4 Coins to Watch During 2018
Maintain a close watch on these platforms this year
The following coins are very promising and have potential to increase in value. As you read through the comments in this article, be reminded that it is virtually impossible to predict the behavior of any cryptocurrency. The information presented here is for your consideration only.
This is not financial investment advice.
This article will touch on key aspects of several crypto projects which make them potentially valuable. Always do your own research and feel comfortable in your decision before investing.
In this article
CARDANO (ADA)
Current Price: $0.154
Market Cap: $3.9 Billion
In 2017, developers of Ethereum toted their experience and vision into the future and developed the Cardano blockchain. ADA is a smart contract platform outfitted to convey scalability, interoperability, and sustainability. ADA has been listed on exchanges which has helped it gain market capitalization, exposure, as well as increased its value quite significantly in a short period this year.
The Cardano development and stakeholder atmosphere is one of democracy; which means proposals are voted on by users, developers, and the community and if the vote wins, then they work on developing the proposal until it is deployed.
Their wallet is called Daedalus and it has recently been upgraded. It will sense the system time of your device to see if it is out of sync with the world clock. If it is, then it will let you know to have the time corrected. Users can have as many cryptocurrency addresses as they want or need. All of the addys are able to be managed via a single user interface. This combination of capabilities help to make this a versatile, time-saving payment platform.
This is definitely a “Card” to hodl in your hand this year.
NEM (XEM)
Current Price: $0.171603
Market Cap: $1.5 Billion
New Economy Movement (XEM) is a an enterprise-grade solution to power the emerging blockchain economy. Originally intended to be a fork of NXT, the NEM blockchain was actually built from the ground up and powers what’s called the Smart Asset System. This blockchain system utilizes powerful yet simple API calls to allow for tons of use cases.
By accessing the API gateway, developers can build DApps without the need of any specialized software. NEM’s blockchain runs on a Proof-Of-Importance algorithm to achieve consensus, incentivizing a more decentralized network of nodes. You can purchase the XEM coin with BTC on several major exchanges and store them on its proprietary wallet called the Nano Wallet.
The price of XEM has been recovering following the Coincheck XEM hack in January, resulting in 523 million XEM coins being stolen.
This should definitely be one of the NEMs on your list of coins to watch.
ETHEREUM (ETH) (Ether)
Current Price: $454.74
Market Cap: $45.9 Billion
In 2015, ETH was born and the crypto universe has never looked back. It is globally recognized as the first Altcoin and has maintained a 2nd position to BTC for years. ETH is capable of doing everything BTC can. Is it doing it better?
ETH was developed so that decentralized applications, smart contracts, Altcoins, and ERC20 tokens could be created. Projects are continually being developed and launched utilizing the ETH blockchain. The ease and security of this platform is becoming very well-trusted and millions of dollars are being raised by some new coin projects due to the simplicity and ease of the script.
Ether is used to “pay the gas costs” for transaction computations on the blockchain and is required/essential to the Ethereum ecosystem — with gas costs/fees and ERC20 smart contract usability, ETH gained 130X in 2017!
An upcoming upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain will increase the transaction capacity on the blockchain. This will be accomplished by breaking up and processing the transactions in shard blocks. Shard scaling would decrease transaction times to around 10 seconds.
Ether will linger in the crypto atmosphere for many years to come.
NEO (NEO)
Current Price: $32.28
Market Cap: $2.9 Billion
In 2017, Antshares was rebranded into NEO which focuses on digital assets and identifies with an endgame goal of evolving a smart economy. Pretty cool, huh?
NEO is also known in the crypto universe as: Chinese Ethereum due to its strong foothold as the preferred cryptocurrency of China. In fact, keeping NEO in a Binance Exchange wallet earns a monthly GAS token distribution. NEO supports multiple programming languages which makes it a desirable blockchain for developers to tinker around with.
Transactions on NEO are low cost, secure, and trusted. When Chinese regulators come around to hear the digital “knock knock” of opportunity and potential, then…
“Wake up, Neo…”
My 2 tokens
The Altcoins discussed above are only a tiny fraction of all of the projects which are currently active and gaining. There are hundreds more under development with plans to be initiated this year and next.
Follow the trends of these coins for a while, paying close attention to their market capitalization. Find them (they will be near the top of the TOP 100 list) on Coinmarketcap.com which is a common way to observe and monitor the trends of accepted and rejected cryptocurrency projects. The charts in this article were snipped from CoinMarketCap on 7/30/2018.
What coins do you have your eyes on right now?
Let us know why in the comments.
