Cryptocurrency becomes very popular in 2017 and many new small investors are thinking to invest into this. There are 1000s of altcoins other than Bitcoin. Many new cryptocurrencies are also added on regular basis. So it is very confusing for early investors who don’t have any idea about Cryptocurrency. Here, I have compiled a list of good options which are very popular in all major Cryptocurrency exchanges. One can consider purchasing these. It is advisable not to put all your fruits in one basket. One should invest in multiple cryptocurrencies. Investing in multiple cryptocurrencies gives the flexibility to explore gain from the random rise in the price of some cryptocurrencies because of the good market news. At the same time, you will not lose everything if your invested cryptocurrency fails to perform.
Bitcoin is always one of the good options but many people want to own the cryptocurrency in odd or even numbers. They are uncomfortable with purchasing in a fraction. As 1 bitcoin cost a lot so its unaffordable for many of us. Every altcoin solves a problem and meant for the specific purpose but all are decentralized currency based on blockchain technology. They try to improve the original Bitcoin protocols to provide best possible usability for the particular purpose.
One cryptocurrency which is not on the list because I am publishing this on Steemit and most of the reader already know about Steem, Steem Dollar. But for those who doesn't know I am giving a brief introduction.
Steem: Steem is a cryptocurrency that powers Steemit which is a platform for the content creators. Content creators gets paid as Steem and Steem Dollar. Payment depends on number of factors. Same content may become much popular and get paid many fold compared to another good article which doesn’t get noticed because of multiple reason. Currently 1 Steem has value of $4.17 and 1 Steem Dollar has value of & $5.05 as on 2nd Feburary 2018 according to CoinMarketCap. The concept of Steem, Steem dollar and Steem Power are little confusing for some people. I will explain all these in my upcoming post. Please follow me to get updates.
Following is the list of my favorite top 15 cryptocurrencies for investment in 2018.
- Ethereum (ETH)
- Litecoin (LTC)
- Ripple (XRP)
- Stellar Lumen (XML)
- Tron (TRX)
- Cardano (ADA)
- IOTA (IOTA/MIOTA)
- Monero (XMR)
- OmiseGo (OMG)
- Verge (XVG)
- Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
- Zcash
- Dash (DASH)
- NEO (NEO)
- Decentraland (MANA)
How to purchase above Altcoins
Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash can be purchased at Coinbase.
All others altcoins can be purchased at Binance which doesn't support purchasing directly with Fiat currency like USD, EUR, GBP. You can transfer cryptocurrencies available at Coinbase to Binance and then purchase any of the 100s of available altcoins at Binance.
Introduction to selected Altcoins
It is good to know what above cryptocurrencies are before doing any investment.
1. Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum comes second in market capitalization among cryptocurrency. Ethereum provides a cryptocurrency token called “ether”. Ethereum platform was first proposed in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin and the project was funded by an online crowdsale in 2014 and subsequently launched in 2015. The collapse of DAO project resulted in two separate blockchains – Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). It is also the leading blockchain platform for Initial Coin Offering (ICO) projects with over 50% market share.
2. Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin is a cryptocurrency (altcoin) launched in 2011 by Charlie Lee, an engineer at Google. Charlie Lee was also heading one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, Coinbase. Litecoin used the same bitcoin’s source code and is based on the blockchain. Litecoin network is faster and mining takes about 2.5 minutes compared to 10 minutes in case of bitcoin. Transaction fees are also significantly low. Litecoin is tagged as “Silver” to Bitcoin’s “Gold”. Litecoin transaction is very fast and the transaction verification fee is also very low compared to Bitcoin. It is one of the very stable-priced coins on the Cryptocurrency market.
3. Ripple (XRP)
Ripple is a cryptocurrency which has been increasingly adopted by banks and credit card companies as payment networks. This altcoin was released in 2012 which enables secure, instantly and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks. The latest acceptance by three of Japan’s big credit card companies who signed up to use Ripple’s technology has given the boost to Ripple’s market value. The biggest advantage of Ripple’s payment gateway is that it allows cross-border payments to be finished within 10-15 seconds compared to 2-3 working days via SWIFT network. Ripple also has the financial agreement with 100s of financial institutions including MoneyGram to use its platform for money transfer across the border. Ripple has now come to the 3rd position in market capitalization after Ethereum. Decentralization aspect makes Ripple different from other cryptocurrencies as the release of new coins is controlled by the private company, Ripple Labs. Ripple cannot be mined or earned decentrally as Ripple Labs holds every XRP in existence. They can release more Ripple.
4. Stellar Lumens (XLM)
Stellar Lumens (XLM) is a cryptocurrency launched in 2014 by Jed McCaleb (who is well known as the creator of eDonkey) and Joyce Kim. Its advisory board consists include Keith Rabois, Patrick Collison, Matt Mullenweg, Greg Stein, Joi Ito, Sam Altman, Naval Ravikant and others. Steller Lumens is an open-sourced, distributed payments infrastructure with the aim to make monetary transactions cheaper, quicker, and more reliable. It connects people from across the world to allow more efficient cross-border payments. Ripple is also a payment gateway similar to this but that is specially designed for big financial institutions but Stellar Lumens is designed for use by common man.
5. TRON (TRX)
TRON was proposed in June 2015 to construct a worldwide free content entertainment system on the blockchain. It allows users to freely publish, store and own data. It provides ownership and rights on their content and the owner can decide how to distribute their content and at what price. It supports cross-continent purchasing of live entertainment without any hassle of transferring payment by bank account. TRONIX is the Cryptocurrency which runs TRON. TRON can play as host between developers and users and used to verify the authenticity and the compliance of credit information of both parties involved in purchasing and selling digital rights. TRON also is a potential currency in online gaming and online gambling. It was started by Justin Sun who is the well-known developer of Chinese Snapchat equivalent Peiwo. The two previous ICOs of TRON was sold in seconds.
6. Cardano (ADA)
Cardano is a Cryptocurrency created in 2015. Developers of ADA claim that it is the only Cryptocurrency which is derived from a scientific philosophy and research-driven approach. However, people are not agreed with this claim. Cardano utilizes the Ouroboros algorithm. It also has the ability to create Dapps and smart contacts just like Ethereum. Similar to Ethereum, this coin will feature the ability to create Dapps and code the smart the economy in the prevailing technological world. Cardano is still in development.
7. IOTA/MIOTA
Iota is a cryptocurrency which enables micro and even nano-transactions because smallest unit IOTA is too small. It’s the first cryptocurrency without a blockchain, it runs on the blockless distributed ledger Tangle. There are no transaction fees and doesn’t involve mining. This cryptocurrency was first launched in 2015 while the token exchange was launched in 2017
Following are the description of various units of Iota.
Iota = 1 Iota = 1i = 1i
KiloIota = 1 Kiota = 1Ki = 1,000i
MegaIota = 1 Miota = 1Mi = 1,000,000i
GigaIota = 1 Giota = 1Gi = 1,000,000,000i
TeraIota = 1 Tiota = 1Ti = 1,000,000,000,000i
PetaIota = 1 Piota = 1Pi = 1,000,000,000,000,000i
The concept of IOTA is little confusing for too many people. It takes a lot of time to find what exactly IOTA is? However, IOTA is meant for small payment so it was designed to do micro-payments. That’s why the smallest unit is IOTA. But it is very difficult for trading exchanges to deal with such a small unit so most of the exchanges have listed Iota as MIOTA (1 Mi= 1,000,000 IOTA) and the price indicates Miota.
8. Monero (XMR)
Monero is a cryptocurrency released in April 2014 with the aim to provide privacy, decentralization, and scalability. It was launched first by a Bitcointalk forum user under the name of BitMonero but currency supports shortened its name to Monero after five days. It can be mined. It is a truly anonymous currency and the privacy aspect attracted lots of attention to those who want to evade law enforcement. Monero is based on the CryptoNight PoW hash algorithm.
9. OmiseGo (OMG)
OmiseGo is a cryptocurrency. Its slogan is “Unbank the Banked” and aim to provide better banking facility to all. OmiseGo enables financial transactions, including “payments, remittances, payroll deposit, B2B commerce, supply-chain finance, loyalty programs, asset management and trading, and other on-demand services. Its aim was also to avoid exchange charges during currency conversion. It was released as decentralized exchange on Ethereum platform. OmiseGO’s initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017 raised over USD $25 million. It was the first Ethereum project which exceeds US $1 billion valuations and was supported by Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood. The first public release of the OmiseGO White-label Wallet SDK is expected to happen in the first quarter of 2018.
10. Verge (XVG)
Verge is a Cryptocurrency which provides total anonymity and privacy to users. All transactions are completely anonymous and untraceable. It hides personal data, such as IP-addresses and geolocation during transactions which gives total confidentiality of the users. Verge is an open source project and not controlled by any private organization. Therefore all development and new features are the outcomes of the whole community. Verge was created in 2014 under the name DogeCoinDark and was re-branded to Verge Currency in 2016.
11. Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency which was originated from Bitcoin on August 1, 2017, to address the scalability issue of Bitcoin. The split happened because some people wanted to scale block size to eight megabytes from existing one megabyte to increase the number of transactions its ledger can process. Such change is classified as the hard fork. The hard fork plan was announced by Bitmain and supported by many developers. Bitcoin Cash name was originally proposed by Chinese mining pool ViaBTC.
12. ZCash
Zcash is a cryptocurrency based on a decentralized blockchain launched on 28th of October 2016. It provides enhanced privacy to its users compared to Bitcoin. Anonymity behind transaction amounts and parties involved attracted lots of attention. For example, it is possible to see all the transactions through a Bitcoin address but all transactions with ZCash is encrypted. ZCash’s development and improvements are supported by Zcash Company. Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn is the CEO of the company and other co-founders include Matthew D. Green from Johns Hopkins University.
13. Dash (DASH)
Dash is a Cryptocurrency which was developed to do instant and private transactions. It is a decentralized and autonomous Cryptocurrency which is not controlled by any private organization. Dash was originally released as XCoin (XCO) on January 18, 2014 which was further renamed as Darkcoin on February 28 same year. Finally, it was re-branded as Dash on March 25, 2015. THE 10% of the total possible Dash coins was mined in just 2 days of its launch which was due a bug and error in the code. Dash focuses on privacy which is branded as privacy-centric digital currency with instant transactions. It maintains the anonymity and tractions are almost untraceable. It offers “Instasend” and “Privasend” features for making transactions.
14. NEO (NEO)
NEO is first decentralized Cryptocurrency based on blockchain platform which launched in China. People also call it as “Chinese Ethereum”. The meaning of NEM in greek is newness, novelty, and youth. The aim of NEO was to create the digital economy where traditional assets can be converted to digital one using smart contracts. Such digital assets was planned to be decentralized and protected by law using digital certificates on the blockchain. This will create an identification of organization, individuals, and entities in electronic form which can be used with the help of multi-factor authentication mechanisms such as facial recognition, fingerprints, voice recognition, and SMS. NEO developed a smart contract platform. NEO support the development of decentralized applications. NEO is an investment token of the NEO blockchain (formerly known as Antshares, ANS) with the maximum cap of 100 million tokens. The smallest unit is always 1 and the entire 100 million token was pre-mined during the genesis block creation. All Neo was pre-mined and 50% (=50 million) was simply issued to the public as the token at the time of crowdfunding stage while remaining 50% was reserved to be managed by NEO council. On NEO platform users derive additional coins in the form of GAS. GAS has a close relationship with NEO. GAS was formerly known as Antcoins (ANC) and is associated with NEO. It was developed to be used as fuel for NEO blockchain. GAS has a maximum cap of 100 million tokens which was not pre-mined like NEO. The aim was to use GAS as resource allocation and network charges for operations such as running DApps, smart contracts, and providing incentives for maintaining the blockchain.
15. Decentraland (MANA)
Decentraland is a Cryptocurrency began in June 2015 and is powered by Ethereum blockchain. It allows users to create content, applications, and experiences which can be monetized. This decentralized virtual platform is built on blockchain and owned by their user which is one of the most important aspects of this Cryptocurrency. Users can develop anything whatever they want and purchase will prove the ownership. Some of the use suggested by developers of Decentraland is live music performances, casinos, attending workshops, shopping, starting businesses, visiting underwater resorts, and test-driving a car. Land purchase is one important aspect of Decentraland. This Cryptocurrency was developed by Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano while Advisory Board includes Xiaolai Li, Jake Brukhman, Luis Cuende, and Diego Doval. Decentraland partners with district0x, Aragon, and imToken.
Disclaimer:
I am not a financial advisor. This article is just for information purpose and is not an investment advice. This just indicates my personal choice which may or may not be the best one. You should realize that Cryptocurrency market is very volatile and market fluctuate a lot on daily basis. You may gain 100 fold or lose all your investments. Invest wisely. You should not take a big risk. It is a good suggestion to invest not more than 5–10% of your saving with such an unpredictable market. Otherwise, you may face a big loss.
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