2017 has finally come to an end – what an year it has been for the Blockchain technology in general and Cryptocurrencies in particular. The market experienced an unprecedented growth in both exchange price and market capitalization. To get a clearer picture of this growth, consider the fact that in the beginning of the year, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization stood at $18 billion. By August, it rose astronomically to over $150 billion. Just when stakeholders were trying to come to terms with such an amazing growth, it doubled again over the period of 3 months to over $300 billion by the end of November. On December 8 2017, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization was around $437 billion!

People from all over the world read about Bitcoin; Media, social channels, conferences, team workers etc. etc. Even on 9GAG you see daily jokes about Bitcoin! Do you believe that? Back in 2015 I was thinking to buy more bitcoins but the 400$ price was so good that one friend of mine had said: “You will never see this price again”. It was true. Now I see that many people keep waiting for the better day. I tell them the same thing: “The future is in front of your eyes, there is no better day than today!”.

In this New Year, let’s look at some of the interesting coins with big marketcaps. Please note that the order in which these cryptocoins appear does not indicate any form of ranking, preference or suitability.

1. Iota (MIOTA)

IOTA brings a level of uniqueness to the cryptocurrency scene that is sometimes lost within the mass projects that are derivatives of other projects. IOTA is the first successful implementation of the blockless cryptocurrency model. Instead of a blockchain, it uses a framework known as “Tangle” which uses Acyclic Directed Graph cryptography instead of the industry standard Elliptic Curve Cryptography.

Transaction speed within the IOTA ecosystem are significantly faster than most of the other blockchains with verification of transactions requiring only two nodes.

IOTA has done significantly well in the market as its price now stands at $4.02 and rising steadily, with a market cap of $11.17 billion.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that is garnering a lot of attention from all around the globe. IOTA’s key value proposition lies in smoothly with the IoT concept especially in the area of Machine to Machine (M2M) transactions which is a key component of the IoT. With such potential for applicability in something that many experts posit will be the core of the new digital revolution.

2. Monero (XMR)

One of the biggest arguments against the adoption of cryptocurrencies has been the risk of facilitating money laundering and funding for terrorist organizations (ML/T risk). This is due to the high level of anonymity in cryptocurrency transactions. While the transactions in blockchain networks are open to the public, the identities of the parties involved in the transaction are encrypted.

XMR is one of the more intuitive solutions to this problem as the Monero system is based upon the creation of an anonymous transaction platform that offers robust security against money laundering and terrorist funding activities.

This enhanced blockchain security feature has been one of the reasons for its meteoric rise which is expected to continue into 2018.

XMR currently trades at a price of $271.31 with a market capitalization of $4.19 billion.

3. Bitcoin (BTC)

No list of cryptocurrency investment would be complete without mentioning the most valuable of them all; Bitcoin. As long as you do not reside in the few countries where Bitcoin is illegal, then considering the king of all cryptocurrencies is a wise move.

The current market capitalization of Bitcoin stands at $281.98 billion which constitutes a dominance of 64.8% of the total crypto market cap. The market price of Bitcoin has risen tremendously, breaking the $10,000 mark in November and its current price is $14,857.10.

The meteoric rise in the price of Bitcoin cannot be attributed to any one particular reason. Rather, it is the aggregation of several factors that have seen the price of Bitcoin soar in this year 2017. The modern world is experiencing the emergence of a number of disrupter technologies that are challenging the traditional mainstream model across many different business segments. There seems to be a sort of paradigm shift away from the old way of centralization into a more open and decentralized world.

Bitcoin is also not regulated by any Bank or Government. Coming on the heels of the 2008 global financial crisis and the resultant bailouts by Governments which effectively weakened the economic status of many people, there is a general distrust for banks and financial regulators. Those who have grown to lose confidence in the mainstream financial market see Bitcoin as a means to take charge of their own economic destinies in an unregulated market.

Bitcoin is also a fairly straightforward cryptocurrency. Many of the newer attempts at creating cryptocurrencies have taken on ambitious projects that require specialist knowledge to come to terms with. Bitcoin closely resembles the fiat money which many people around the world are already used to.

There are of course numerous other factors but they all serve to drive people into embracing Bitcoins. With massive adoption on such a large scale, the price of Bitcoin continues to soar.

4. Ethereum (ETH)

In the aftermath of the DAO hack, there were fears over the sustainability of Ethereum but in this year, it has grown significantly. One of the reasons for this is the fact that it is the platform of choice for most ICOs. 2017 has seen a lot of startups elect to go the ICO route for their crowdfunding campaigns and this has further cemented the value of Ethereum. With more ICOs expected in 2018, this can only mean more potential for growth. The market cap and price of Ethereum stands at $72.43 billion and $752.65 respectively.

It is not only a way to do ICOs, it is far more than that. The things that a programmer can do on the Ethereum network are unbelievable. Business from all over the world start consider this as an alternative of the classic tools. The Smart contracts can be used on a variety of fields and become easier to understand and deploy each day.

Some will argue, but a very popular idea is that Ethereum will surpass Bitcoin as marketcap by 2020 and I don’t mind. The first ever produced car was replaced by a better, faster, reliable car few years later. I see bitcoin as being a Gold reserve of our days and Ethereum being similar with the Fiat but much more.

5. Lisk (LSK)

The direct competitor of Ethereum is now more capable than ever. With a great team behind, LSK has done huge steps forward in terms of technology. Built around the need of JavaScript among programmers, LSK offers a more scalable solution than Ethereum. On Lisk there is no single main chain. but there are multiple chains interconnected. Imagine if there will be a hack, only one chain is affected and the others are safe. Remember the DAO hack right? Was not funny..

6. Stratis (STRAT)

I am mentioning this coin because I was following it right from the beginning. C# programmer’s heaven. It was designed to facilitate the Blockchain development using one of the most popular programming languages, C#.

The technology is great, the community is great, my mom’s pizza is great but we only care about profit, isn’t it? Well, here is the good news. If you do a little graphical analysis, you will see that there is a big possibility for a 4x to happen extremely soon. Many professional traders on viewtrading.com platform speculated that a break through the resistance level is imminent so.. on board on the train until it is not too late!

7. Siacoin (SC)

Tell me something that exists on the internet and does not need storage? It’s more like you have some new Christmas presents but you don’t want them to get stolen but you also don’t want to pay more than the presents worth for keeping them safe, isn’t it?

Well, Siacoin got your back! You can now store your files in the safest possible way, on thousands of computers from all over the world while being powerfully encrypted and guess what! It’s stupid cheap. I mean compared to the alternatives (Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.) it is 8 times cheaper. More than that, your files are only yours, no one can read them because no one has full access to them, they only have a small portion of your files. Say goodbye to targeted advertising, stolen files by hackers or corrupt organizations.

Siacoin is not even in top 30 altcoins, but imagine one day, when a huge company like the ones mentioned above will say: “You know what? We need your services!” and bang! A huge partnership is announced and the price is glued to a rocket.

Final Words

Despite the growth in the cryptocurrency market, it is important to understand that as assets, cryptocurrencies are still quite volatile and unstable. Investing in them constitutes speculation and as such, great care must be taken at all times. Do your own research and don’t invest just because somebody said so. Precaution and patient, take you must. ~Yoda