The internet of money

I track my investments through two apps, Wealthfront and Blockfolio. When I opened Wealthfront this morning my accounts were up $10 — a pretty wild swing! I opened Blockfolio and my cryptocurrency holdings were down $3,000 — just another Wednesday.

If you’ve held any cryptocurrency for more than a few months, days like today begin to seem normal. Daily swings can run as high as 20% for Bitcoin and far higher for altcoins like Ethereum, Litecoin, and Neo. That doesn’t mean that cryptocurrencies are a bad investment, in fact far from it. Every major coin has returns well above 100% on the year, but it is easy on days like today to wish for more stability.

Is there a way to have stability in cryptocurrency investing? Absolutely. A number of projects are working to stabilize the crypto market and some in a few creative ways. Here are three of my favorites.

Digix tokenizes gold assets. With Digix every token is backed by a gram of gold secured through their partners. Gold has long term stability and has long been a favorite holding of the elderly and preppers alike. The challenge has always been how to best buy and secure these assets. Using the blockchain fixes this problem. DGX tokens can be quickly bought and sold without any of the typical fees associated with buying gold. The downside? A 0.13% transaction fee every time you transfer and a 1% fee to cash out.

Similar to Digix, but tokenized platinum bullion and no transaction fees. Platinm claims they chose platinum because it has shown more long term upside than gold, with peak prices going far higher. Additionally, platinum has a bit more real world utility, being used in almost every industrial process. To make things better, PLT tokens have no transaction fee, which makes them totally free to trade. Platinm is currently doing their initial token sale, which makes this dip a good time to get in on this one.

This one is a bit different than the other two. Stable claims that they are making a token that will undergo 5 to 10 times less price volatility than the more established tokens. They do this by automatically buying into falling markets and selling into rising ones. The net result should be more price stability not just for STB, but also for any coin STB makes part of it’s portfolio. Stable is also doing an ICO right now, and the full project hasn’t been launched, so there is a bit more risk in this one.

Cryptocurrency has created an entirely new asset class that may be ushering in a digital revolution of money. These new stable alternatives may be the path to more widespread adoption.