2017 was wild ride for cryptos. It not only bitcoin that made people millions, there were others. If you had invested 100 in ripple in January 2017 it would have turned into 35000 by the end of 2017. That's a 35000% gain. This post look into potential cryptos that could make you thousands in the coming months.
Litecoin (LTC)
Created by Lee back in 2011, it’s billed as an alternative to bitcoin. Without getting too wonky, Lee essentially aimed to cut the amount of time required to confirm new transactions and tweak the way bitcoin was being mined to ensure anybody could participate. “My vision is people would use Litecoin every day to buy things. It would just be the payment method of choice,” Lee once said.
Litecoin is also designed to produce more coins -- it has an 84 million coin limit, versus bitcoin’s 21 million. About 54 million coins are currently in circulation, versus bitcoin’s current 16.7 million circulating supply.
Performance over last 12 months, as of Jan. 3:+6,025%
Monero (XMR)
The appeal of Monero? Anonymity. With Monero, the details of every transaction, including sender, receiver and size, are recorded on a public ledger, but are obfuscated to reportedly make them untraceable. Use Monero, and, in theory, there’s no way for anyone else to connect the dots between the sender, receiver or size of the transaction.
Sound like an appealing coin to cybercriminals? It is. The hackers behind the global ransomware incident WannaCry, which infected 230,000 computers running Microsoft Windows, demanded payments in Monero.
That said, there are many more cases recorded of hackers demanding bitcoin, and Monero’s backers say the coin’s biggest use cases aren’t illicit. It would appeal, they say, to corporations who want to move money around without competitors knowing, or to anyone who simply doesn’t want their balance and transactions made public, such as someone doing business in a foreign country who doesn’t want to become a target.
Monero recently said 45 musicians, including Lana Del Ray, Sia and Dolly Parton, will be accepting Monero. Many will even offer discounts to those who pay with it.
There are about 15.5 million XMR in circulation, and, unlike bitcoin and Litecoin, Monero doesn’t have a fixed coin supply.
Cardano (Ada)
Market cap: $20.21 billion
Performance in 2017 (since start of trading in October): +3,296%
Who created it? Blockchain developer Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK)
Tung believes that “this next-gen platform has the right team, dedication and money to create a real contender to Ethereum.”
The Cardano blockchain just launched a few months ago and exploded on the scene with massive gains in its coin, called Ada, in November to break into the top 10 cryptos in terms of market cap. At latest check it had slipped down to No. 13.
The project began in 2015 and billed itself as the first blockchain network backed by a “scientific philosophy” and built by leading academics and engineers through peer-reviewed research.
Cardano, while still a relative unknown, is apparently big on private transactions as well as responding to the needs of regulators, making it primed for mass adoption. Its CEO, Charles Hoskinson, says that Cardano tackles issues of “sustainability, interoperability and scalability” so that cryptocurrency can go from a “fun novelty” to something that could be used by billions of people and interface with legacy financial systems. Cardano’s framework is still in its very early stages (what the team refers to as its “bootstrap era”), and the next phase in its road map is set to launch sometime in the second quarter of 2018. That means its framework is still being developed, and it may take time for it to reach the full-fledged smart contract platform its leaders envision.
About 26 billion out of a maximum 45 billion coins are currently in circulation.
Ripple (XRP)
Market cap: $95.45 billion
Performance in 2017: +41,040%
Former bitcoin developers launched software company Ripple in 2012 and its digital currency, XRP, is seen by some industry types as bitcoin’s logical successor.
The New York Times once described Ripple as “a cross between Western Union and a currency exchange, without the hefty fees” because it’s not only a currency, but also a system on which any currency, including bitcoin, can be traded. “Ripple connects banks, payment providers, digital asset exchanges and corporates via RippleNet to provide one frictionless experience to send money globally,” its creators explained.
Ripple has licensed its blockchain technology to over 100 banks. And a new hedge fund recently announced it would be denominated in XRP. Its CEO recently told Fortune: “We’re not anti-bank, we’re not antigovernment, we’re not anti-fiat currency. For a while that took conviction to stay the course in the face of the more libertarian elements of crypto.”
The XRP circulating supply is currently about 38.7 billion out of a maximum supply of 100 billion... which is A LOT more than the rest of the cryptos on this list.
Iota (MIOTA)
Market cap: $11.10 billion
Performance in 2017 (since start of trading in June): +525%
Who created it? David Sønstebø, Sergey Ivancheglo, Dominik Schiener, and Dr. Serguei Popov, a team of entrepreneurs, mathematicians and developers
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.