Welcome back! In the previous article (Part 1) I shared 3 out of 5 cryptocurrencies you should know apart from Bitcoins, In continuation to the said article you will find the other two cryptocurrencies and some handy tips to evaluate them.

4. Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash

Year of Release: 2017

Market Capitalization: $11.72 Billion (As of 1st April, 2018).

Founder: Bitcoin Cash was created by a team of people who forked the bitcoin blockchain ledger. It is now controlled by multiple independent teams of developers.

Bitcoin cash is sort of a hard fork of bitcoin. In August 2017, a group split the chain to create a new form of Bitcoin that they called Bitcoin Cash. The two blockchain shared a transaction history up until the time of the split, giving anyone who held any number of Bitcoins until the hard fork the equivalent number of Bitcoin Cash on the new fork. (A hard fork is a software change/ revision) Hard forks run the risk of splitting the blockchain into two, particularly if the community disagrees about it. This exactly happened with bitcoin and bitcoin cash.

“With this fork, there is a battle over Bitcoin — the name, the brand and which chain is the true Bitcoin. And no one is backing down.”- Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, a $250 million crypto-hedge fund

BitPay, the largest bitcoin payment processor, integrated Bitcoin Cash into its Visa debit card.

5. Cardano (Ada)

Cardano

Year of Release: 2018

Market Capitalization: $ 4.06 Billion (As of 1st April, 2018).

Founder: Blockchain development firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) led by Charles Hoskinson (former co-founder of BitShares and Ethereum) and Jeremy Wood.

Famously known as the Ethereum of Japan. Cardano is a 3rd generation coin. Its a distributed computing platform that runs the blockchain for Ada cryptocurrency. It aims to run smart contracts, decentralized applications, side chains, multi-party computation, and metadata. It is the first blockchain network backed by a “scientific philosophy” and built by leading academics and engineers through peer-reviewed research.

The Cardano blockchain just launched a few months ago and exploded on the scene with massive gains in its coin, called Ada, It break’s into the top 10 cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization. About 25 billion out of a maximum 45 billion coins are currently in circulation.

So how do you determine which altcoin is worth a flyer?

Origination — find out why they were created? was there a underlying problem that they intended to solve? you will realize most cryptocurrencies are created for no reason and are not worth your time and money. For example — bitcoin was created during the 2008 financial crisis to solve the problem of money being controlled by big central organization that wielded financial power. When the reason for its origination is strong and relevant it is bound to be popular and useful thus creating value for the currency. Most of the currencies you would be considering would be eliminated by this single test itself. Research the founders — “ What is the background of these founders? have they been involved with any other cryptocurrencies before? How experienced are these founders? Do they have a solid backing up from some organization or body? It is important to know the team behind the currency as the most successful cyptocurrencies have the most experienced teams on board. Determine the lifecycle — find out where they are in the process? analyse their stage, determine if they are still in beta/test phase or are live? Are they constantly releasing new features and improvements? This process will help you analyse the maturity of the currency which is a important factor when determining or predicting its value and price. Valuation and Market capitalization — Not all altcoins are a hit in the market some are received well, some simply ignored. There could be numerous reasons for such market reaction. Thus its important to analyse how they are priced according to there current market evaluation. You should stay away from over priced currencies.

Keeping the above in mind you should be at a good starting stage to analyse the currencies on your radar. Having said that one should not forget the risk involved and the volatile nature of these currencies.