If you are using the publish0x platform, you probably already got some tips in HYDRO tokens. But what is the HYDRO token, after all? Does it have high growth potential? Let's analyse it a little bit.

First of all, the HYDRO token is native to the ecosystem that is being built by The Hydrogen Technology Corporation, the so-called Hydrogen platform. The company was founded in 2017, its HQ is in New York City, and it has something between 24 and 50 members (source here and here). In their website you can see that the fintech company has been awarded multiple times, including a Fintech Startup of the Year Award by KPMG. Solid business. It is always good to find that the company you are investing in is not just some geeks in the basement trying to make easy money issuing obscure tokens. Enough about the company, let's look at the Hydrogen platform. A quote from their Linkedin page:

Hydrogen is The Global #Fintech Acceleration Platform. Hydrogen enables developers around the globe to build sophisticated fintech applications that help cut the cost of building and running savings, investing, insurance, wellness, and other applications by tens of millions of dollars. Hydrogen is one of the fastest growing fintech companies and more broadly API/Cloud platforms in the world. The Hydrogen ecosystem allows anyone, in any country, globally to build and deploy sophisticated fintech applications in just hours. Hydrogen is also the founder of the open-source Hydro blockchain - the public ledger for the new global economy. We hope our platform can hep to digitize the financial lives of over 1 Billion people.

Before looking at the HYDRO token, let's just summarise the main parts of the Hydrogen platform, as described in their white papers:

Raindrop: a blockchain-based authentication service built on top of the Hydro public ledger. A remark here: Hydro blockchain is built on top of Ethereum, so operations on it have to pay gas fees. (We see that the number of Ethereum based applications only grows. I can see ETH passing BTC in dominance in the future.)

Snowflake: an identification solution based on the blockchain.

Ice: a paradigm for document management in financial services that leverages a public and decentralized blockchain.

The figure below summarises the main protocols and products of Hydrogen.

(Tide and Ice names are switched in the picture above.)

Project Hydrogen was launched in March 2018, and its first stage (Raindrop) is already fully operational. The other parts are in progress.

So, when it comes to the Hydrogen platform and the company, it seems that they have very good prospects for the future, and we are on the very beginning of this development. For more information on the platform, read this excellent post. Now let's look at the HYDRO token.

By reading the white papers, what I could grasp is that off-chain apps and DApps that interact with the hydrogen blockchain can make use of other Ethereum tokens, but the operations that are native to the Hydrogen platform -- such as authentication with Raindrop, document stamping with Ice, etc. -- will demand payment or staking with HYDRO tokens. So there will be demand for the HYDRO token in proportion to how busy the Hydrogen ecosystem becomes.

Now to the financial side. According to Coingecko, HYDRO is now the #298 crypto token in market cap, at $6,246,157. Currently, it is traded in 6 exchanges, including Bittrex, at a price of $0.00065222 per token. There is a total of 9,576,699,922 HYDRO tokens in circulation, and the maximum supply will be of 11,111,111,111 tokens.

I think it is patently obvious that 6 million dollars is a very small market cap if the Hydrogen project gets traction as it is expected from their ambitious goals. On the other hand, people have to be aware of the total supply: 11 billion coins is a lot. With Earth's population growth rate declining, at the peak this is more than one coin per inhabitant. Still, if HYDRO was the only currency on Earth and each person had 1 coin, this coin had to be worth some hundreds of dollars at least. On the other hand, of course, that is not even the goal of the project, so that's too optimistic. I can envision, however, the Hydrogen project moving the same or more capital than projects like BAT, which is limited to advertisement (at least in the beginning). If HYDRO reaches such a market cap (currently $255,676,556, but BAT is also at an early stage), the token can take off and reach $0.02301089. That seems small, but represents more than 35x growth. If the Hydrogen project becomes bigger than the BAT project, which I think is possible, given its broader domain of operation, and reaches half the current market cap of Ethereum itself (I don't know if it can be bigger, as Hydrogen's growth also propels Ethereum's growth, since it operates on it), this would put it at a 9 billion USD market cap, and 1 HYDRO = $0,81 (more than 1200x growth compared to today). This second scenario sounds a bit too optimistic for me, but still within the realm of possibility. The first scenario of 1 HYDRO = $0.02 sounds more plausible, especially given the airdrops, frequently anywhere between 5,000 to 500,000 HYDRO.

HYDRO has not performed well so far, but we see a surge in trading volume in recent months.

So, enough rambling, these are my speculations about the price of HYDRO. What do you think, am I being too positive? Or do you think it could go even higher? Let me know in the comments!