3 Hot Blockchain CryptoCurrencies Entering 2020.
The most promising blockchain projects going into 2020 have momentum, accomplishments and high upside.
As we say goodbye to 2019 and hello to 2020 we can put the ugly past and financial mistakes behind us and start anew. Many people lost big — putting emotional bets into crypto projects that sounded good from “blockchain soothsayers” that have made their fortunes by social engineering others to buy their snake oil. As with such there should be some responsibility when making projections, or guiding others to make financial investments based on “advice”. While these are MY favorite projects heading into 2020, they still carry a lot of risk, and should be treated as highly volatile assets with major price swings and movements. If you can’t stomach the risk, don’t place the bet and look for more low risk/low potential investments such as a high yields savings account. As with such — your potential returns are minimal and to the bold go the spoils of victory, who stomached the risk and calculated bets paid off — such is the game of life.
When I am researching Blockchain projects, I first look at their use-cases. I ask questions such as, how ambitious is the project? And, is there a viable market? If the ambition is high, I look at their competition, I research the stages the company is in, their financial situations, market sentiment, etc— your typical due diligence recon 101 market investment strategy. While doing this I’ve come across three projects that fit the Goldilocks zone for my three criteriaas, ambition, accomplishments and projection.
1. Tezos
Tezos was founded by Arthur and Kathleen Breitman although originally development by Arthur Breitman and his team in Delaware, USA. Tezos is similar to the Ethereum platform, the pioneer of smart contracts and dApp’s, but with a few major differences. Tezos has three layers: a network, transaction, and consensus — all being modular to simplify replacements. Tezos is a self-amending cryptographic ledger which can be considered “Polymorphic” in a sense. This means that Tezos can adapt to dynamic needs in a rapidly evolving blockchain industry — or changes can be submitted and voted on by the community which then can be passed and applied such as to avoid hard-forks, hence the “Self-Governance” title. The reasoning behind this sorcery is that Tezos set out to create a true digital commonwealth, a network in which all people involved can let their voices be heard and have a shared honesty, which fits the blockchain, trustless decentralized theme.
Another important factor that gives strength to Tezos is Security. Tezos provides a smart contract platform that allows for dapps (decentralized apps) that can’t be censored or shut-down by self interested third parties. Additionally, Tezos facilitates formal verification, a technique used to improve security by mathematically proving or disproving the correctness of algorithms (code) to a certain specification or property in an application, using formal methods of mathematics. Bottom line, formal verification makes life more challenging for Hackers who make a living finding bugs in code and exploiting them for profit and also creates a much more stable environment overall.
PoS (Proof of Stake) & Delegation Explained:
PoS is another way of verifying the correctness of data on the blockchain, similar in a sense to how Bitcoin verifies data using PoW (Proof of Work) aka “Mining” to solve algorithms. Proof of Stake works by validating block transactions according to how many coins someone holds. Since the latest Tezos update, to create your own Tezos node and stake yourself, you currently need at LEAST 1 roll, which is 8,000 XTZ or “Tezzies”. This is why many people choose to delegate their XTZ to other stake-hodlers who in return, pay the delegators a percentage of their rewards for allowing them to use their XTZ as a part of their staking pool. This is similar to a mining pool with the PoW concept with Bitcoin, if you are familiar with that concept.
Why Tezos ISN’T a SCAM (Accomplishments)
1st Staking/Delegation service offered by Coinbase: Coinbase recently announced in November that all of it’s members who purchase and hodl XTZ in their accounts will earn a passive delegation reward, this means that Coinbase has started their very own Tezos Staking Node and that it plans on using all of it’s customers XTZ as delegators. This is a huge confidence boost for Tezos, which is now backed by the #1 Crypto Currency exchange in the United States.
While the above mentioned factoids are intriguing, none of it matters more to me than the following:
BTG Pactual, Brazil’s fifth largest bank, plans to utilize the Tezos blockchain for security token offerings potentially worth $1 billion.
STO’s and Digital Assets are going to be a GAME CHANGER — not just in the crypto space, but the most important and influential emerging markets overall. I am going to be writing an article on both of these in-depth here soon so keep an eye out for that, I will also be talking more about STO’s and Digital Assets with Ravencoin. I believe Tezos, with it’s polymorphic, self-governed and formal verification blockchain ecosystem will be a leading force for digital assets and STO’s because it is the most secure and future proof out of any existing blockchain platform.
2. Chain Link
Chain Link is a decentralized blockchain oracle service — a third-party info source that has the sole purpose in life of supplying data to blockchains which permits the creation of smart contracts with said data. What a year Chain Link has had already, in 2019 Chain Link grew over 500%! If you are hodling any crypto currency long, Chain Link has out-performed every top 100 coin in the market YTD. But why the sudden spike in interest and growth? It’s sadly the most simple concept that everyone is just now starting to get (much like the concept of Bitcoin itself).
Once developers tried to integrate blockchain technology with their real world applications they soon realized a problem, a missing 3rd party node, or trust-less decentralized oracle that could transfer data back and forth between blockchain and application acting as a middle-man. Why is this so important? Without a decentralized oracle, a decentralized smart contract will only be able to perform operations with on-chain data. If there is no go-between, they lose trust and defeat the purpose of having blockchain in the first place. Unlike traditional oracle services, where there is a single point of failure, the decentralized nature of Chain Link allows the perfect integration with blockchain and real world applications.
Why Chain Link ISN’T a SCAM (Accomplishments)
Chain Link boasts over 50 partnerships with both Blockchain and Traditional tech giants — a feat only it can claim in the cluttered blockchain sector. With partnerships from giants such as Google and Oracle, to acquisitions to make it’s protocol more robust and intuitive such as Towncrier and Kaliedo, Chain Link is leading the race in real world adoption use cases for blockchain technologies.
If you are a believer in blockchain tech and are going to hodl long, you must own some Chain Link in your portfolio as it’s looking more and more like it will be the default decentralized oracle node service for all applications integrating blockchain smart contract services. Right now it only works with Ethereum, but it’s aquired town-crier protocol will allow interoperability with other blockchains as well.
3. RavenCoin
I go cray when I think of real world and digital asset ownership integrated with blockchain technology. I mean, it’s the inevitable future of ownership — a mathematically proven, decentralized ledger that without a doubt proves the ownership of an asset — real or digital. You can create digital assets or assign a real world asset such as a deed to land or property and verify that ownership and amount owed — if any, between two or more parties.
Ravencoins open source platform is all ready to go, you can start creating digital assets right now and in return, it burns the RVN needed to create said asset. Additionally they are working on a built-in messaging and voting system. This is a true cypherpunk/cyberpunk coin with privacy centric features that combine messaging, voting, fungible and nonfungible asset creation and a possibility for STO creation.
Ravencoin is probably the riskiest play on this list, it is the only one that did not participate in an ICO, being that it was open source. It is an original fork of Bitcoin, albeit a few major differences, one being the circulating supply needed for the ownership marketplace. Ravencoin is not as accomplished or on an established Exchange such as Coinbase.
Why Ravencoin ISN’T a SCAM (Accomplishments)
In June of 2019 Ravencoin was listed by Binance’s official Trust Wallet app. Before that, the protocol team announced it would be joining the top crypto platform Binance Chain to exploit the full potential of A.I.
In August 2019, the tZERO cypto finance platform announced its support for Ravencoin.
Former CEO of OverStock Patrick Byrne invested heavily into Ravencoin, believing in the possibilities the open source project can create for the space.
So there you guys have it, my solid crypto picks heading into 2020, but keep an eye out — this space moves fast and changes are constantly happening in an ever evolving space. You never know what crypto is right around the corner that will rise above the competition, from dusk to dawn.
