (XEM) could outperform Bitcoin and its imitators. As such, many analysts are initiating a $1.00 XEM price prediction for 2018.
- Dash
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Dash is unlike other cryptocurrency projects like Ethereum or Stratis which are more of a development platform.
Dash advocates itself as peer-to-peer decentralized electronic cash. It intends to be as liquid as real cash which we use in our respective countries like USD/GBP/EUR/INR or CNY.
Dash is built upon Bitcoin’s core code with the addition of new features (such as privacy and quick transactions).
Like BTC, Dash is open-source and has its own blockchain, wallet infrastructure, and community. But unlike BTC, its transaction fee is negligible.
Dash aims to be the most user-friendly and scalable payments-focused cryptocurrency in the world. The Dash network features instant transaction confirmation, double spend protection, anonymity equal to that of physical cash, a self-governing, self-funding model driven by incentivized full nodes and a clear roadmap for on-chain scaling to up to 400MB blocks using custom-developed open source hardware.
While Dash is based on Bitcoin and compatible with many key components of the Bitcoin ecosystem, its two-tier network structure offers significant improvements in transaction speed, anonymity and governance.
- Power Ledger (POWR)
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Power Ledger empowers consumers to simply trade electricity with one another and receive payment in real-time from an automated and trustless reconciliation and settlement system.
As per the company, POWR provides numerous benefits to stakeholders:
Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership — //
“There are many … immediate benefits such as being able to select a clean energy source, trade with neighbors, receive more money for excess power, benefit from transparency of all your trades on a blockchain and very low-cost settlement costs all leading to lower power bills and improved returns for investments in distributed renewables.”
PowerLedger (Powr) has since its ICO seen a tremendous gain in both price and market cap. Powr currently sits as the #37 coin on coin market cap and is currently trading at $0.71. Powrs’ current market cap totals $251 million at the time of writing. To put that into perspective, the market cap on November 7th was at $68 million and its price was trading at $0.20. It has seen a 3x multiple in less than 1 months’ time! Why are so many people scrambling to get into this amazing new project?
PowerLedger aims to provide a decentralized marketplace for the peer to peer exchanging of electricity. For example, you are currently allotted a certain amount of electricity by the power companies in your local area. What happens to that excess power if you do not use it all? It is the profit of the electricity company, as it is resold to the next customer of the power company. What PowerLedger is trying to do is establish a system that creates complete transparency of exactly how much power you are using. Any electricity leftover provides you, the owner of that electricity, the ability to resell your excess energy to your neighbors. It is truly going to change the world of electricity and the way we view power in general forever.
- Vertcoin (VTC)
VertCoin (VTC) is a cryptographic currency, similar to Bitcoin and Litecoin, with one major difference – Vertcoin believes that everyone who has personal computer should be able to join the Vertcoin network.
VertCoin is a Litecoin Fork, that in turn is a Bitcoin Fork.
Vertcoin is also the first cryptocurrency to implement Stealth Addresses, a new technology for providing privacy on the public ledger.
- Ardor (ARDR)
Dubbed as NXT 2.0 – Ardor is a scalable blockchain platform that natively supports a wide range of features including voting, privacy based coin mixing, account management, blockchain storage, transaction aliasing, and built in marketplace creation. However, Ardor’s implementation of child chains is the stand out feature that makes this platform a truly innovative project.
The introduction of child chains opens up great levels of customisation. It also enables each child chain (which could be a group, institution, private/public organisation, company, etc.) to run its own self contained blockchain ecosystem whilst still benefitting from all the core features of Ardor itself. These features can also be turned on and off as per the requirements of that given project. This feature makes Ardor a very attractive platform for a wide range of use cases.
This flexibility will truly be a game changer in the crypto space because businesses looking at blockchain solutions will no longer have to choose a one-size-fits-all approach on a shared blockchain. Instead, they will be given creative freedom to build child chains that suit their very specific needs and security requirements.
The project has the crypto community very excited. Ardor already has a healthy market, which is pegged to explode in Q1 2018 when the Ardor mainnet launches. Read more on Ardor here.
- ARK
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Ark is an innovative new project based in France which aims to unify many different previously incompatible blockchain networks. They fell short of their 2,000 BTC ICO target back in December of 2016, ending up with 1,279.67BTC (worth $998,000 USD, at the time) but decided to proceed with their roadmap while offering optional refunds to investors.
The Ark team’s primary objective is to bring the best of blockchain technology to the consuming masses. Rather than a simple investment vehicle like so many altcoins and tokens on the market, Ark aims to create, in their own words, ‘an entire ecosystem of linked chains and a virtual spider web of endless use-cases that make ARK highly flexible, adaptable, and scalable’.
Ark looks like a fantastic project to get behind. The success of Lisk and Crypti is a testament to the development and management strength of the Ark team. Additionally, Ark has the real power to change the way people buy and trade and build on other blockchain networks which gives it a definite advantage over the countless other altcoins on the market.
Read More About ARK HERE
- Siacoin (SC)
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Sia is a cryptocurrency set to dramatically change the way we look at enterprise cloud storage, and the technology is no doubt set to transform data storage in the future. It has its eyes set firmly on a market currently dominated by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Dropbox.
Traditional cloud storage services such as DropBox upload customer’s data to a central ecosystem. The data is controlled here and thus exposed to all sorts of shady shenanigans such as personal data misuse, accidental loss, and database breaches.
With Sia your uploaded files are encrypted, broken up into tiny pieces and then spread across multiple hosts. This means superior redundancy (multiple copies of your data are securely stored across multiple hosts) ensuring data loss and snooping is no longer a problem.
What makes Sia so great is that anyone can participate and get paid for leasing their spare storage space. This is something many of us have with the price of hard drives being so low. When a host and an uploader connect a contract is formed. This contract is called a ‘smart contract’. It allows the renter to receive payments in exchange for their storage space being used.
Given SiaCoin’s potential, we strongly believe it is seriously undervalued. In fact, there are hundreds of other coins out there without a fraction of the usefulness of Sia.
- Factom (FTC)
Factom is a blockchain-based system that runs on top of Bitcoin. Factom is optimized to store millions of realtime records with a single hash. Factom allows companies to create immutable database, and they store database in their own blockchain, create a hash of that data, and store it in the bitcoin blockchain.
Factom is useful for all kinds of business apps, and they have got a huge contract with more than 25 smart cities in China. They are also working with other countries to create immutable database, which will allow government to secure their data. Factom had initially raised 5.3 million dollars in its Series A funding, but the company is so appealing that private investors were compelled to increase their investment in Factom. Factom raised a total of 8 million dollars in April 2017 from various high-profile investors, including Tim Draper, Stewart Title, and Bill Gates. See more on Factom cryptocurrency here.
- Aragon (ANT)
Aragon ran a very successful ICO, which at the time was the 4th largest crowdfunding event in history, and the second largest in the blockchain space with only ‘The DAO’ raising more than Aragon’s $25 million.
Essentially, it is a platform for creating decentralized organizations. In some ways, it is a more polished successor to what ‘The DAO’ could have been: an unstoppable, borderless organization owned and controlled by the people and capable of giving birth to other such organizations. I can see a lot of projects within the blockchain space using this technology, and potentially some outside of it as well.
- ZCash
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Zcash is a crypto that aims to solve the same issues Monero does. Zcash leverages zero-knowledge proof constructions called zk-SNARKs. These constructions allow two users to exchange information without revealing their identities. The bitcoin blockchain contains records of the participants in a transaction, as well as the amount involved. On the other hand, Zcash’s blockchain shows only that a transaction took place, not who was involved or what the amount was.
Zcash was founded by Zooko Wilcox in October 2016, and it is the result of continuous efforts by developers to create cryptographic protocols that offer greater privacy.
It is important to note that the use of Zcash is not just for cybercriminals who engage in illegal transactions in the dark web. There are a number of legitimate reasons why a user would opt for anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Zcash, including a couple who are into eye-brow raising bedroom toys; an entity who would like legal services for a private matter like bankruptcy; a company who would like to protect its trade secrets or supply chain information from competitors; an individual with a chronic medical condition who would like to buy his pills online anonymously; etc. These are all examples of individuals seeking anonymity for privacy reasons.
- Golem
Golem is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Golem is a project run by the group of Polish programmers. It is on track to becoming the world’s most powerful decentralised supercomputer. This supercomputer will process anything from scientific research in academia through to rendering the latest block buster movies, and once complete users will have supercomputer processing power at their fingertips.
However it does not stop there. Golem can also be used to process or mine any ‘big data’, for example identify trends in environmental changes, predict stock market movements, help assess and discover cures and better medical solutions, etc.
Its unlimited use cases is what makes the project exciting. Users earn GNT tokens by leasing unused processing power. These tokens can be re-used on the platform or traded on an exchange at the current market rate.
The technology is currently in its alpha stage. It can be downloaded and installed by anyone. Golem aims to eventually have Smartphones, huge data centres, laptops, and everything in between contributing to its ever growing cache of processing power, and with more and more processing power required everyday investing in Golem is a must for investor.
- STEEM
STEEM was launched on 24 March 2016 and it is an open-source, decentralised cryptocurrency created to reward posters on Steemit.com, the blockchain-based social media network. Steemit promises a fast-paced development, including a user-friendly graphical wallet client. Its chief technology officer is BitShares founder Daniel Larimer.
Steem has a built in inflation of 100% annualy and no coin limit. The platform itself (Steemit) has grown considerably since the Coin launched and currently has over 70,000 users. Steem is the fundamental unit of account on the Steem blockchain, and all other units (Steem power and Steem dollars) derive their value from the value of Steem. There is no need to hold on to Steem in its cryptocurrency form. Instead, it should be used either to purchase Steem dollars, Steem power or be converted to Bitcoins.
Steem power (or SP) is a token symbolizing how much power you have inside the Steemit platform, and when you have a lot of SP, your votes count more in the system. Steem dollars (or SMD) are the units used to reward users for posting and curating content, and each SMD represents the amount of Steem equivalent to 1 USD.
In the most recent light of the companys’ news, the Australian government has awarded an $8 million grant to Power Ledger (POWR) to fund the development of the new technology and system that PowerLedger is creating.
Power Ledger’s (POWR) current movement is parabolic. There are rumors that there are some big partnerships coming up including one with a Thai power company. Please do your own research.
It’s no wonder there is a hype storm around this cryptocurrency. The project is lightyears ahead of almost any other coins out there. Many coins that have just launched their ICO are all hype and promises. This project has actual blueprints and government backing for creating a brand-new system for recycling and reusing energy that puts the people in control of their energy supply. Considering the recent funding from the Australian government to drive this coin’s hype storm in further, there is much more potential upside for this coin as we move into 2018.
- Groestlcoin
A coin with a very weird name: Groestlcoin. Don’t let the name fool you- behind this name is a coin with a lot of innovative technology.
Groestlcoin was the first coin that activated SEGWIT and is Lightning Network ready already. They are one of the first coins to be ASIC-resistant, they are multipool resistant, are highly profitable for all miners and energy saving at the same time. There is a 6% block reward decrease every week(!) which makes the coin lucrative for an long-term investment.
Groestlcoin has a very big team and each of its members are specialized in various fields. But most importantely: They keep their development very transparent through Twitter, Reddit etc.
Why 29 and not 10? ahha
Because people need options...