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Modern broad topic crypto
About the Author:
I have been working in IT and technology all of my life and at a senior engineering level for more than 10 years now. I started playing around with BTC in 2012 and started the largest scrypt mining facility in the United States in 2013 of which we just shut down this year. I am starting 2-3 more crypto related companies in 2018 with the first one about to launch. I have invested in the stock market for over 10 years, sometimes heavily day trading, I have a strong understanding of finance and stock markets. I have traveled to approximately 50 countries and have a broad understanding and acceptance for different cultures. As soon as Microsoft announced ETH as the foundation for their new Blockchain As A Service, I started buying and told everyone I knew in crypto to buy it, that was at .88cents. My current conviction holdings are primarily ones I have followed for an extensive amount of time, I do not promote PnD’s.
Purpose of this post:
I often have people ask me about my recommendations so I decided to write this and refer them to this when they ask since there is so much data to process. I have been quite successful with virtual currency investing, many times people ask me about certain coins which I particularly don't like and with good reason, I will make another posts about popular crypto I oppose and why at another time.
Disclaimer:
I am not a professional or certified analyst, this is not advice to buy any particular asset, you should always do your own research. The crypto market is extremely volatile and risky with many scams, potential for government intervention & legal action could all but shudder nearly any crypto. You could lose any and all of your investment money in the process without any notice or opportunity to save your funds or take action to recover them. Investing in Crypto at this stage should be considered dangerous and performed with care, using no more funds then you can afford to lose, the same as if you were going to a casino to gamble.
Topics touched upon:
About the market:
Blockchain is so much more than virtual currency now, in fact virtual currency only describes probably less than 5% of the crypto market as most “virtual currencies” are not targeting FIAT alternatives or P2P commerce markets. Ethereum represented the emergence of blockchain 2.0 tech using the blockchain to support self executing smart contracts and distributed applications, worlds apart from the use of blockchain for fiat replacement. With this technology, Ethereum established its market dominance in the DAPP and smart contract sector in the same fashion BTC established its dominance in the P2P commerce market (Though it role is somewhat changing now). The reality is there are dozens of sectors being courted by blockchain technology now and there is likely to emerge a dominant crypto in each sector of which blockchain actually provides value, which means there could be dozen more crypto’s that go from a $30,000,000 market cap to a 30 Billion dollar market cap and more.
Approach:
There are almost 2000 Virtual currencies at the time of this writing and with the ICO bubble in full swing, barring heavy handed regulation, I see there being upwards of 3000-5000 VC’s by the end of 2018. I cannot possibly evaluate all of these coins, as such my focus is more so on the various sectors, blockchain applicability and the maturity of blockchain development. While I still hold a large ETH holding, I don't see this holding going up more than 2x – 5x in its short, medium and possibly long term outlook. I see several other sectors where 40x-100x + gains isn't just possible but likely. The majority of my speculative focus is on what I feel is the next sector to mature and find one of its coins at the top with BTC and ETH. Beyond this I try to grab at least one promising project from each sector that I feel blockchain brings value and of which the options seem promising. I tend to buy something I like and watch it, as they succeed and gain market acceptance and increase in price, I continue to add to my position. At some point I start slow selling it, realizing gains and reinvesting those gains into real estate. The majority have been long term holds for me, already having substantial gains.
Holdings analysis:
Note that these are listed in the order of which my holdings are greatest with the last being my smallest holding at the time of writing. This order could change at any time as cryptos run or dump in fact they have nearly completely changed order several times while writing this blog. Furthermore, I am only listing my larger holdings here, I have some very speculative holdings that I do not detail here and hold much smaller positions.
#1 ETH
No surprise here, I have been on this bandwagon since MS picked them up as the foundation for their BAAS and it has only gotten better as they grow the Ethereum Alliance with more fortune 500 companies. The direction of the development to include moving to POS is extremely positive. This technology is still in its infancy really, the sky is nearly the limit. At the same time, when even the “well developed” solutions are still in their infancy, this should remind all investors how much risk is really involved with crypto investing. I wont detail ETH much because most people already know what ETH is and what value it brings to the table.
Before I continue with this list, its important for you to know why 3 upcoming holdings are what they are. Blockchain actually brings a pretty significant innovation to distributed storage such as the ability to have a distributed file allocation table or lend incentive to storage hosting. Commercial storage these days is quite expensive, especially if you want global redundancy, blockchain storage solutions can offer a significantly cheaper price with guaranteed 100% uptime. This is a lucrative market to tap Blockchain storage can also provide redundancy and resiliency superior to storage hosting today to the level of being used as a CDN creating even an additional sector they can disrupt.
The world population is growing exponentially, the demand for storage is anticipated to outpace supply over the next ~10 years.
Now consider that the 3 major blockchain storage solutions were just starting to reach maturity and even find market acceptance when the ICO fad hit. No one bothers to look at projects that have been around for 2-10 years anymore, they are only looking at freshly released companies, ICO’s stole Blockchain Storage thunder. That said, these solutions that are mature and either in production or nearly in production with market acceptance happening now have a market cap upwards of 1/10th of unproven ICO’s who currently have nothing more than a good idea fairly and a lot of ICO cash. Those ICO may be great one day, and I hold some of them but their day, their true day will be in 2-3 years as their product reaches production and finds market acceptance.
I am a strong believer that the blockchain storage market will have at least one leader at the top of the boards with BTC and ETH and that this day is finally nearing after watching, buying, holding and waiting for at least 2 years now.
#2 STORJ
This wasn't my #2 but it became my number 2 as it continued to grow with development progress, customer base, alliances and other positive announcements. In fact, STORJ was my least favorite storage coin despite it having half the market cap of its closest competitors and being in production.
Pros:
-Blockchain brings advancements to storage
-They are mature blockchain tech in a relevant market with lucrative potential
-They are in production now and have been for some time
-They continue to grow their demand and network size
-They are open source code (transparent, trustable)
-They are very active in development with busy Github repositories
-They are now integrated with Filezilla for ease in use of storage
-They recently announced a partnership with a large financial firm who will be using their platform.
-They continue to aggressively market their product and growing market accept ion.
-The have an attractively low market cap considering they are in production with more market acception than any other storage coin at the moment.
Cons:
-They arent truly decentralized, they still use their physcial web presence as a control portal to the distributed storage limiting its feature set while also introducing the ability for the closure of their front end to bring down the service all together. This is more of a hybrid blockchain solution.
-They are still an infant company who did not get to enjoy the lucrative funding that ICO’s receive these days, they are still vulnerable to a variety of market pressures that could impact their ability to continue operations.
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#3 XLM Stellar Lumens
From 7th to 3rd in my portfolio while writing this but, stupid name... and at fist I didnt like it because it was stated by a Ripple co-founder, a Mt-Gox co-founder. In both cases though, this guy took off because he didnt like what the people were doing, now he start his own thing, open source, competition to XRP and very for the people performing airdrops, funding charities and not obscenely controlling the circulation. I didnt pay much attention to them until IBM announced picking them up as a foundation for their financial services platform. This reminded me of when MS announced Ethereum. IBM did also mention that they only planned to use this as an interim solution, possibly less than 2 years. In the meantime the coin will have a lot of money pumped into its development, its real world applicability will really be put to the test and even post IBM it should find itself in an advantageous position, that is, if IBM doesnt help keep it going themselves as well. I am already up nicely on this and as all the coin I have listed so far aside from the uncertainty of RCN, I plan to hold this for some time. As you may notice, XRP is not my favorite, it is on my avoid list however admittedly of all the coins that are on my do not touch list, XRP actually does have a chance at big successes, well Ripple Labs does anyway, but my discussion on why not XRP will be at length when the time comes.
Pros:
-It has the capability of XRP without being associated to Ripple Labs
-It has gained market acceptance through the partnership with IBM financial services
-It has a low market cap compared to XRP
-Online and working with customer base now
-It is charitable, opensource/transparent & decentralized, very opposite in nature of its direct competition
Cons:
-IBM stated their intentions for this to be an interim solution
-Some of the market competition already has a substantially better footing in the financial sector than XLM at this point
-Its hard to take that name serious
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#4 MAID
This has been my favorite pick for some time now, starting to buy around .20cents and added to my position as it progressed. It should be noted that MAID is not really blockchain storage, it only uses blockchain to monetize the solution and give incentive for their storage hosts. The MAID team has been working on MAID for nearly a decade now and finally reaching into advanced alpha stages with a usable product available for testing now. MAID coin will eventually be traded out for SAFE coin once the network is ready to go live. Around this time is when I anticipate likely when we will see one of its biggest runs. The platform is essentially Internet 2.0 providing the ability to host entire sites in the cloud across 1000’s of machines and increase seeds as data demands increase, even more genius, literally move copies of the website closer to where the greatest demand, dynamically. Web sites that are difficult if not impossible to attack or shut down with 100% uptime (void operator error). They also service as a drop box type service where you keep the private key, no one can unencrypt your data except you. They also have world wide de-dup services for efficiency and keeps data broken up and encrypted for integrity and to remove host liability. This is the most feature rich “Blockchain storage” solution and in fact may very well be one of the most feature rich, complex solutions in the industry and nearing production with likely launch in 2018.
Pros:
-They are mature blockchain tech in a relevant market with lucrative potential
-They have years and years (more than 5) of headstart on all other solutions
-They are nearing production with a working product now
-Though not intended for p2p commerce, can send money anywhere, immediately, for free
-They are open source code (transparent, trustable)
-Weekly company/dev updates on Thursdays
-They are very active in development with a busy Github having 32 repositories all with 100’s if not 1000’s of commits.
-The have an attractively low market cap given the potential revolutionary solution they are nearing to production
Cons:
-Their initial release has to use their own browser to work. In the future they hope that the mainstream browsers will support safe://, however, there is no guarantee of this.
-The are not in production yet, there is inherently more risk investing in something before it has market acceptance much less not having reached production yet. There is still a slight chance that they never reach production.
-May have government and regulatory pressures once they are in production due to the capabilities that this platforms feature set provides
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#5 BNB
From 9th to 5th, but also recently added to my position,Binance isnt even decentralized they have only a promise to -and a fat profit rebuy program. Binance was a chinese company that moved their headquarters out of China when the ICO ban and VC freeze happened, they focus on ICO coins and after only a few months of operation are already handling 500Mil in volume per day, thats a lot of profits and since they are using 20% of all profits to buy back coin and burn them, I see this coin going up for a while. BTS, Waves and other decentralized blockchains seem to have limited volume ($1mil or less a day) even after being online for months if not years. I went after this because I realize how lucrative these exchanges are and how much volume there will be in the ICO world, good or bad is still good for an exchange. Something to keep in mind as well as other competition such as OMG coming out, there is a development in blockchain called cross chain atomic swaps. This technology allows you to send one coin to an address and receive the equal value of another coin to an address you specify. As blockchains across the board implement this feature, there may longer be a need for an exchange at all with the process being completely decentralized among the virtual currencies themselves. As this develops, it is likely all exchanges will be impacted over time.
Pros:
-Already has half a billion in volume a day
-Does a buyback every quarter, last one was much larger than anticipated
-Caters to ICO’s
-Joining Qouine’s liquid network for global market arbitration/liquidity
-The platform performs quite well even during sell offs with high volume
Cons
-They arent actually decentralized and once they are, they may not be able to handle this volume so gracefully
-ICO’s represent the greater part of their income, if world wide ICO clampdown hampers the market too much, it may effect volume negatively over time.
-Chinese govt could go after chinese owners/management
-Cross chain Atomic swaps are coming and they make way more sense than a poorly supported money greedy exchange.
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#6 SC/SIACOIN
This was the first blockchain storage coin I invested in. This one can be a hard coin to hold for many. I initially invested a couple of years ago when it was a fraction of its current cost so its fairly easy for me to hold. The run to .02cents was exciting and gave a feeling of the potential but was likely a strong sting for those who bought in at .02 as it sits at .005 now. Whats more important in analyzing a stock or coin value it its market cap, not its per coin price and with a 120 million dollar market cap in this sector, there is still a huge potential for massive returns. Since reaching .02 cents, SIA has pretty much been quite with very little news to help promote its price. That said, behind the seens, stats show that the available network storage and utilization are up about 300% from earlier this year. One of the great things SIA has going for it versus STORJ is that it is truly a decentralized storage protocol and not restricted or limited by a front end portal. SIA has the intention of focusing on corporations and datacenter level redundancy though I also see them as a stong candidate for CDN services as well. An interesting tidbit about SIA is that it is actually the most expensive VC on the market, even with BTC at $8600. There is a SIA fund coin, only 10k in existence and 8k are owned by the company, very hard to find. Last I saw one for sale it was about $17k and thats when BTC was $2k. The coin pays a reward of 3% of the transaction fees for all SIA spread out across the 10k shares.
Pros:
-Blockchain brings advancements to storage
-Respected blockchain dev team
-Extremely active development for years now with almost 8000 commits on Github
-Working solution in production now
-Gaining adoption
-storage hosting cubes (miners) being manufactured, sold and run all over the world (Cube not needed to host storage)
-Regular development updates on their forum
-Very attractive market cap considering its market placement
Cons
-Despite all the development work they have had a few black eyes including a limited transaction swap pool that caused the network to come to a halt when volume spike (issue later resolved)
-New marketing personnel put in place this year does not appear to be very effective, lack of significant partnerships like those being enjoyed by the STORJ team says they need to make a few changes, there is always a risk they never make the changes they need to address the issue.
-Its a development interface, hard for the common investor to test. STORJ is extremely easy for the average person to use and MAID is fairly intuitive and user interfacing.
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#7 QASH
This obviously hasnt been in my portfolio long, an ICO I picked up that I felt had huge potential and added to my position a little on an initial pullback, now sitting at #4 in my portfolio and I believe has potential to be #2 in the very near future. QASH is a sister company of quine who already runs 15Billion a year in transaction gateway services. The intention of this endeavor is to provide a market maker for the VC market. Much of this will likely be achieved through the potentially lucrative position of exchange to exchange arbitrage as the market commonly experiences a wide range of value from one exchange to the next for the same coin. Imagine the value to the market this also provides as ETH is pretty much the same price no matter what exchange you buy it from, worldwide. Furthermore, there are some coins that lack liquidity, it is the market makers job to provide liquidity for these coins so that there is always a buyer/seller, perhaps with HFT mechanisms or as we call it, bots. This will be especially helpful for new exchanges and lower volume coins/tokens. I am not sure the mechanisms they will use outside of Arbitration and for me it didnt matter because world VC market arbitration is enough to gain my attention. This project is too new have much further information for analysis. My sentiment on this may change over time but currently bullish.
Pros:
-Sister company of Qouine, a 15 Billion a year payment gateway
-Already has agreements in place with Bitfinex, Binance, & CEX.io, Bitfinex is currently doing 1.5Billion dollars of volume a day, Binance 500 million.
-Has their own exchange online now
-First Japanese second generation blockchain
Cons:
-Brand spanking new initiative, as with any startup there are greater risks than investing in more traditional and established investments.
-Cross Block Chain Atomic swaps could make the need for arbitration moot
-Could face future regulations
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#8 BTC
The reality is, BTC has totally failed to replace country fiats and it will probably never be able to fill that purpose. That said, BTC brought forth the critical technologies necessary to ignite crypto. The other reality is that there is only 21mil BTC ever to be produced, more people becoming interested in it daily and a world population that is growing exponentially. BTC technically could literally run forever, to millions if left unharnessed. Eventually even a Satoshi will be too expensive to buy daily goods in a peak currency crisis and as such some people are now trying to dub BTC a store of value, I call that crap IMO, its a system of trust not a store of value. I belive BTC will likely be kept alive by the “alt-coin” market which will rely on BTC as one of the only conduits to deposit, extract or asses value of alt-coins making it a market maker. I dont know what futures contracts will hold, since delivery in BTC isnt actually required it really is at an advantage to financial institutions and deficit to BTC and JP Morgan has been known to control entire commodities markets through futures. Its possible that how a coin will switch algorithms to avoid an ASIC, perhaps we will have to switch coins to prevent financial institutions from wrecking them, writing off every coin they adapt. Anyway, the ultimate summary of this is that I could see BTC going to $100k in 2018, a quarter million within the next few years is not unrealistic. This US administration is not about regulation which bodes well for the VC sector as a whole as well.
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#9 GNT
Golem is a going all in on becoming the blockchain compute solution. Think of this similar to the wallpapers you could run on your PC and then it had all the PC’s working towards helping nasa process some data. Think about if you could then rent that kind of more than super computer power at your will to process whatever you want. The idea that servers could eventually be virtualized with true cloud compute. I like where cloud computing is going, I used to be big into GRID for a while as it was almost the only blockchain compute coin out there then GNT ICO’d and I wrote it off because Gridcoin Research was already so far ahead of them. But looking at the GitHub repository for both the solutions, GNT has already blown GRID out of the water, GNT is a development machine likely to head production sooner than expected and to me, the likely leader in blockchain compute.
Pros
-Not a lot of competition in blockchain compute
-Aggressive and strong development team (Nearly 5k commits after 1 year)
-Fairly low market cap
Cons
-Not in production yet
-No significant partnerships
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#11 LTC/Litecoin
LTC was my second holding until recently where I liquidated most my holding while it was close to $400. This is a very interesting situation that Charlie Lee has managed to put LTC that lends it to having some potential. I have held LTC for years, I have run a Scrypt mining facility for years, I have handled 10k’s of LTC however most of them were sold when LTC was under $3. Now the reality is LTC is just a Wallet-QT fork. That is to say, BTC core /wallet-QT code was opensource and of the first 500 virtual currencies in existence about 490 of them were wallet-QT forks, just a BTC clone that they change block times and sizes, maybe POW algo’s and then market it as better than BTC when in reality it only took one day of coding for most of them and is nothing more than a generic BTC with little to no future development work. This was the true season of the original shitcoin. LTC had the status of being the 1st clone and Charlie sold it as silver to BTC’s gold as its less expensive. Charlie maintained the code and included all the same upgrades BTC included in their code while working at Coinbase as a developer and convincing them to add LTC to their marketplace. Then the shift happened, while miners kept Segwits suppressed on BTC to prevent a lucrative mining exploit they were using from being disabled. Charlie made BTC’s segwit code happen on LTC. LTC rallied behind Charlies attempt and for the first time ever, LTC led the way for development and then BTC followed and with greater confidence after seeing the successes of the LTC implementation. LTC has now situated itself as a possible sandbox for BTC, this is a unique position that none of the other original 490 knockoffs were able to pull off. What is the value of this? I dont know, but outside to this development and Charlie Lee being well respected and liked, LTC is not special, it is very not special excluding those two points. My holding for LTC fluctuate up and down, I hate missing the boat on a coin I have supported so hard for 4 years. I have shifted some funds back into LTC recently leading this to become my 5th holding now, it has been my second at one time and I may reduce or increase the position again in the future.
Pros:
-One of the few coins on Coinbase
-Charlie Lee is good for Litecoin
-Unique positioning as possible future sandbox coin for BTC
-Popularity could cause it to go up well beyond its value
-Charlie could take the coin somewhere else to better its market position
-Charlie has kept the code current with all the same updates BTC has implemented
Cons:
-Litecoin is not special, a BTC fork that tried to be ASIC resistant by using a different POW Algorithm.
-Literally, no features over BTC or 100’s of other BTC forks that are using the same code.
-Cannot express the above enough, think DGB or DOGE, they are also wallet-qt forks.
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#12 RCN Ripio Credit Network
Honestly I was just playing around with ICO’s as I felt I had missed too many opportunities. This one came out, a company that already has a user base and revenue and another financial sector coin of which actually there are minimal competition considering there are 1300 coins today. They are aiming to bring credit to locations that do not have it. Bringing credit to places that dont have it is huge if they can make it happen, its what helps bring a country forward economically, look at Russia for example and how they prospered with the offering of personal & business credit after the government allowed in in the late 90’s. The reality is its a long shot and I really wanted to make some ICO money but for the moment I continue to hold RCN as it still seems to have momentum. I am not going to talk about pros & cons on this one, I am going to talk to you about ICO’s on this one.
Important points when investing in ICO’s
-Most of these companies wont have a working production product for years, thats a long time and a lot of opportunity for the price to diminish and any sort of incident to derail the whole project, these are the riskiest investments in VC
-Many of these ICO’s are stating they are the first to do something but there are actually already numerous coins doing it and many of them mature in development making market penetration more difficult once they do develop a ready product
-The ICO market is with question in a bubble. A good idea fairy and some good marketing and companies are getting 10’s of millions of dollars in funding, some of these coin are running to Billion dollar market caps. To have no product, not even a complete team yet, no significant partnerships, many times competing against mature tech with established market presence and yet valued at 100 Million dollars or even crazier 1 Billion USD and higher market cap, this is obscenely grossly overvalued in this state however, it is normal in the VC ICO world today.
As mentioned above, there is no doubt there is a bubble here with ICO and also not mentioned here, hard forks of active chains by entities other than the coins developers, active hard forks where the code and the ledger is forked, this creates free coin on the new coin equal to what each person held in BTC prior to the fork, its a free money giveaway, many just implementing things that are intended already in the BTC roadmap or short sighted bandaids for bigger problems trying to steal BTC name recognition with enticing free money that didnt have to come up with and over night 11 digit market caps out of thin air, obviously a bubble. When these many bubbles pop, many people will lose 100’s of billions, possibly trillions of dollars nearly overnight. The dot.com bubble bled something like 1.7Trillion dollars nearly over night. Of course not all the dot.com’s were bad, some were really good investments and they too came down to rock bottom prices offering a very attractive entry point. For example could you imagine if a massive market crash brought ETH back down to $98, what an opportunity. The point, be aware, its a bubble, take advantage if you can but recognize the risk level, be prepared to take advantage of the crash when it happens, understand this rally could go possibly for years and trillions of dollars. There is the chance the market could gracefully temper the active hard forks and ICO’s due to the sheer number of them coming out and this may resolve peacefully as well but that seems hopeful.
-If you are going to invest in ICO its important you understand that
---If they are selling shares/coin to fund their company they are a security and many governments have significant regulations on how much money you are allowed to invest in these companies.
---Legitimate ICO’s will have whitelists, make sure you sign up ahead of time for ICO you are interested in, they will need some information
---Dont buy the first second it opens but be prepared to, watch the numbers, if they are selling fast and getting close to closing the deal, buy quick. Many dont come close to their maximum cap and as such once they hit the market they tend to bleed off and become much cheaper.
Honorable mentions
GAME
I mined this a lot over the years, it was more profitable than LTC most the time. When I started mining it, it was .17cents. I mostly have a little mining proceeds that I have added to in order to have afairly decent holding. In reality, it was just a crappy Wallet-QT fork, they could of just used BTC instead of making a new coin but now they have created a rewards coin and they have a smart contract platform coming that will interact between the reward coin and the game credit itself, they are modernizing it and they have actively been working software and busness dev for some time. In fact GAME has established several relationships including one recently with a 2 billion user mobile game platform. Game may be one of those old school crappy shit coins that actually makes something of itself. The majority of mine were free so I will definitely hold.
IOTA
They helped me understand what blockchain can bring to IOT data and when they announced the MS deal I bought, I sold most of it when I found out they embellished or fabricated the MS partnership. I still hold a decent size holding that ended up being free and had extra cash to put into other conviction holds. Ultimately I am weary of IOTA after this Ripple like marketing scandal but I believe in the purpose now and will keep an eye on IOTA or any competitors.
POWR
At first I didnt get it, but they landed municipality contract in Australia, already has government ties, this should be considered pretty big for POWR. After talking with my mother who was changing electric companies and looking at the upgrades to infrastructure for reselling individual solar surpluses and a syste already in place for essentially trading power, I see how this solution could bring innovation to the sector. I am not strong enough in this field to truly understand the girth of the potential here but I see enough to holds some.
STEEM/SBD
They are the only real social blockchain out there, they work, they can handle massive transactions per second, they are gaining market acceptance daily, even taking a fraction of Twitter, FB or instagram share value leaves one to believe that there is no reason this couldnt be an 11 digit market cap one day.
SALT
New, launching soon, allows you to get loans against your crypto. I see a lot of people losing it all with this as crypto fluctuates below their capital requirements. Despite the dangers of this platform, I see the opportunity for this to be huge as people can start taking money out of crypto without actually removing their investment in crypto, not stupid.