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Before you consider getting into the cryptocurrency market, you should familiarize yourself with the method of evaluating an asset’s intrinsic value. Fundamental analysis is a necessary precursor to investing for any intelligent and responsible individual. Before buying an alt-coin with a comparatively small market cap but significant perceived and potential value, you must do your homework.

First, ask yourself, what problem is the altcoin solving? Where it’s positioned in the market, and are there any better alternatives to it? Second, research the team behind it. Is the development team any good? Is their corporate structure transparent? Are they credible and competent for the job? When and where are they registered? And at last, ask yourself, how much of your net worth are you willing to risk?

While the answers to all of these questions fall solely on your shoulders, we’re here to help and narrow your choices. There are more than 1300 altcoins on the market, and these are our top sven altcoins for 2018.

Monero (XMR) – $12 to $250 in 1 year

Monero is a secure, private, decentralized and untraceable cryptocurrency that started as a grassroots project in 2014. It’s an open-source project developed by a very respectable team of 7 core developers, more than 30 regular developers and above 240 contributing coders, continually pushing the frontier of what’s possible with security and privacy. With a market cap of 3.8 billion dollars, it’s the largest and most promising privacy altcoin at the moment, taking the 13th place on coinmarketcap.com. Without a doubt, 2018 will be a big year for Monero with massive upgrades accelerating adoption rates. Kovri, bulletproofs, and multisig support will give Monero dominance over the privacy coins in the years to come.

Cardano (Ada) – $0.02 to $0.4 in less than 5 months

With a meteoric rise of more than 3,200% since it came out in October, Cardano is currently the 5th largest altcoin on the market, and it’s for a good reason. The Cardano development team prides itself on being the first open source blockchain network built by leading academics and computer engineers through peer-reviewed research. The platform, unlike current cryptocurrencies, is built for the future — mainstream adoption with billions of transactions. The Cardano project aims to create a technological platform that will run financial applications used by individuals, organizations, and governments, as well as running smart contracts and decentralized applications. Basically, Cardano is a next-gen Ethereum on steroids.

Litecoin (LTC) – $3.7 to $160 in 1 year

Litecoin is marketing itself as the cryptocurrency for payments. Since it forked from Bitcoin in late 2011, the Litecoin development team, improved upon the Bitcoin concept, solving the scaling issue and enabling instant, zero-fee transactions; creating an alternative altcoin envisioned to be used as a medium of commerce, or as means of exchange rather than a store of value. Although Litecoin is currently the 6th biggest altcoin in the industry with a market cap of 8.7 billion dollars, it’s far from reaching its full potential. Charlie Lee, one of the most influential faces in the industry, announced that the Litecoin team is working on a merchant processor, popular online wallet and a goods trading platform which is expected to expedite Litecoin’s growth in 2018. Over the past year, the altcoin outperformed (price-wise) both Bitcoin and Ethereum with a growth of more than 2000%.

Steem (STEEM) – $0.14 to $4.15 in 1 year

STEEM is an SMT (Smart Media Token) that’s being used as a fast and zero-fee altcoin on blockchain based media platforms like Steemit.com. In essence, Steemit is a blogging site (a forum) just like Medium or Reddit with two crucial distinctions — it’s decentralized, and the content creators are getting paid for their content with the platform’s native digital currency STEEM. This novel proof-of-brain concept positions STEEM as a one of a kind tool for building growing internet communities that use cryptocurrency as an incentive for members to create valuable content. The popularity of Steem is growing at an exponential rate, exceeding both Bitcoin and Ethereum in a number of transactions processed.

Sia Coin (SC) – $0.00037 to $0.023 in 1 year

In an industry niche dominated by giant techno-moguls like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, the Sia project is a noble endeavor to decentralize cloud storage and offer faster, cheaper, more reliable and secure, censorship and surveillance-free cloud storage platform secured by smart contracts. Tapping into an ever-growing market, Sia is solving the file storage problem by connecting users who need file storage with hosts worldwide offering underutilized hard drive capacity. Buyers of storage space and hosts offering it are settling their transactions with Siacoin, the native cryptocurrency on the Sia blockchain. The value of Siacoin is experiencing exponential growth since the announcement of the project.

Substratum (SUB) – $0.05 to 0.71 since it came out in September 2017

Substratum is a project that’s essentially trying to build a decentralized, limitless Internet. The system is designed to allow individual users to access the decentralized web hosted by other users on the network in exchange for SUB, the platform’s native cryptocurrency. With a relatively small market cap floating at just $160 million at the moment, and total altcoin supply capped at 352,000,000 SUB (one of the smallest on the market), this altcoin has a massive long-term hold value. Living in an age where the most progressive governments are attacking net neutrality and the less progressive ones are outright censoring it, Substratum seems like a project with an increasing utility value as we slowly move towards Orwellian dystopia.

Golem (GNT) – $0.02 to $0.37 in 1 year

Another coin with massive utility value. Golem is a global, open-source, decentralized supercomputer that anyone can access, made up of the combined power individual PCs around the world. People can lease their hardware/computing power in return for Golem Network Tokens (GNT). The Golem supercomputer allows for individuals or groups with limited computing resources to tap into the network and use it for anything ranging from CGI real-time rendering, artificial intelligence and machine learning to complex physical modeling and many other resource heavy computing functions. With a market cap of 300 million dollars and massive utility value, Golem is one of the most promising altcoin investments in 2018.

About The Author

Catalin is the founder of Ecommerce Platforms and Unblock. He’s a design enthusiast and loves matcha, and is uber passionate about bitcoin and blockchain technology. He is the author of the Beginners Guide To Bitcoin.

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