Crypto Winter is coming and no, I’m not talking about the recent bear market. We’re talking about the purge of altcoins that is sure to happen in the (hopefully) near future. With over 2000 options for cryptocurrencies as of summer 2018, there’s not much hope for them all. Greed and borrowed technology seems to be at the forefront of most altcoins. Looking at statistics involving the success rates of start-up companies, the vast majority will fail. . .



BUT. . .

Certainly there are altcoins that will survive. I’ve compiled a list of the coins I feel will survive and the reasons for it. In no particular order. . .





Stellar – XLM

The Stellar Blockchain project mainly pointed at remittances or cross country payments in a fast, efficient, and cheap way. Stellar offered their solution to the resource usage issue that many proof of work networks encountered with their Stellar Consensus Protocol (Can be explored in the Stellar Consensus Protocol White paper Here). With many advantageous partnerships, including tech giant IBM, Stellar is on the right path to crypto immortality. If you do any online business, especially internationally, you’ll see there is a need for fast, simple and cheap ways to send payments. With the leaders in online payments currently charging 5% (think Paypal) or more in money transferring fees, it’s easy to imagine a world where Stellar, with its <5 second transaction speeds and ultra low transaction fees, thrives in business. It is said that Tempo running on the Stellar blockchain as a remittances dApp can facilitate 600,000 transactions for 0.01 USD in fees. Stellar will survive the altcoins’ purge.

Read More about other Projects here.

Cardano – ADA

First and foremost Cardano seems to be a big player in the eyes of Coinbase. With Coinbase making their official/unofficial announcement on Twitter, with their blog stating that they are exploring adding 5 new tokens to their platform (fingers crossed for a release matching the ETC rather than the failure of the BCH release on their platform). Cardano was created by Charles Hoskinson one of the co-founders of Ethereum. It makes me happy that these mentioned assets have their own platform/ blockchain vs the ERC20 tokens that will eventually flood the Coinbase market. Cardano has been meeting their all their targets on the ever counting down roadmap. They also have a growing community with over 100,000 followers on twitter alone this year. I’ve also noticed they’ve been using a testnet to mainnet approach rather than throwing up changes for the community to deal with or even releasing mainnet and the community suffering from major problem. . . Not going to name anyone but their network name rhymes with mangle. . .

On a side note Cardano is one of the most documented “altcoin” out there with 100’s of articles written in several languages just in “Advice and Answers from the Cardano team”

Zcash – ZEC

I’ll mention this right away! 90% of Zcash users use it strictly as a Cryptocurrency, rather than the privacy token it was created for. I do see this changing slowly as markets grow in the future, which of course includes darknet markets. Darknet markets will never go away. This should not devalue the token in your eyes though. After all, Bitcoin is “only used for drug and weapon purchases” on markets like the Silk road. The people who were so down on the OG cryptocurrency probably hold it today and are preaching the same thing about Zcash and Monero. If they don’t believe in privacy they don’t deserve to use the technology. That being said in my opinion for the financial market, specifically because I don’t want to get into the “morals” or the Darkweb markets, I think it adds value that the coin you are holding is secure and is sought out for potential purchases that people want hidden. This gives it a deep value rather than the face value of just being on a blockchain. We all want privacy, after all.

It is Worth mentioning that they were also mentioned on the Coinbase blog and I quote. . . “The Zcash protocol has been live since 2016 and the development team has published technical improvements that may reduce the memory consumption associated with transaction privacy by 98%.”- Coinbase

0x – ZRX

Number one! Decentralized exchanges. They are built with the 0x protocol and a completely open protocol allowing ERC20 tokens to be trades directly on the Ethereum blockchain. This project has been built through several libraries to ease its way into developer community, I mean hey, building in your native language is a time saver and gives you that push to take a crack at it vs learning a full new build. 0x again have stuck to a majority of their items on the road map and of course have also been mentioned in the Coinbase Blog… They really know how to pick their coins wisely, you don’t want to add dying coins to your growing platform!

Ethereum Classic – ETC

Yes I know I mentioned that Coinbase doesn’t want to add dying coins to their platform, “Then why did they add ETC!?”. I think this as a long term strategy, with the announcement of ETH moving towards a Proof of Stake system people may want to use classic over the new protocols due to the immense difference in consensus between Proof of Stake and Proof of Work. For this reason, I see Ethereum Classic surviving the altcoins’ purge.

Basic Attention Token – BAT

BAT is advertised as a unit of account between advertisers, publishers, and users. In fact, BAT does not encourage the trading of their tokens on any exchanges (though they’re happy to advertise ALL exchanges who list BAT). Citing the data usage, energy use, and expense that users face for unwanted ads on their mobile devices, the Basic Attention Token White Paper addresses issues we all can relate to. Synonymous with BAT, is the Brave browser. The Brave browser seamlessly integrates with the BAT token. Blocking trackers and ads that steal your information and sell it to companies who spam your various inboxes, the browser protects you while you surf the web. Oh, and it can also push malware away from your computer. With a team of experienced people highly regarded in the tech world, BAT has what’s necessary to survive the altcoins’ purge.

EOS

Where do I even start with EOS? First of all, it’s got a huge and excited community. Some of the biggest names in blockchain believe strongly in EOS. So, what’s so great about it? Well, transactions are. . . Free? That’s right, free. EOS is not mined, rather there are block producers who are voted in by its community. EOS is fast, very fast. EOS is scalable. The beauty of EOS is that it addresses many of the shortcomings of the Ethereum Network. For example, developing a dApp on the Ethereum network requires one to write an app in the complex machine code Solidity. EOS provides services to developers regarding database management, account management, and other services to overcome this big issue with Ethereum. EOS provides the tools necessary to host dApps on their network. Where the Ethereum Network requires users to pay money to interact with the network, EOS does not. In the future, it’s very possible that people will be using EOS dApps without ever having heard of the EOS Network. A very successful year long token sale means that EOS has the funds to develop into something huge. For these reasons, I believe EOS will survive the altcoins’ purge.

On a second note it’s also nice to see them recover from their problems they had after going mainnet. I think the release of the constitution struck fears into EOS holders with the “redistribution” clause causing the original downturn of EOS, but after some talk it seems they will be removing it and said it was there to encourage use of their chain rather than having stagnant addresses with slow inflation due to less circulation.

Tron – TRX

I’d like to clear this up immediately, I HATE Tron, I hate Justin Sun and his twitter announcement style. I hate that Tron built their white paper from a basic explanation of an Ethereum contract and a copy and paste from the IPFS/ Filecoin white paper. In summary, Tron sucks. With that said the community is overbearingly enthusiastic on all social medias. People WILL see the name and put their money into it. It’s pitched as the Ethereum killer and people will put money in it because of the lowcap coin currently sitting at $0.0235. People find it easier to buy lower cap coins because they think that a plus 100% boom will pay out more than 100% on another coin for some odd reason, but they don’t see that the +/- on any investment here will be the same in the end. Ok OK! I’m done shitting on Tron, the coin, and their community. In positive light, they recently purchased BitTorrent! I think this acquisition is a great move for them and I see them potentially looking into some sort of more secure and decentralized torrenting methods for the future, this is where the IPFS part of their projected project will come in handy. The distribution of file parts and recombining them to the user downloading will be a great innovation to the field especially if they figure out placeholder styled downloads with first come first save vs the systematic styled approach we have now.

In other news they do now have over 100,000 accounts which is NOT close to Ethereum’s network. . . unlike the popular articles floating around CryptoTwitter the last few days. I do give them props for this growth though and that their chain is actually running! Congrats on being one of the few ERC20 coins to make it to MainNet!

Litecoin – LTC

Litecoin is the oldest cryptocurrency on this list. Founded in 2011, LTC has become a BTC alternative with a top 10 market cap. Some key differences lie in Litecoin’s foundation though. Litecoins coin limit is 84 million vs 21 million from Bitcoin. The average mining time of a block on the LTC blockchain is roughly 2.5 minutes vs BTC’s 10 minutes. Litecoin took the key features of the Bitcoin and improved upon the technology. And they did it before crypto was cool. The project has a dedicated following and it has large current market cap of over 3 billion USD. With tons of active traders paired with Litecoin being one of the big four on coinbase, I believe Litecoin has what it takes to survive the altcoins’ purge.



A side note on Litecoin. LTC found Charlie Lee happend to sell his coin at the all time high right after an interview on national TV in December. Claiming that the move was not to further his personal wealth (really…?), Charlie lees remarks were something along the lines of claiming his holding of LTC was a “conflict of interest.” Cashing out at the peak just happened to be an added bonus, I guess.

Monero – XMR

Monero is now the prefered coin on dark markets, it’s a privacy token known for this. I don’t see it coming to coinbase listing any time soon. Monero runs on a proof of work standard which is another reason I see it continue through the years, there will almost always be a value behind it even if it’s only the cost of energy that was used plus a bit of a market upsell similar to Bitcoin. They have a great transaction schematic that involves ring signatures and stealth addresses created on the fly to keep you and your transactions private. I see Monero as a classic and almost a standard need in the crypto community considering it was founded on similar principles of privacy and decentralization. Everything in which the community originally started the movement for is why I think Monero will survive the altcoins’ purge.

Please note: Ethereum is not on the altcoins list because we do not consider it an altcoin. Even if all ERC20 coins die, I believe ethereum will survive alongside Bitcoin as a store of value.