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Photo by Hasan Can Devsir on Unsplash
While Bitcoin dominance is taking a break, Alt-Coins are preparing for the next possible run-up.
By now, when you’re a cryptocurrency newbie, you probably heard about Cardano, Chainlink, DogeCoin and maybe even Polkadot. Do you also know what their product is, their innovation, how decentralized they are?
When Bitcoin sets through its current bigger correction and possibly goes down to $43.000, more money will move to the Alts again. Also, Bitcoin’s breather will tank some Alts just the same. The speculative ones.
Be prepared.
Where will you put your cash? Are you Scrolling Twitter for some obscured names like Unobtanium (UNO), airdrops or multi marketing Ponzi schemes? Or are you ready to invest in projects with dedicated teams focusing on a product instead of exposure and price?
I believe that future real value will be in those ones, the Alts that are ready to mature and stay for the long run.
I bought some Alt-coins back in 2019 that gave me great gains, using a method I am about to explain. All I needed to do was to stick around long enough, all through the last crypto winter.
Are you willing to do the same?
Alt Coin investing is learning to discern between a quality wine that gets better and better over time compared to a cheap Lambrusco that shines and bubbles nicely but gives you a hangover the next day if you didn’t sell on time
Here are my best parameters to make your Alt-coin portfolio shine. Give them time to ripe, and you’ll enjoy amazing gains in a few years from now.
Price is a good indicator of the value of anything. How much are you willing to pay?
We have learned from our current economic system where banks equal Santaclaus printing money for free that having a fixed market cap can be a true innovation in introducing a new type of money altogether.
In fact, it might be the only relevant condition for any money of the future.
We don’t want to repeat the mistakes from the past. This means that new crypto money, regardless of the product, should have a max cap, a definitive number of tokens minted.
This mining, farming or minting should be backed by real utility. Else, you are creating nothing but another copy of a centralized pyramid currency system where the founders of the project become central bankers with the power to switch on the token machine at their whim.
Scarcity coins have no top in a FIAT money printing system without a bottom.
Nick Szabo came up with a fancy name for the scarcity resulting from the difficulty to mine tokens combined with a max cap: ‘Unforgeable Costliness’.
According to him,
Bitcoin has unforgeable costliness, because it costs a lot of electricity to produce new bitcoins. Producing bitcoins cannot be easily faked. Note that this is different for fiat money and also for altcoins that have no supply cap
Let’s dive further into this price-value-mining difficulty parameter by looking at the best research done in this field, exactly 2 years ago.
PlanB researched 5 Alts to see which of them might have a future as a digital store of value. Surprisingly enough, they found one Altcoin that performed even better than Bitcoin: DECRED, the innovative consensus voting model.
My first hidden Gem is DECRED (DCR)
Remember, this research is from March 22nd, 2019. DECRED price surged from around $19,- on March 22nd 2019 all the way to its present ATH at $180,- on March 14th 2021. A whopping 947% price rise
I’ve been a team member of a project in the decentralized storage space. The expectation and hope in that team was humanity moving swiftly from pyramid models to circles driven by fully empowered people taking full responsibility.
We had high hopes, and we did our best to walk the talk, embodying those above values in our own everyday actions and decisions.
The project is still quite invisible, but it's up and running.
When we zoom out for a moment, humanity itself seems further than ever from a world with innovative social-economic decentralized models for the exchange of goods and services, information, law and general value expressed in tokens.
When you investigate ALT coin projects to find hidden Gems, ask yourself this:
Is teamwork making the dream work?
Examine how strong the team is behind a project. That’s a crucial parameter. Is there any echo from the old world still playing out, meaning a pyramid model with sometimes even only one founder at the top? Tron is a coin of which price depends heavily on founder Justin Sun being in the news positive or negative.
The same goes for Elon Musk and Bitcoin. (I am only joking)
I don’t argue that projects with a strong founder or leader can not thrive and bring value. Behind a strong inspiring leader, a great team can be built. Ethereums founder Vitalik Buterin inspires hundreds of young developers to create a better world and apps on the WEB3 network.
What are the core values, the mission of the project, how is the project organized? A hard-working in the shade coherent and aligned team that puts product before promise is a great parameter. That's why I believe the start-up I worked for is another hidden Gem. They always put the product before marketing.
ThreeFold (TFT #1027) brings the decentralized Internet of the future and is my most secret gem
Price just soared 20% today, where BTC is going down. Just Saying.
ThreeFold consciously chose the Stellar Blockchain. Stellar is another example of a Thiel inspired non-profit organization whose mission is to “Make Money Better’. The open-source Stellar Network is driven by an organization that wants to empower people. It’s there, written on the foundation’s website!
Another one: The Zilliqa team. At Zilliqa it's the team first. The Singapore/London based initiative that introduced Sharding hosts many young developers, is very present on all social media, shows self-reflection as it asks for improvement advice openly on Reddit for example. Zilliqa feels to me like an open, very transparent, learning by doing, hard-working organization, just in the way they present themselves.
My Next 2 Hidden Gems : Zilliqa (ZIL #53) and Stellar (XLM #14)
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
That brings me to the last parameter: the product. When you look behind the initial 2018 crypto ICO hype and dig through the more than 800 deceased scams, you will find Coinmarketcap.com.
No, seriously. Be honest with yourself.
Do you only briefly check out coinmarketcap, investigate the top 10 cryptos, follow free airdrops, spent time on CryptoTwitter and YouTube and simply hope for this altcoin season to fill your bags?
That’s perfectly OK, and you probably got lucky, when you got in in time.
Why not support a coherent open-source team because of its values, because you like the utility? For this reason, I bought some BAT, Stellar, Decred and Zilliqa. To buy a share in a product of the future, a product that I can use even referring to the Brave browser.
I must address the latest craze in crypto country here: The Non Fungible Tokens. I do believe there can be some Gems in there.
The problem with NFT’s is that’s pretty much still in the hype phase. The next billionaire’s game pushing the Art collectors world fully into digital mode? The NFT market is gaining momentum and volume and some insiders bet on it surpassing the value of the physical art world.
Justin Sun adopted the TRON blockchain for NFT, since moving single value tokens connected to digital content around in gaming land has already been proven to have potential. Just remember the Cryptokitties hype, that’s where it all kind of took off. Creating your own unique virtual kittie in a game, and store it in a token to validate it’s yours, and yours alone. Breed 2 kitties and its offspring is a new NFT.
I also do see the potential for fusion projects. One example is Aavegotchi, blending DeFi service, Aave mechanics and the Tamagotchi toy. Defi is something that won’t go away, only grow.
My last Hidden Gem is Aavegotchi (GHST #459)
All of these sectors behold challenges to bring real innovation, and dozens of projects are working on them. Using the above-mentioned parameters hopefully can give you some indicators to make a checklist and spot the projects that are gaining momentum and traction.
The revolution of digital information, the internet, took roughly 20 years. We should not expect the revolution of money to be fully embodied and working within the next 5 years.
A lot of new infrastructure needs to be built to replace inefficient old systems, for example, close to the edge data storage. This can take decades.
Blockchain technology is leading the way to real disruptive innovation in maybe all of the sectors of our lives, and probably even smarter solutions will be invented or build on top.
We should allow the sector its fuck-ups.
Because it will be decentralized, no new pyramids will raise their shoulders above others and eat the ‘competition’ eventually.
The coming age will be about cooperation, responsibility, redistribution of money and slowly closing the gap of the huge separation that the old system has brought us.
The flaring tribalism between different coins and projects won’t serve this process. We are all part of this massive move, and what we need the most are vision, belief, and patience.
Your best Alt Coin choice?
Invest in the future you believe in using the above wisdom, tools and advice.
Rebellious Visionary writing stories to empower you to live a passionate life in joy & inspiration. Author of The Wisdom Keeper: www.amazon.com/dp/B081S641DW
(This is by no means financial advice, Crypto is my hobby. Always do your own research).
