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Amith B. Nirgunarthy, Benzinga Staff Writer

MaxCoin, the new crypto currency founded by Max Keiser will launch on February 5 and it has a good chance of crossing $20 million in market cap its first month of mining.

With over 88 altcoins listed on Coin Market Cap, it’s getting tougher to find the winners, but MaxCoin really stands out and here is why.

Value Creation: It’s all about the community.

For those of you that don’t know, Max Keiser is a vocal opponent of the current financial system and he has no problem accusing CEOs of crimes like murder and money laundering.

He has been a champion of bitcoin for sometime now, but for Max, it all started after the 2008 financial scandals, when he started to amass a strong following of likeminded people, who agree fiat currency is a joke and the central banksters should be hung.

Sound familiar? Many Bitcoin enthusiasts feel this way as well.

His web audience will seed Maxcoin in a similiar way the crazy Dogecoin community has driven their market cap to around $62 million in less than two months.

MaxKeiserTV has 39K subscribers. His “personal” twitter handle has close to 91K followers and the Maxcoin “official” twitter handle has 4.2K followers. Pretty impressive for a coin that hasn’t launched yet!

The MaxCoin reddit has 30 subscribers, that may not sound impressive, but consider that NXT coin only has 52 subscribers but commands a market cap over $60 million and you start to see why I am excited.

Strategic: A well planned launch helps the coin

Keiser loves calling out the banks for rigging rates and insider trading, so it only makes sense that he is aiming for a fair launch. The below is a statement from the official bitcoin forum thread and this coin's emphasis on “fair” is a strategic advantage to other coins, just like transparency and trust are at the core of bitcoin's message.

“One of the most important things for MaxCoin is to achieve a fair launch. In the current world of 100-alts-per day achieving a fair distribution at launch seems like a rare occasion. MaxCoin will have a zero percent premine, proven by the timestamps of the first blocks”

“...we want to set a hard deadline for the release of the MaxCoin clients as 7:30PM GMT on Wednesday, 5 February 2014 to allow the news of the coin's launch to spread, and to provide a fair chance for everybody to prepare and mine at official start time. This also afford you enough time to prepare yourself for mining...”

Special Features: Liquidity, Cryptography and Difficulty

Most coins have their own features chosen to set themselves apart. Here are features that may give MaxCoin an advantage.

Max Keiser has only planned for 250 million MaxCoins, sure it is a lot more than Bitcoin’s 21 million, but a whole lot less than Joe Weisenthal’s Stalwartbucks (from Business Insider), where trillions are released every day.

The Keccak (pronounced “catch-ack”) cryptography being used to verify transactions was chosen by The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) after a five-year competition to select the best cryptographic hash algorithm.

This winning algorithm beat out 63 other submissions that NIST received after its open call for in 2007, when it was thought that SHA-2, the bitcoin secure hash algorithm, might be threatened.

MaxCoin’s mining difficulty will be retargeted using the kimoto gravity well algorithm. Recently, the Dogecoin developers have been thinking of retargeting this way as well.

The advantage of Kimoto is that it changes how the difficulty readjustment works so that the difficulty is adjusted after every single block that is mined on the network.

Basically, it supposedly won’t let miners take advantage by throwing tons of computer equipments towards mining MaxCoin, thus creating a fair mining atmosphere.

In addition to all of the above, this may be the first time a coin will be traded on an actual exchange the first day it is mined. Coins-E has already announced it will start trading MaxCoin February 5. This in and of itself is pretty big news, considering many coins are still traded on public google spreadsheets.

MaxCoin at $20 million doesn’t sound so crazy, does it?

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.