As we’re approaching the end of 2019, we can step back and take a broader look at what happened in the distributed ledger field over the past 12 months. From Bitcoin and altcoins to state-backed digital currencies, we’ve seen it all.

Surely, this year was many times dubbed as the “year of regulations” when it comes to public cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and now government-backed stablecoins and digital currencies, and for a good reason, considering the controversial technopolitical debates that took place over the course of the year, tackling with projects like Facebook’s Libra or China’s national crypto the CB/DC (Digital Currency/Electronic Payments).

While all the lights were pointed at legislative efforts to introduce some sort of a blockchain-based cross-border monetary settlement solution, most of us skipped on what was cooking behind the scenes of the public cryptocurrency domain.

Besides some speculative news subjecting Bitcoin’s price per unit, and discussions of possible outcomes the next block reward halving will bring to the table, as well as Ethereum’s nine core updates, finishing up with the ‘Istanbul’ upgrade that sparks a new era for the Ethereum blockchain, development news regarding minor cryptocurrencies, or as some would call them ‘altcoins’ were pretty much absent from the epicenter of critics this year.

In this article, I’ll try to lay down a couple of the key public cryptocurrency projects that I think will shape the industry in the near future, but no-one really talks about anymore, or at least for now.

IOTA (homonymous ticker) – the IoT altcoin

Sometimes labeled as MIOTA, due to market pricing ease, IOTA is one of the most sophisticated distributed ledger technology projects out there. And personally the most important project of the near “smart” future.

Despite the vast developments at the IOTA Foundation digital HQ, the dream-level industrial partnerships that include Volkswagen, BOSCH, and Fujitsu, just to name a few, the fact that it was dubbed as the ‘future of the economy’ by Deutsche Bank, IOTA not only struggles to keep relevancy in the mainstream crypto plaza, but it is now trading at its lowest point since the Summer of 2017 which was essentially its introductory period to the market.

Sure, IOTA has its own unique DLT based on directed acyclic graph and not blockchain architecture, it has 0 transaction fees when trading under the native network, and it has an infinite amount of appliances for the digital era.

The only problem is that my mother would be never able to maintain an IOTA wallet without possibly losing her funds from her own mistakes, neither she needs the electric autonomous vehicle she doesn’t currently possess to contact her unpresent unmanned aircraft at the moment. This is all stuff of the future, yes the near future, but still not for today.

So again, from an investor’s perspective, I would definitely pay attention to IOTA for obvious macroeconomic reasons related to techno-politics, IoT adoption, and smart-cities, but tell that to my mother and what you’ll get is something like “Is it similar to Bitcoin”?

Cardano (ADA) – the Scientific altcoin

Cardano was one of the most exciting projects before, during, and post-launch. IOHK, the matrix project behind Cardano promotes the later as a scientific-oriented cryptocurrency project run by and tailored for academia, and researchers. It sounded amazing at that time but both investing and marketing excitement started to fade away day by day, week by week, month by month. One simple reason for this is that it solves nothing that wasn’t already solved by Ethereum and other major blockchains.

Even recent supposed to be “exciting” news relating to Cardano is not a really big deal. Take their announcement about partnering with New Balance for example, where the would register authentic NB pieces on the blockchain. I mean…that was done by IBM, R3, and even VeChain like a couple of years ago and it is considered as the most basic use-case a blockchain platform could be used for.

And again, it doesn’t matter when NIKE has already a similar use-case with Ethereum, that’s far more superior in terms of utility that ranges from registering single-piece physical kicks on the blockchain to actually tokenizing and selling digital NIKEs inside videogames and crypto dapps. So…you do the math.

I really like Cardano’s initial vision and I still believe that when IOHK board members are done with their seemingly year-long vacations they can actually pull it off, but for now, I’d trust Tron’s announcements more.

Read More: Why the Next Global Financial Recession Could Actually Benefit Cryptos

Conclusion

While Bloomberg’s latest report based on their BGCI (Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index) suggests that we shouldn’t expect altcoins to see any sunny days before the father of all coins, Bitcoin breaks into a new all-time high, basically surpassing it’s ~$19,500 position during the winter 2017-18 pump, there are a lot of factors that make me believe this is not the case with some Cryptocurrencies such as IOTA, and Cardano for reasons that might be absent in the present day, but will certainly make absolute sense in the digital future that awaits us all.

Again, I wouldn’t focus on pricing when it comes to investing, but the potential in terms of utility, and at this time it seems that the above projects can satisfy both edges of an investor’s sword.

Nevertheless, we should consider Bloomberg’s advice, not because it’s a de facto, but because as mentioned before, my mother would ask me about Bitcoin and not IOTA or Cardano.