People on the crypto markets are usually either short term or long term oriented. The short term side looks to take advantage of latest market information and TA to scalp various coins and ride out the waves. The other side has different plans, as they look to enter long term positions on coins that have excellent FA behind them. Good FA will require you to find a coin with a strong, experienced development team. This team should be looking to bring cryptocurrency into a big enough market niche which can warrant wide adoption of the project in the future.
The idea is to find a coin with good fundamentals that has excellent potential, invest in it and wait for a longer period of time. If the coin was well analyzed before investing, the potential gains that the investor can make can be very rewarding. We are currently in a crypto market where new projects and ICO’s are happening almost daily. This means that the average investor is given a number of projects which could potentially earn him an excellent long-term return on what he puts into a project. In this article I will try to point out a few coins that should be no-brainer long term holds for any investor.
ICON
This so-called Korean Ethereum/NEO is a somewhat unknown project still, which is rather surprising considering its technology and the amount of partnerships it has gathered so far. Icon will be a large scale ecosystem that will bring together various blockchains under a single platform. Schools, banks, government, businesses will all be able to create their own blockchains in the future and the ICON platform will look to help these various players come together.
ICON just recently became a part of the so-called Interoperability Alliance, an organization backed by Wanchain and Aion, which has a shared goal to promote interconnectivity between isolated blockchains. The Alliance will focus on developing common industry standards, sharing researching, and protocol architecture. Aion will be the backbone of the project, enabling various companies and services to create their own blockchains. Wanchain will be the financial part of the alliance, enabling private, smart contract empowered cross-chain transaction of value. Finally, ICON will bring these pieces together by creating an interconnected network of blockchains that can communicate freely and quickly.
Projects like ICON will definitely have a use case in the future, as more and more individual blockchains start seeking ways of communicating between eachother. While it won’t be easy to achieve everything they set out to do, the list of companies backing them should be enough of an indicator that this coin is going places in the future.
Plus they have an excellent ticker.
Wanchain
A project closely related to ICON, it aims to connect various projects by allowing them to exchange value between their blockchain ledgers. Any blockchain network, whether a public, private or consortium chain, can integrate with Wanchain to establish connections with other ledgers and perform low cost inter-ledger asset transfers. Platforms from all walks of life can set up “virtual teller windows” that will provide services like loans, credits, value transfers and transaction settlements backed by the power of the blockchain.
Other than that, Wanchain has good token economy. It’s relatively rare with a total supply of 210 million coins (a bit more than 100 million currently circulating). As the interoperability alliance keeps developing and growing, the demand for the coin should do the same. Additionally Wanchain will implement a Proof-of-Stake algorithm in June and a few weeks after that enable the possibility of anyone with enough WAN to stake them. Staking basically means that users get to run one of the network nodes who receive rewards based on their staked amount and the type of node they are running. Finally, its market cap is currently 460 million dollars and some people are suggesting that it should go to levels of 30 billion at least. Judging by all of those, owning Wanchain wouldn’t be the worst financial decision of your life.
ZRX
DEX’s (decentralized exchanges) are seemingly the talk of the town nowadays in the cryptosphere. Everyone is tired of having to deal with centralized exchanges customer service and not having control over their exchange wallets private keys. A solution has been created in the form of an open blockchain based protocol that allows token for token trading on decentralized platforms. The protocol’s name is 0x, and its coin is aptly named ZRX.
0x protocol promises to deliver a new era of decentralized token exchanging. Users will be able to retain control over their private keys and will be solely responsible for their wealth. The protocol will be globally accessible and blockchain backed. Trading is simplified, faster and with lower fees. Obviously such a project has raised a lot of interest from users and investors alike. Probably the biggest confirmation of ZRX’s potential has been Coinbase purchasing the 0x protocol-based DEX called Paradex. With many Coinbase devs on 0x’s advisory and development team, all the signs imply that ZRX will end up being listed on the mentioned exchange. Combine its potential as a platform with it potentially becoming the 5th coin traded on one of the biggest exchanges known for its stinginess when it comes to adding new tokens and you will see why ZRX is a fan favorite.
EOS
There have been many “Ethereum killers” mentioned in the past, with various coins looking to supplant the current king of smart contract technology and ICO’s. EOS is one of the earliest projects looking to do so, with a desire to create a blockchain-based platform which will be able to host decentralized applications on top of smart contracts. Its developer Dan Larimer brags about EOS being capable of reaching millions of transactions in the future, which will be possible thanks to implementation of the Delegated Proof of Stake algorithms.
While the potential of the coin is immense, it could eventually become useful enough to blast even the best of mainstream, old finance options that are available out there. The project has had some rough times recently, with security leaks and bad design choices being discovered at a crucial time for the coin. With the EOS mainnet scheduled for June 2nd, answers to many questions that the cryptosphere has been asking will be answered soon enough.
Bitcoin
Of course, we couldn’t leave out the king, now could we? Going strong (even though currently not so strong) since 2009, Bitcoin is the best known cryptocurrency out there. Made with a simple intention to be a decentralized, virtual, cryptography protected currency, it will have a lot of things to prove in 2018. Price-wise, it’s currently sitting below 7500 dollars and is in a middle of a bearish trend. There is some talk that it could go as low as 5500 dollars and some people are even seeing a “flippening” on the horizon, during which Ethereum will take over the spot as no.1 cryptocurrency in the world in terms of market cap.
The upcoming year should give us a clearer picture if and when will we see Bitcoin move up to the levels it was on back in January. Much will depend on its further adoption and how will the lightning network and Rootstock solve its issues with scalability and lack of smart contract capabilities. Ultimately Bitcoins movement will be the key to the movement of the entire market and it still remains the one coin we should all pay the closest attention to.
