While the January crash wiped a huge chunk of market cap off the map with aftershocks rippling through the marketplace ever since, there are a number of projects that have weathered the storm well and continue to show promise for the future. Factors include the team, the total supply, the use case, and the price change since early 2018.

Without any further ado, these are some of the sleeping giants of Crypto 2018.

Ontology

Ontology has a market cap of over $700,000, making it the most high-profile token in this article at number 23 on coinmarketcap. The project launched in March and has seen great success, now trading at $4.77 despite the high circulating supply of 151 million out of a total supply of 1 billion.

The fact that the currency has such a high supply and is still trading above $4 is impressive and rather unusual – it peaked in May at $10.10 per coin, but didn’t crash as is often seen when a new currency reaches a significant ATH and then undergoes a price correction. It dropped to $6 in late May, then spiked again to over $8 in June before dropping back down the following month.

The Project

The website describes the project as follows:

Ontology is a new high-performance public blockchain project & a distributed trust collaboration platform. Ontology provides new high-performance public blockchains that include a series of complete distributed ledgers and smart contract systems. Ontology blockchain framework supports public blockchain systems and is able to customize different public blockchains for different applications. Ontology supports collaboration amongst chain networks with its various protocol groups. Ontology will constantly provide common modules on the underlying infrastructure for different kinds of distributed scenarios, such as those for the distributed digital identity framework, distributed data exchange protocol, and so on. Based on specific scenario requirements, Ontology will continue to develop new common modules.

Essentially the project is a second-generation blockchain aimed to tackle logistics and data storage. Based in China, the project is just about to launch its mainnet.

The Team

The team is an impressive collection of software architects and designers headed up by Jun Li. Li has a rich academic background, including a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Master’s in Communication Engineering, MBA, and PMP. He is a senior blockchain architect and blockchain solutions professional with 16 years’ work experience in IT and fintech. Li previously provided technical architecture, management, and planning support for top international IT firms and major Chinese financial exchanges.

Lisk

Lisk is another one to keep an eye on in the coming weeks and months – the currency soared with many other altcoins last December to trade at above $20 before coming back down to earth, now trading at about 30% of its ATH, just like Bitcoin. The total market cap is $600,000, and Lisk is trading at $5.62. Compared to Ontology the total supply is quite low at 122.9 million, with 107 million already in circulation.

The Project

“Lisk’s Sidechain Development Kit makes it easy for you to build your own blockchain. Our tools are free for everyone, open source and written in JavaScript. Discover your potential with sidechains.”

The project is geared towards blockchain developers, facilitating the creation of new and innovative blockchain solutions.

Lisk aims to make Blockchain technology more accessible with a SDK written in JavaScript, special focus on user experience, developer support, in-depth documentations and the Lisk Academy. The Lisk network is operated using a highly efficient Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus model, which is secured by democratically elected delegates.

Lisk launched a mainnet a long time ago (on May 24. 2016), but Lisk 1.0 is still in development and soon to be released. Further growth could be on the horizon when it is released.

The Team

The Lisk team of 51 staff is headed up by Max Kordek, a 26-year-old business strategist and CEO with no prior experience listed before Lisk, making him potentially a wildcard in the otherwise solid project due to a lack of experience. However, Lisk have been on point so far, climbing to number 26 on coinmarketcap and reaching inter-market recognition as a blockchain project, meaning they’re definitely doing something right.

Augur

Coming in at number 34 on coinmarketcap is Augur. The project has a market cap of $400,000 and like many other currencies, is now trading at around 30% of its January ATH ($107) at $36.70. The total and circulating supply is just 11 million, making it even scarcer than Bitcoin – the low supply is definitely an appealing characteristic of the project.

The Project

Augur is a decentralized oracle and prediction platform built on the Ethereum network allowing users to “trustlessly create prediction markets on the outcome of any future event.”

Users feed real-world information into Augur’s contracts. Augur ensures the accuracy of this real-world information by providing a financial incentive for REP token holders to correct markets they believe have been reported on incorrectly. There are several ways users can participate in Augur: you can trade shares in markets, create prediction markets, or participate in the reporting system to keep the Augur oracle working accurately.

The Team

The team is quite formidable – Dr. Jack Peterson heads them up as CEO and Lead Developer with years of experience as a developer and entrepreneur, and the Co-Founder is Joey Krug of Pantera Capital (Chief Investment Officer) who use Augur tech for their predictions.

DADI

This one is by far the smallest one on the list – like, by far.

The project launched in March and the marketcap is under $10 million compared to the $0.6 – $0.7 billion projects listed above. DADI is currently trading at $0.12 after an ATH of $0.4. However, a recent mainnet launch has helped increase the profile of the project which has over 30k followers on Twitter and 20k in the Telegram channel despite the 449 ranking on coinmarketcap.

The total supply is 100 million and over 76 million tokens are in circulation.

The mainnet launched just over a week ago on 28 June, 2 days ahead of schedule.

The Project

The project is described as an initiative aimed at making the internet fairer with a suite of network-ready applications to offer faster and more secure hosting services for websites, APIs, apps and e-commerce stores. It’s a decentralized cloud computing and data storage project with a goal of disrupting the $200 billion+ cloud computing industry by slashing storage costs by allowing anyone to rent their excess device space in exchange for cryptocurrency, cutting out the middleman costs involved in paying Microsoft or Google who buy server farms dedicated to that purpose and have to cover those costs.

74% of the cloud computing market is now controlled by just four tech companies: Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Google. DADI is owned and run by everyone, sharing its revenue to help build a fairer internet.

The Team

The team is solid, comprised of experienced early investors and software developers headed by Joseph Denne.

Joseph is the Founder & CEO of DADI, and the visionary behind DADI’s decentralized architecture and web services. He is an expert in multi-agent and blockchain technologies as well as big data and machine learning. He was responsible for Symphony CMS and has 20+ years experience developing data and content platforms. Joseph was previously Group Technical Director for the Leo Burnett Group, the Founder of Airlock (a multi-award winning technology company), the Technical Director at Chime Communications and a member of the technology board at the BBC. His work is known across the industry and has been recognised with multiple Webby, Lovie, Emmy, Sony and Bafta awards.

Nothing is certain in the world of cryptocurrency – however, these are the three sleeping giants that I would recommend keeping an eye on. This is not financial advice, but information aimed at informing you on interesting projects in the space that you may wsh to look into. As always, do your own research before choosing to make an investment, and godspeed.

Interested in other cool crypto posts….check out Mining Wars: Bitmain vs Dragonmint and The Price of Bitcoin vs Cost of Mining.