As we move towards the end of the year, this week’s choices are set to benefit from significant developments and announcements that should strengthen their market positions and benefit their communities. The news should also result in increased amounts of attention to each respective currency over the coming weeks.

1. Fetch.ai (FET)

The Fetch.ai project combines artificial intelligence with blockchain and DAG (directed acyclic graph) data structures to build a scalable and stable ledger. The ledger’s consensus algorithm is called uPoW (useful proof-of-work), which seeks to make the computational power that is used to secure the ledger also perform other useful tasks for the network’s participants.

Why Fetch.ai?

The team at Fetch have a number of developments in the pipeline including their mainnet launch scheduled for December 19. The mainnet will launch following on from their Aries code update with a live version of their protocol running from then on. The team have also announced that the next stage of their staking program begins on December 17 with bidding opening at 1pm UTC. The projects staking system sees millions of FET tokens being staked on a monthly basis with token owners receiving rewards.

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How to buy FET on Binance?

2. Wanchain (WAN)

Wanchain aims to unite the world’s digital assets and transform the digital economy, and plans to connect the various coins, tokens, and blockchains that make up the current ecosystem. Wanchain also aims to be a bank of the future and provide lending, payment, settlement, transaction, investment and financing solutions.

Why Wanchain?

The team have a testnet upgrade scheduled for December 16 and the Mercury hard fork upgrade will occur on December 16 2019 at 0:00 UTC on the Wanchain testnet. Once the Epoch ID of Galaxy Consensus reaches 18246, Wanchain GWAN testnet clients that have been updated will switch over to the new Mercury branch. All users and validators running GWAN on testnet are advised to update their GWAN client before December 16, 2019 0:00 AM UTC to make sure the normal syncing process works efficiently after the hard fork. The team outline the full process here.

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How to buy WAN on Binance?

3. POA Network (POA)

Formerly known as Oracles Network, the project is an Ethereum-based public network that uses a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus. PoA is an alternative consensus mechanism, which doesn’t depend on nodes solving arbitrarily difficult mathematical problems, and uses a set of authorities or nodes that are allowed to create new blocks and secure the blockchain. This creates a cheaper and faster mechanism than proof of work (PoW) and the POA team are focused on building a secure and cost-efficient public network that is widely available.

Why POA Network?

In light of the recent Ethereum network upgrade, the team behind the project have scheduled their POA Core Istanbul upgrade for December 19. The update will see the POA Core Network upgrade to become compatible with Istanbul and will take place at block number 12598600. The team advise node operators to update spec.json and Parity node to version 2.6.5, and the full details can be found here.

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How did the coins perform last week?

The seven day period led to poor results across the market, but last week's coins to watch weathered the storm quite well. TRX fell by around 3% and in value and is currently trading at around $0.001. WAVES outperformed the market substantially, jumping by 21%. TFD made a marginal gain of around 1% in value and is currently trading at $0.005. Over the course of the week, the market moved from $205B to $194B.