As it stands, there are now more than 6,000 cryptocurrencies in existence. The vast majority of these are unlikely to achieve great heights, whereas some already have and others are well on their way.

However, while everybody focuses on the minor gains made by prominent cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), a huge number of smaller projects are still in earlier stages of development, and could yet be poised to experience meteoric growth in future.

With that said, it is good practice to consider the diversity of your portfolio when making any investment. This includes ensuring the bulk of your funds are locked away in safer, less volatile investments, whereas the minority is reserved for more experimental, riskier investments that could either pay off big or completely fail.

Fortunately, we have done some sifting of our own, and found five projects we think have good potential to blossom in 2020 and beyond. Every entry on this list has a market capitalization under $20 million, which as far as cryptocurrencies go, firmly places these promising projects into the realm of ‘small-cap’ coins, meaning meteoric growth is still well within the realm of possibility.

5. Perlin

Perlin is designed to provide a high-throughput blockchain capable of sustaining smart-contracts written in most major programming languages. Initially, the platform was built on the avalanche consensus protocol, but later switched to a more capable consensus algorithm known simply as wavelet.

This new protocol radically improved the functionality of the platform, enabling lighting fast transactions and impressive scalability. Following the switch, Perlin is now considered to be one of the world’s fastest blockchains, after achieving a whopping 31,240 tps in a recent test, which the team guarantees will also be possible on the mainnet.

As a blockchain-powered cloud computing network, Perlin enables startups and other small businesses to rent computing power at a low cost, creating a new way for businesses to store data and process big data.

The project initially garnered mainstream attention after launching on the Binance Launchpad—an IEO listing platform—back in August 2019. The IEO was a huge success and all allocated PERL tokens were sold. Shortly after, Perlin partnered with the International Chamber of Commerce to develop an International E-Registry system for ships—a significant partnership by any standards.

Perlin’s Testnet went live in November 2018 and the team finished moving over to the new consensus mechanism in March 2019. As it turns out, this became a huge catalyst for the development of the project and helped Perlin secure additional partnerships, including the likes of the Government of Montenegro and the Dubai Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

After achieving partnerships like these in scarcely more than a year, we think this project is well on its way to making waves in the not so distant future.

4. COTI

What started out as a basic decentralized payment app, COTI has now evolved into a fully assembled payment platform based on a multi-DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) data structure.

Right now, most digital payment options are more expensive to use than simply paying in cash. But if COTI gets its way, this might not be the case for long, as organizations now have the power to build their own scalable payment solutions using COTI’s cost-effective technology.

COTI became famous after winning Google’s Pick a Startup competition back in late-2018. Just over a year later, COTI has been able to achieve most of its roadmap milestones and is now offering a wide variety of products, including COTI pay and a white-label payment network.

The platform was able to complete its mainnet launch back in June 2019, and customers can now integrate COTI’s point-of-sales software to enable PayPal-like functions on their website, helping to process cryptocurrency payments, as well as normal credit and debit card transactions.

COTI uses a brand new consensus algorithm known as ‘Proof-of-Trust’, which assigns each platform user a score (Trust Score) based on their behavior, and rewards them through an associated proof of stake system for participating in consensus. This system produces a lightning-fast blockchain network that COTI claims is capable of processing over 100,000 transactions per second (tps).

Despite launching its mainnet just last year, COTI has already achieved a huge amount, but has no plans of stopping there. A few of the milestones planned for 2020 include the creation of a global trust system, to establish arbitrator decentralized governance, and launch a universal wallet.

With so many big releases in the pipeline, COTI is looking like one of the strongest candidates for growth in the near future, and certainly one worth keeping tabs on.

3. Elrond

Billed as a fast, highly scalable blockchain for distributed applications, Elrond is designed to provide developers with the infrastructure needed to build and maintain decentralized applications (DApps) of any scale.

To accomplish this, Elrond uses a virtual machine built on WebAssembly (WASM), which allows smart contract developers to use practically any programming language they're familiar with to build their products.

This, in combination with the fact that Elrond is a frontrunner in the development of state sharding—a technique used to distribute a blockchain over multiple shards to improve parallel processing and hence efficiency—makes Elrond a strong contender for serious potential growth.

The platform currently plans to bootstrap its mainnet in several phases, with the first phase adding a pre-staking feature, which allows ERD holders to stake their tokens and earn up to 32% annual rewards. Phase 2 and 3 will further build on this functionality until the full-featured mainnet is released.

In November 2019, Elrond joined just a handful of other cryptocurrencies to be added to Samsung's KeyStore wallet. The new partnership will allow Samsung device owners to easily use their ERD and interact with Elrond DApps. Beyond this, Elrond is scheduled to launch its flagship “Battle of Elrond” app in Q1 2020, which will give players a way to earn ERD. The game will eventually be ported to the Elrond blockchain, but there is no ETA for this yet.

As it stands, the Elrond token (ERD) has a market capitalization of just under $15 million, which makes it one of the larger crypto assets on this list. However, Elrond has roughly maintained this value for almost six months. As such, the project still has huge room for growth ahead of it, and could easily hit $200+ million if it delivers on its promises.

2. Kleros

In simple terms, Kleros is a protocol that can be used for online dispute resolution, by using blockchain and crowd-wisdom to fairly settle disputes about practically anything.

To achieve this, Kleros uses an advanced crypto-economics model to fairly select and reward anonymous jurors that help to achieve consensus on a dispute. Rewards are paid out in Pinakion token (PNK), which also protects the system from attacks.

Part of the reason Kleros is so promising is due to the impressive number of integrations the project already has, with Kleros already being used by uniswap.ninja, ninja-dutchx.netlify.com, escrow.kleros.io, cryptounlocked.wetrust.io and more. In addition, the Kleros court DApp has already used 65 unique jurors to arbitrate over 130 cases, while ots Token² Curated Registry DApp has already paid out more than 214 ETH to jurors.

Just last month, the project announced it had received a €718,017 (~$800,000) prize from the Banque Publique d’Investissement (BPI) of France for the development of project Themis, which will which help extend the scope of Kleros outside the crypto ecosystem into a variety of corporate and industrial use cases.

Besides this, Kleros just completed its second token sale, selling out a total of 150 million tokens to raise more than $1.28 million in funding. This, in combination with its recent funding from the BPI should give the project a fair amount of runway, allowing it to achieve its lofty near-term goals and improve the liquidity of the PNK token.

With a market capitalization of just under $5 million, Kleros is one of the smallest projects out there, which means there is still significant room for growth. Not only this, but the Kleros token (PNK) is one of just a handful of tokens that is worth more now, than when it first launched—with a current ROI of around 60—an unfortunately rare sight nowadays.

1. Verasity

In brief, Verasity is a video-based content platform that rewards viewers for their attention, while giving publishers more ways to improve revenue, since brands can use the Verasity token (VRA) to increase viewership and engagement.

Verasity's technology is already integrated with around 95% of video markets, including YouTube, Twitch, and Vimeo, allowing publishers and brands to easily begin using Verasity’s attention-based solution.

Since launching its first VRA-rewarded video ads back in May 2019, Verasity has largely flown under the radar, while the VRA token currently has a market capitalization of just under $2 million. This, however, might soon be set to change thanks to the project’s rapidly improving fundamentals.

Throughout the second half of 2019 alone, Verasity managed to add more than 63,000 wallet users and grew the number of VRA-rewarded watched videos by more than 400%. Beyond this, in Q1 2020, Verasity will be integrated with the GameZBoost platform, allowing more than 550 game publishers to use its advertising stack.

Despite its relatively low market capitalization, Verasity still clocks in an impressive daily trade volume of around $300,000—equivalent to a volume/market cap ratio of 0.1787, which is far better than many large-cap cryptocurrencies, including Binance Coin (BNB), Monero (XMR) and Tezos (XTZ).

Popular crypto analyst Lucky. L summarized Verasity's potential quite succinctly by comparing it to its nearest competitor Basic Attention Token (BAT). With a market capitalization just a tiny fraction of BAT’s, but more than 10% of its user base, Verasity could be due for an explosion if it achieves anywhere near the popularity of its main competitor.

Beyond this, Verasity frequently racks up the highest volume on the Binance DEX and was recently added to KuCoin—one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges. This, in combination with its strong use case and impressive growth in 2019 paints Verasity as one to keep an eye on with a huge... HUGE potential in 2020.