Ethereum (ETH) - This year’s spike has put Ethereum on the map more than any other coin. It seems as though Ethereum received more media coverage than even Bitcoin. Of course things BTC is BTC and is here to stay.
Very interesting link I stumbled upon comparing Bitcoin and Ethereum growth - http://bc.daniel.net.nz/
ETH growth and therefore returns, media coverage, developers, people involved in the blockchain and emphasis on its future and much bigger potential of it as a platform for running decentralized apps or smart contracts made it skyrocket in 2017. It has a built-in programming language Solidity that is Turing complete, which basically means that many different things can be built on top of it, although it’s complexity gives a lot more room for errors or possible exploits. In terms of functionality and scale, ETH transaction speed is its huge advantage compared to a time needed to process a BTC transaction. Ethereum has a very dedicated number of developers working on developing it and making it better. Heck it has an organisation behind it.
Lastly, and this one has to be aware of in terms of business community. Large corporations and Startups have created EEA or Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, something one has to have in mind. Their bets are rarely something you should just set aside. They don’t play around with things like speculation or jumping on the bandwagon. They always play it safe.
NEO (NEO) - Often called “China’s Ethereum”, the first open-source blockchain platform developed in China NEO has rebranded as NEO. NEO is developed by Onchain, company from Shanghai. Being China’s no.1 is something to bear in mind. Some >70% of all BTC trade in Chinese Yuan. It’s specific economic policies, huge market and quite often obvious cooperation between private enterprises and state authorities has gave rise to some big projects and companies. We all know that China supports their own quite openly. And yes, NEO team is working together with China’s authorities, specifically those dealing with certificates in order to map real-world assets using NEO smart contract. On the other hand, Onchain is also familiar name in China, and they have secured millions (some $300M) in funding to advance the technology in the following years. Will it have it’s own version of EEA inside China’s borders remains to be seen.
Regarding the programming side, NEO has ensured compatibility with all existing coding languages. Like Ethereum it supports smart contracts. It also has an underlying ecosystem that enables users to generate “gas” to be used on the platform. Unlike ETH though, NEO has opted out to cap its supply like BTC, but at some 100 million, taking approx. 22 years to reach the cap.
If it sounds interesting to you at least partially the amount that it amazes me, currently you can acquire some NEO on Bittrex, and consider taking the advice to store your NEO in your wallet as it will then generate coins for you just sitting there. That way you’re receiving dividends for any amount of NEO you’re holding. So never keep you NEO in exchange.
Ripple (XRP) - I remember getting hyped about Bitcoin some 4, 5 years ago and since it already showed signs of gaining a lot in value, I seeked some alternatives. Lo and behold I saw you could get a lot of Ripple, very cheap, considering it was pretty worthless back then. Patience being my weak side back then during the studies, I really didn’t think years in advance and just what XRP could become. As things got heated for cryptos in 2017, Ripple wasn’t left out. Since the beginning of the year we witnessed an increase of over 4000$ or 40x in value. And there are reasons why this isn’t based on speculation alone. Currently, Ripple is the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after BTC and ETH.
Ripple is venture-backed startup that provides global financial settlement solutions that reduce the total cost of settlement by enabling banks to transact directly and instantly, with absolute certainty. It’s aimed to give banks an easy and a reliable solution for cross-border payments. For that reason a digital payments network for real-time financial transactions is built. Due to this Ripple is primarily enterprise oriented and has partnered with a big number of banks around the world, while even larger number is experimenting with Ripple’s network and ways to implement it and profit. Big difference there between other cryptos and Ripple’s XRP is the fact that Ripple currently owns over 50% of all XRP.
Although very volatile currency, as more financial institutions adopt Ripple protocol and join its network, I believe we will see a greater increase in XRP value.
Steem (STEEM) , Bitshares (BTS) - Both of these projects are innovative in so many ways. It’s my belief that the block.one teams behind Bitshares, Steem and EOS will deliver. Basic info about Bitshares is available in these two posts I highly recommend - Dan’s post about Bitshares , Cointelegraph BitShares 101 post.
And Steemit is an incredibly interesting program I won’t write about but let you research yourself.
EOS (EOS) - Amazing blockchain project by the man behind aforementioned block.one team - Dan Larimer. I will just mention that EOS is one of my top 3 long term bets (other being ETH and NEO), and that is why for me it deserves a special place.
https://eos.io/ - incredible system of token distribution taking place at this very moment and for the next year. Check out the white paper provided on the home page.
https://eostalk.io/ - EOS forum where you can find information from people into EOS the most, as well as people currently involved in the project in various ways.
http://eosscan.io/ - website not run by block.one used only for information about current prices of EOS during the distribution.
OmiseGO (OMG) - OmiseGO is one of those fascinating projects, and aside from NEO, second one coming from Asia. More precisely it comes from Thailand, although they are very much active in Southeast Asia. Creator of this coins is a Thailand fintech startup Omise which raised during their OMG ICO $25 million. Important thing that differentiates this ICO from the rest is that it was controlled and capped. They didn’t go astronomical in their intentions and are aware that ICO was just a way to acquire enough funding to make their project work.
This fintech startup is looking to disrupt banking and more specifically payments. The idea of not relying on banks and sharing funds without need for incurring fees or cross-border costs is highly promising. But Omise is not looking to stop there as its plans include partnering with retail industry to enable purchases using their service. And their services will be powered by, you guessed it, their ERC20 token - OMG. A user of Omise GO will be able to conduct financial transactions such as payments, remittances, payroll deposit, B2B commerce, loyalty programs, asset management and trading, and other services, in a decentralized and inexpensive way.
Omise exists for some time now, since 2013, and its core business was similar to Stripe - enabling online payments in the Southeast Asia markets, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia and Singapore. In the early days of Ethereum they were one of the first ETH backers, and that secured them an incredible team of advisors including Julian Zawistowski, Founder of Golem, Vlad Zamfir whos Research Lead on Ethereum's Casper and both Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood, Founders of Ethereum as well as Joseph Poon, Lightning Network white paper Author. Talk about that first rule about cryptos - check the team!
So an established company solving an actual problem, with incredible team, expertise in the field is looking to utilize the Ethereum blockchain to create a network effect in the payments system therefore raising the value of its tokens? That alone makes OMG one of the more stable and promising blockchain projects at this moment.
Access to their products will be open to everyone via their network and digital wallet in Q4 2017.
Two cool moments happened for them recently: McDonald's to start using OmiseGO as a payment channel in Thailand! and Omise GO will give out free OMG tokens to all ETH holders over 0.1 ETH!
GameCredits (GAME) - Awesome project from a multicultural team of people from several countries looking to disrupt the gaming industry. While most of the blockchain projects revolve in some way (logically) around fintech, rare are the projects in other industries. Gamecredits disrupts the gaming industry by creating a new payment gateway and a Gaming Online Store which has been in development for over 2 years. They are boasting that GAME is the first free open source gaming currency made by gamers and game developers. The Store is projected to have over thousand games by the end of 2017.
However the most important fact here is that Gamecredits will only charge 10% of game developers revenues in comparison with 30% in case of Apple and Google at this moment.
Gamecredits (GAME), an open source POW cryptocurrency, will function as the primary payment and transaction currency of the GameCredits mobile gaming store. There is also a plan to incentivize the players to use gamecredits (GAME) for purchasing in game items, providing gamers with more value in their purchases.
GAME tokens will also be used to trade virtual items and in-game content by the players in the decentralized virtual market-place of GameCredits. GameCredits can be acquired by credit card payments and other local payment methods.
Besides GAME they have also created smart contract token MobileGo. MobileGo tokens will be used to gamify the mobile platform, and to incentivize gamers for loyalty and participation through rewards.
At a conference that i attended recently, I had the opportunity to hear their CTO give a talk in which he said that GameCredits is currently developing a ShapeShift kind of exchange, only without any fees! How about that? The reason for this, according to his words is because, scaling an online gaming shop and payment system will require many different and cheap ways of acquiring GAME coin. And that coin will be used for transactions in a system possibly disrupting a $100 Billion industry. Kinda makes sense that this project one should really pay attention to!
Siacoin (SC) - Token connected to Sia - company looking to disrupt cloud storage business. That is a serious task with contenders in the likes of Google, Microsoft, Dropbox and the obvious giant Amazon... In short Sia is distributed cloud storage platform. That means it’s decentralized, peer-to-peer, encrypted and based on a protocol which creates an opportunity for companies to outsource their data storage. You, me and anyone else uses the service to store our data just like we would using any of the traditional services. But instead of giving big companies like Dropbox or Amazon control over our data, advantage is that using Sia’s platform one doesn’t lose control over data because data is encrypted, chopped into great number of small bits which are all uploaded to equally large number of hosts. None of them have power to do anything with your file, violate your privacy or stop you in any way in retrieving your data. When you retrieve your file, it’s just assembled again and at your disposal. Sound really interesting in the era of internet privacy and leaks.
Of course, like with any technology, in order for it to gain mass adoption, the question is raised whether the service provides a better solution to a certain problem. Although hard to imagine, blockchain as a concept and platforms based on it are changing the internet right now. This is why they are subject to immense speculation.
The idea behind Sia’s service is the one that could dramatically reduce the price of hosting and storage for everyone. Sia won’t accept payments and instead it will enable the hosts to receive payment for providing their storage to customers. Hosts will determine the price, which will obviously create competition and drastically lower the price of providing hosting services. In turn Sia’s plan is to incentivize them to provide these services all the time, but if they decide to go offline, customer data is not jeopardized.
Where does the Siacoin come into? Well it seems that Siacoin is a token made just to enable the payments between the hosts and customers. It’s unclear whether Sia could have utilized some already existing coin, but tokenization of their service provides some control over the financial system within the decentralized network.
Something to bear in mind is also the fact that Sia is in that small group of blockchain companies which has made their road map entirely transparent and open.
Siacoin is one of the more interesting blockchain projects for me, although we’ve all probably heard about Filecoin now. We’ll just see what happens with these in the future.
