Today, the market is going up and Bitcoin is nearing $13,000. This is both good and bad in my mind. A part of my mind is happy that the market is going up (obviously) but the other is frustrated with the ups and downs. The price really needs to stabilize or move with a little more sense and then I would be happier. As it stands, there are probably a lot of people losing a lot of money. Not good in the long run. I want tokens to moon, but also not be so unpredictable. But then we have all been wishing that.

Anyway, I’m once again going to mention a few projects (all well known) that I think will solidify their place in the market in 2020.

1. Ripple (XRP)

Ripple critics should put to rest their arguments now. Sure, it’s kinda centralized and it’s not exactly winning any favours by getting close to insiders from the fiat industry. But that is the point of Ripple. It is a connection between the old world and the new. It is a new form or replacement actually of SWIFT and banks can seize on it to grow their businesses and beat their competitors.

The best thing about Ripple is that they are taking a very strategic approach to expanding their global network of partner banks and establishing some interesting ways that will guarantee their growth. This is mostly getting banks to see that a DLT based transfer is faster and cheaper. I think I have seen banks in some major countries, mostly in India, Japan and the Middle East really get on board with the xRapid product.

So imagine that in 2020, the many banks on RippleNet have completed more trials with Ripple’s solutions. If they are happy with it, and all of the responses so far have been almost fully positive, banks go through with making Ripple an actual part of their systems. That would give Ripple reach to millions of customers that the banks already possess. It is a smart move and because Ripple actually has a good product, I think that XRP price will shoot up in 2020.

2. Basic Attention Token (BAT)

Even if it is not in the same use case space, I think the Basic Attention Token project has a lot of similarities with Ripple. By that I mean that the team knows exactly what their use case is and is catering to people who are frustrated with a big problem of our times, privacy and advertising revenue. Like Ripple, they are smartly reaching out to content creators and publishers and convincing them that BAT is an ideal way to make the platform more fair and faster and cheaper. It knows its target audience very well.

And I like that there is good evidence that BAT and its browser Brave are reliable and functional products. The publishers list is always growing and so is the userbase. Brave beat Firefox and Opera, and is gaining a lot of attention as people are posting reports, like on WIRED, about how it is better than Chrome.

3. Stratis (STRAT)

Stratis is not so famous as the other two projects but the team and project use case is very solid. Stratis is a BaaS project that helps businesses build blockchain for their systems from end to end. This is a requirement for the world as blockchain-based systems become more common and companies see the value in having such a system.

Companies will have to have a lot of money and put in a lot of manpower in order to build these systems, but Stratis makes that much easier for them. It is for those companies that lack the big bucks and manpower of bigger companies to be able to do their blockchain work with ease and cheaply. Not only will these businesses be able to build these systems cheaply, they will also be able to compete better through the benefits of blockchain. I really like how you can see these different blockchain ideas make things more fair in any ecosystem it is working in.

And 2020 I think will be a big year for a project like Stratis because it will be the year when more small and medium sized companies think about the technology. Stratis has already delivered many milestones, so it is putting itself in a good position to attract these companies next year, when they decide to start investing in blockchain. I think this will play a big part in the STRAT’s token price going up and becoming a top 20 project.