5 Long Term Altcoins To Keep On Your Radar
A lot of people have been asking us which projects and altcoins we have our eyes on in 2018, so we decided to make this post.
We’re not going to just jump straight in with some picks though. If we don’t take our time over this post, you won’t take your time over it either… and when you don’t take time over crypto investment decisions, you end up getting burned.
How many of us have been guilty of jumping into a coin too quickly, or when it’s at an all-time high, only to get stuck holding it at a loss until it (hopefully) gains again?
We’ve done it a few times, and we’re sure you have too.
So we don’t want to be responsible for something that causes more people to jump into investments without doing their own research.
In fact, we even created an ICO Evaluation Cheatsheet to simplify the research process and avoid bad investments.
You can steal it here.
We’ve done a ton of research over the past few months, and we do have a pretty good handle on some of the best long term cryptocurrency projects out right now.
While one of our last posts talked about finding under-the-radar coins, this one isn’t going to focus on those.
Under the radar coins can yield incredible gains if you are fortunate enough to find one that skyrockets in a short period, but the risk is much higher that you end up holding a bunch of useless projects that never go anywhere.
So for this post, we wanted to pick coins that we just know (ok, strongly feel), are going to be around at the end of 2018, and are going to be big gainers. This is a long-term hold post, rather than the SoonMoon strategy which can be more short-term based.
It would be naive and egotistical of us to think that we can predict exactly which projects will be the best performers, and you shouldn’t listen to anyone who claims to know anything for sure in crypto.
So let’s just call this list, five projects we’re excited to hold throughout 2018.
We’re not saying only these ones are good, and we’re not saying they’re the best. They’re just ones that we feel are going to be worth looking at in more detail, if you don’t already hold any.
The information provided here is for informational purposes only and should not be seen as investing advice. Our opinions on this site are only that, if you are considering an investment into cryptocurrency or anything we speak about on this site, please advise a trusted financial professional first, before doing so.
We know that many of you may disagree with these five, or you may feel they are fine but we should consider something else. That’s fine, feel free to let us know in the comments so we can get some discussion going.
But for now, let’s get to it.
Remember, these are in no particular order.
1.) NEO
We’ve professed our love for Neo many times on this site and will continue to do so, with good reason. It’s got to be one of the best long term altcoins in existence.
When NEO dropped from $50 to $17, we continued to hold, and we were vindicated when it nearly reached $200 last month. We don’t think it’s going to stop there either.
While many of you may feel that Neo is currently pretty expensive and you may have missed the boat on this one, we disagree. Neo has the potential to reach Ethereum’s marketcap, and if you had the chance to pick Ethereum up at $150, you would have backed up the truck right? Neo could end up being the same situation.
Yes, it’s not going to be the biggest gainer of 2018 (like it was in 2017), but we’re looking forward to seeing where it goes.
For those of you who haven’t read much about Neo, there’s a fantastic article that compares it with Ethereum here:
This one that shows a bit more information about Neo and Onchain is also worth reading:
Read: https://hackernoon.com/neo-onchain-and-its-ultimate-plan-dna-4c33e9b6bfaa
Here’s one thing we do want to say about Neo though:
Many people invest in Neo because they have convinced themselves that sooner or later the Chinese government is going to legalize ICOs again but only if Neo is the blockchain is used.
This theory just won’t die. It’s worse than thinking Jar Jar binks is a sith lord. He’s not, he’s just a lame ass character.
Neo’s CoFounder Da HongFei himself has also denied this theory several times. One of the best examples is in this speech below:
The Neo project is much more than just trying to be Chinese ethereum and it’s going to succeed regardless of what China does with ICO’s. You shouldn’t invest in it in the hope that this situation is going to change.
Neo is going to help create an entire smart economy, which is where they see the future of blockchain. You don’t need ICOs to be legalized in China for this to happen.
Read those articles we linked earlier to understand this more.
2.) ICON
It’s the Korean Ethereum! No wait, the Korean Neo! No wait..the Korean..Icon?
Icon is a project that has already experienced huge gains, but it’s still got some way to go. Currently, it’s not even traded on Korean exchanges, which is just nuts.
For those of you not familiar with Icon, here’s the TL:DR:
Similar to Neo, or IBM’s Hyperledger, Icon is designed to be a large scale ecosystem. Their vision is to allow many different private and public blockchains to work together, such as universities, banks, hospitals, schools. The idea is that they can all share information together via Icon and other partners like Wanchain.
The cool thing about this is that it doesn’t exactly rely on mass adoption of blockchain apps like other speculative plays in the space right now. Many private blockchains are already being developed by the types of institutions mentioned above, and Icon are just there to help connect them. The average person on the street doesn’t even need to know what blockchain is.
So Icon itself will have a real world use case a lot sooner than some other projects in this largely speculative crypto world.
We don’t really know whether people will start using dApps in every day life in the future, but what we do know is that as Blockchain itself develops, the projects which either add liquidity to crypto investing (exchanges etc), or add with interoperability (wanchain, icon, loopring etc), or fintech projects in general, are the ones which should reach large scale usage first.
As such, Icon is likely to become a strong force in Korean blockchain over the long term, if not THE force. What they are trying to achieve is ambitious, but also makes a lot of sense. They have already secured some very good partnerships, both within Korea and within the crypto world.
There was a lot of hype (rightfully so) when Icon announced its partnership with Wanchain (who is also feature in this article) and AION. In addition, they are also partnered with a ton of other companies, look at this image from Spec-rationality.com:
Going back to our earlier “Icon is the Korean {insert company here}” statement, if you really want to make a comparison, do it with IBM and their hyperledger project.
And here are some great resources to help you understand more:
https://medium.com/@neochain3_66408/thoughts-on-icon-icx-part-1-e6896df560b5
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@techblogger/crypto-review-introducing-icx-korea-s-icon-project
3.) Dragonchain
This one has come across our radar quite a few times and we were fortunate enough to finally take notice of it during a time it was at a very attractive price. We picked up a relatively heavy bag.
This is an interesting project that many people have tried comparing to Ethereum and Neo (sounds about right!), but actually is more a case of apples and oranges.
Dragon was originally developed by Disney as a business-focused blockchain. It is supposedly one of the most developer friendly blockchains out there. It should end up pretty popular with businesses too, because it allows you to use blockchain for data, while maintaining control of it. It also has a server-less architecture, which is unique in blockchain to the best of our knowledge.
There are actually quite a few cool features in this project, but the most popular, and ones we’re most excited about are the incubator, and the one-kyc-for-everything feature, meaning you only have to pass KYC once. There are also some interesting features which will help encourage people to HODL their DRGN tokens, such as the slumber score, which we’ll talk about below.
As outlined in this blockonimi article, here are some use cases for Dragonchain:
Just a few outlined by the team include ticketing; voting systems; reporting and compliance in auditing; a payments platform; open-source software project governance; peer-to-peer financial derivatives, like futures and bonds; and pay-for-performance systems using smart contracts.
Slumber Score
As more projects and ICOs take place on the Dragon platform, different tiers will open up for DRGN token holders. By holding more DRGN for a longer period of time, you develop a slumber score. The higher your score, the higher tier you can access during a tokensale. For example, you might have access to a higher allocation, a higher bonus, or in some cases you might be the only tier eligible for participation.
Although DRGN tokens themselves won’t be used to participate in Dragonchain ICOs, the slumber score benefits should strongly incentivize people to hold their tokens, which should drive buying pressure.
Here is a quick summary of Dragonchain benefits, taken from this Reddit thread:
Benefits of using Dragonchain:
- It’s a hybrid system that lets a business (enterprise or startup) have its own chain and achieve enterprise consensus in stages all the way to one or more public blockchains (eg BTC or ETH).
- Developers may code smart contracts in Java, Python, Node, or C#. Platforms projects always do extremely well in the long run, look at STRATIS, LISK, NEO, NEM, XLM, etc.
- The architecture allows a project to control exposure of sensitive business data and smart contract logic.
- It doesn’t require the use of a currency (full trust at first layer).
- It can support multiple currencies on one chain.
- A project can start without full knowledge of its economy and monetize activity or assets late in the process.
- The commercial platform utilizes serverless architecture to enable simple and powerful scaling.
- There will be an incubator and marketplace for new projects.
- Entire team based in Seattle USA. Fortune 500 companies are more willing to invest in blockchain projects where they know it can’t be shut down on a whim by foreign government, e.g. NEO (China), etc and ability to get localized support if required since the team is USA based.
DRGN should have a pretty good 2018 ahead of it, and it’s plausible that it hits milestones faster than some of the projects that went before it. However, it is still a pretty speculative play at this point, because unless more and more ICOs come out of the project, there’s little reason to see the token growing in demand.
Who knows where it’s going to end up pricewise, but at the current price we feel it’s hard to resist.
4.) Wanchain
How could you talk about Icon without its possibly-even-more-hyped-up cousin Wanchain? The two projects are in the same category of projects, but are complementary to one another. As we mentioned above with Icon, Wanchain works on interoperability, or to put it another way, the ability for different chains to work together and different projects to work across multiple blockchains.
This is going to be of huge value as blockchain develops, especially at an enterprise level.
Here’s a good overview of Wanchain, and an excerpt:
Wanchain connects and exchanges value between different blockchain ledgers in a distributed manner. This means, any blockchain network, whether a public, private or consortium chain, can integrate with Wanchain to establish connections between different ledgers and perform low cost inter-ledger asset transfers.
What did this mean in layman’s terms?
Using Wanchain, any institution or individual can set up their own virtual teller window and provide services such as loan origination, asset exchanges, credit payments and transaction settlements based on digital assets. To simplify things, Wanchain is a distributed super-financial market based on a blockchain.
If that still doesn’t explain it for you (and you may have to read it several times), then watch this video:
Aside from the actual project, the tokenomics of Wan are great too. They didn’t raise a huge amount of money and there has been a lot of hype building since the crowdsale in November. Yes, there will probably be some people who want to dump as soon as the tokens are tradeable, since they’ve been had funds tied up a long time. However, there will be many more people who missed out altogether during ICO and are looking to pick them up once they finally hit exchanges. The buying demand will most likely far outweigh selling demand.
WAN has sure taken its sweet time getting its mainnet up and running, which has only stoked that enthusiasm and hype. With only $100m coins in circulation, that is a pretty good potential for growth, although we are not willing to speculate on its future price, you can compare the prices of similar projects and come to your own conclusions.
5.) Nex
Nex hasn’t actually launched or even announced details of its tokensale yet, but we’re pretty sure it’s going to do well. We aren’t optimistic that you will be able to put a huge amount into the crowdsale though, because there will be such high demand, they’ll probably issue small individual caps.
9 QUICK WAYS TO EVALUATE ANY ICO
That doesn’t really matter though, you can pick it up when it hits exchanges and still should see good gains. Of course, it’s up to you to determine what price is attractive though.
For those of you unaware, Nex is an upcoming decentralized exchange, based on the Neo blockchain. It’s a DEX, on Neo, created by Neon, so it’s NEX. Get it?
There are not many decentralized exchanges out there, and they don’t work all that well, especially when the Ethereum blockchain gets clogged up. There are also virtually no exchanges that support NEP-5 tokens right now. So NEX should do very well purely because it will support Nep-5 tokens and will likely be more powerful than Idex and EtherDelta.
Here’s a good video from the guys at Coincrunch:
There are a few other things in the whitepaper which should get you excited too, and you can read it here.
This is definitely our most speculative pick and it’s still very early, so there’s no way to judge the project, the team, or the reality on this one.
That said, the Neo community is so bullish around anything to do with Neo and CityofZion in particular, that their support should keep the project going through any difficulties. A decentralized exchange is a core part of Neo’s plan, so you can imagine the Neo council will be putting full support behind this project. For further analysis, check out the full review of NEX here.
Special Mentions:
Here are some other projects we hold and are very excited about for 2018 as well, but didn’t quite make the top 5:
- VeChain
- OmiseGo
- Loopring
- CoinFi
- TheKey
What do you think about these projects? Are they on your list?
What else is on your radar?
Originally published at cryptosis.io on February 9, 2018.
