While the cryptocurrency market has been very bearish and recently going sideways, I used more of my time to research upcoming cryptocurrency projects. My suggestions are based on the idea and team experience.

DY/DX

I came across this project a while back but I want to highlight it because of the recent developments and relations it has with other crypto-companies. [Link]

Dy/Dx is coined as, “the protocol for decentralized financial derivatives.” According to Investopedia, “A derivative is a financial security with a value that is reliant upon or derived from an underlying asset or group of assets.” This project has enormous potential because it will provide decentralized margin trading and options. Currently, there are not many options or derivatives to short crypto especially the mid-tier altcoins. This platform will certainly bring more volume and opportunity into the cryptocurrency market, especially during bear markets.

Now the team and the relations really excite me. The founder, Antonio Juliano, was previously a software engineer at Coinbase and Uber, and is a Princeton Grad. Other team members have experience at google, Bloomberg and Amazon. They are built on 0x and Ethereum, two leading cryptocurrency projects that I believe will be around for a long time. Furthermore, they are backed by Andreesen Horowitz and Polychain Capital; leading crypto hedgefunds. This experience and relations it has with crypto-companies, I believe provides a positive reputation to the project and also shows support for the growth of the 0x and Ethereum platform as well.

Recently, they launched their testnet and open sourcing the smart contract code for the protocol and I believe main launch is soon. [Link] If you have any questions, you should try contacting Antonio on slack, he is very active and answers everyone’s questions.

Vectorspace AI

As the cryptocurrency boomed in 2017, crypto ETF and index funds have been popping up left and right including: Coinbase Index Fund, First Crypto ETF, and Bitwise. However, I believe Vectorspace Ai Smart Baskets has technology that could potentially outperform the market and majority of the competitors. [Link]

Quoting the website, “Using a biomimetic approach, the Vectorspace AI platform will leverage advanced approaches in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) in order to create dynamic smart baskets (token baskets) based on trends rising in context-controlled sentiment, search, social media, and news”

Essentially based on market sentiment data and trends that the platform collects, they will have custom autonomous curated baskets. I guess you can think of it as mini sector index funds or baskets but designed to be smart in that it can find hidden relationships and tailor it for max performance. The smart baskets also provide 7 and 30 day returns and Sharpe/Sortino ratios, which gives insight on performance and the risk profile. These metrics align with traders and hedge funds who are always looking into generating alpha.

Furthermore, it seems like they are working on baskets that one can go long or short which would have been beneficial during this bear market we have seen the last couple months. These curated baskets bring in various trading opportunities and strategies such as sympathy plays, sector rotation, and market neutral basket trading.

Additionally, the team seems like they know what they are doing. Through my digging on LinkedIn, the core team has been working together on NLP and ML technology for 20 years in various startups, including running publicly traded companies (websites states they have multiple patents on NLP technology). This type of experience and proven team dynamic leads me to believe that they can be successful, because as I said before, an ICO project is a combination of crowd funding, VC funding, Finance (IPO), and Computer Science(Blockchain and smart contract technology) all at the same time. Vectorspace team checks all the boxes.

Currently the website states that the ICO period is active. They seem to be planning to run an ICO while being listed. [Link]

Which according to the telegram group is happening within the next two weeks.

Pepper

I stumbled onto this project while researching food related cryptocurrencies. I love food…lol.

Pepper, powered by Ethereum, aims to be a Reputation management platform for the real world. I constantly read about fake reviews and business even deleting negative reviews on news outlets so leveraging immutable blockchain technology makes so much sense in this space. Quoting the website, “Pepper is building the protocol layer to fight fake reviews for the internet of tomorrow. Our incentive-based network uses the blockchain to enable trustworthy reputation management and lower customer acquisition costs.” [Link]

I believe the team’s experience alone makes this platform have potential to become successful. All their early team members worked at top tech companies like Facebook, Groupon, Yahoo, and Twilio and did a bunch of other crypto projects like SpankChain, district 0x and makerdao.

The three Co-founders are all Thiel Fellows. For the individuals who are not familiar, a Thiel Fellow is a fellowship created by Peter Theil (Peter Theil is a very successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist who among other things is a supporter of Bitcoin.) through the Theil Foundation which provides exceptional students funding to drop out of school and pursue scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movements. So the team already has experience under their belt in creating successful startups such as Sleeker, Draftpot, and EnvoyNow which have been acquired. Furthermore, the advisors for the team have also created successful cryptocurrency projects including Bloom and Gem. In addition to that, many of the team members are dropouts of Ivy League Institutions, reminds me of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

While the website does not provide much more information, It seems like they are going through the final touches of a rebranding right now and will possibly move into markets other than the food industry. To say the least, I will be keeping this project on my radar.