Most of people enter the crypto world from fiat through one of the big exchanges like Coinbase, Krakenor Gemini. What meets their eyes are very expensive bitcoin, fairly expensive litecoin and ethereum. This means he can buy only a fraction of bitcoin or couple of litecoins or ethers; which further means his moon/lambo dream is not looking too realistic. Other, more cheap coins listed on these exchanges look far more attractive to the unsophisticated new crypto investor and he starts thinking of buying himself a pile of penny cryptocurrencies like XRP, IOTA, XLM or ADA.
But how sound is that decision, economically? Because, most of the cheap coins are cheap because of their massive supply (in billions of tokens). Supply and demand is a basic economic law that dictates outcomes like this – the bigger the supply of certain item, the lower its value and its price.
Read our other article – on most undervalued coins to see which ones are more worth (in our opinion) than the market is willing to price them right now. And this article will tell you generally more about altcoins and which ones are promising projects.
However, it is perfectly reasonable to expect bigger growth from a low-priced altcoin than very expensive bitcoin.
For example, if you invest $1000 in bitcoin right now you will get approximately 0.2BTC. If bitcoin does an incredible, wildest astronomical gain of 100x and reaches $500k – you still have earned “only” $100k. But imagine if you invested those $1000 in a dirt cheap coin that costs 1 cent and it does 10,000x or 100,000x increase to $100 or $1000 per coin – you are a multi-millionaire. If you think this sounds like a fantasy – go check some stats from 2017 and see the incredible growth of many coins, from under $1 to $1000+ (ether being one of the most famous examples).
If you have a big appetite for risk and speculative drive in you, hunting down these penny coins can be very rewarding. Once you seize those profits, it would be wise, though, to move them into bitcoin as that is the ultimate goal of crypto investing: increasing your bag of satoshis with every trade move.
Before we gush out of the initial topic, let’s move to the list of recommended (in our humble opinion) penny cryptocurrencies worth investing in 2019. It is worth noting that all of the below enumerated coins are under a $1.
Basic Attention Token – BAT
Founder is a Mozilla Co-founder and creator of JavaScript. Enough said. Use case is excellent as digital advertising in current form is completely broken from all aspects (aside of the middlemen’s view, they profit nicely). Brave Browser is already boasting big numbers of active users: 5+ million. Team is professional and very reactive to community feedback so the product is improved almost in a daily pace.
BAT is currently valued at $0.28 per token which is 3.4x lower than its all time high, so there is a lot of room for solid gains. Even though, BAT experienced a big rise in the last month or so, the potential of their Brave browser and by extension BAT token is massive.
Ravencoin
Ravencoin, a fork of Bitcoin, is a relatively young token; it’s only since January 3, 2018 that it’s been hovering among the crypto currencies.
Ravencoin blockchain is designed to serve specific purposes. On the one hand, it should help to determine ownership of assets in a flawless manner. On the other hand, Ravencoin, similar to Bitcoin, wants to make direct payments possible. As the open source project on the homepage emphasizes, it is completely decentralized: Neither master nodes nor especially no ICO are behind the project.
Bruce Fenton, high profile expert from traditional finance sector, is the father of Ravencoin. Bruce is known an early Bitcoin advocate, who worked as Executive Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation from 2015-2016. His experience led him to discover the future of blockchain’s potential for the financial securities industry.
Tron Black is one of seven lead developers of Ravencoin works for Medici Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Overstock.com. Bruce was friends with Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com’s CEO, and this is how Tron became involved with Ravencoin.
RVN is currently sitting at $0.06 per token, after its huge surge in March.
VeChain (VET)
VeChain’s current market price is $0.007 with a market capitalization of $291.8 million. It is an enterprise level public blockchain with use cases in several industries like automobile, logistics, healthcare, and even luxury fashion. It also connects with state-of-the-art IoT solutions as well. The blockchain is managed by the VeChain Foundation.
It comes with built-in governance tools and works on the Proof-of-Authority algorithm. The blockchain system also boasts of higher scalability suitable for enterprise solutions as well as sidechain capability. It works on a two-coin economic model that helps in managing the costs of VeChainThor protocol. The project is currently dedicated to the expansion of VeChainThor ecosystem and business side of their project is thriving with major partnerships coming to birth almost weekly.
Top strategic partnerships include DNV GL, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), National Research Consulting Center (NRCC), Yida China Holdings Limited and BitOcean.
Holochain – HOT Token
Holochain is a post-blockchain technology that is energy efficient decentralised app development platform that is truly peer-to-peer without the scalability issues of existing Blockchain projects.
Holochain is like having access to all of the capabilities of all of the Internet apps simultaneously without needing an API, because the languages are entirely compatible. Holochain is the equivalent of having an IFTTT layer built underneath the entire Internet.
Because the information isn’t forced to sit uniquely in each application, the end user can create a customized experience with the parameters of their choosing. The possibilities for data mining and consensus building are endless. End the data-monopolies of Facebook and Google. If we choose to use Holochain, we choose how our information is shared and empower the commons to utilize it for collective growth and understanding. Source for this wonderful description of Holo is this guy.
When you hear the description of Holochain, you get excited. The project is bleeding edge tech and it grabbed attention of some mainstream media that reported about it. Right now it is still closer to an idea rather than to an actual realization but the potential is immense.
HOT token is actually doing very well, it is one of the rare tokens on the market that is beating the bear mood and recording new highs. Right now it is at $0.0013 and it is only 2.5x lower than its all time high.
Stellar Lumens (XLM)
Stellar Lumens is a cryptocurrency platform that focuses on remittance and cross-border payments.
Stellar is aiming to be an open financial system that gives people of all income levels access to low-cost financial services. These services include, but are not limited to:
- Remittances
- Micropayments
- Mobile Branches
- Mobile Money
In addition to these services, one very powerful feature of the network is their Distributed Exchange. Users can liquidate/exchange their funds for other cryptocurrencies or fiat currencies using the platform’s exchange anchors.
XLM would cost you $0.12 per token right now, however, if their big plans with IBM come to fruition, that number might swell to a much bigger figure.
Tezos (XTZ)
Tezos is a novel blockchain, another “Ethereum killer” that was first proposed in a paper released in Aug. 2014 with more specifics announced in a whitepaper released in Sept. 2014. The Tezos blockchain is designed with a focus on on-chain governance, allowing token holders to vote for proposed changes to functionality in order to avoid forking the network.
In 2015 the founders, Kathleen and Arthur Breitman established a company called Dynamic Ledger Solutions which was responsible for writing the initial code for Tezos. At the core of this codebase is a self-amending protocol, a system to formalize proposing, voting for, and implementing changes to the functionality of the network. Once a proposal has been made holders of Tezos (XTZ) tokens are able to vote with a weighting of one vote per token.
Tezos blockchain uses a modified version of a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) system where stakers, called bakers within the network, can lock up their tokens in exchange for the ability to validate blocks. In Tezos more liquid DPoS system users are able to “delegate” tokens to bakers without transferring ownership. Rewards for validating blocks are distributed to bakers in the form of new XTZ tokens with a proportional amount of the reward distributed to wallets that have delegated tokens to the baker. This enables smaller token holders to participate in the validation (and reward) process if they hold less than the required amount to become a full baker.READ What Is Cosmos Network (ATOM) – Full Review and Guide
Due to the scalability, problems with smart contracts and formal verification plaguing Ethereum, Tezos has a great opportunity to become the dominant chain in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Through it’s self amending protocol, Tezos will be able to upgrade and evolve over time which is a strong characteristic of a 3rd generation blockchain. However, when we consider that even Ethereum is a highly experimental technology, Tezos’ completely unproven approach to blockchain and protocol development is a double-edge sword.
Tezos, as a project, is also extremely well-funded from the Tezos Foundation which is sitting on a pot of nearly $500 million according to recent disclosures back in October 2018.
Icon (ICX)
The vision of the ICON Project is to introduce the new era of decentralization by redefining the meaning of communities and creating a new world by connecting such communities or to put it in their words: „With ICON, we now enter into a world of true hyperconnectivity“.
Icon conducted an ICO in October 2017 in which half of total ICX supply was sold to the public. The total supply created is 800,460,000 ICX, with 400,230,000 sold to the public and circulating. Regarding release of the other 50% of total supply, the Icon website states: “Issuances of new ICXs will be determined through annual C-Rep consultation.”
ICX did build a solid ecosystem and the team is pushing simultaneously on both fronts: tech and business side.
Between the many partnerships, some of the major ones include:
Partnerships with Woori Bank and Nonghyup Bank, two of the largest banks in South Korea; with the larger healthcare blockchain consortium in South Korea; Partnerships with the larger insurance consortium in South Korea backed by the Ministry of Science; Partnerships with Samsung; Partnership with Daily Financial Group etc.
There is also the benefit of coming from South Korea. One of the major benefits for Icon is that it is the biggest blockchain project coming from a very tech-savvy South Korea. It’s a nation quick to embrace technological change. You could probably pin this to Korea’s incredible economic development in the latter half of the 20th Century, when it was transformed from an impoverished country in the aftermath of the Korean War into a wealthy nation with the 12th largest economy in the world.
As reported by Quartz, more than 30% of employees within South Korea have owned cryptocurrency at some point. The ICON blockchain project was started by Korean fintech startup incubator Dayli Financial Group, which also owns Coinone, one of the country’s largest crypto exchanges.
While there are many competing projects looking to connect various industries and public sectors in other countries, ICON has established itself as the only real contender to dominate blockchain development in South Korea.
ICX should see major gains with the Korean markets building steam and the overall crypto markets building momentum. ICON has a decentralized exchange for OTC exchanges, they were created by one of the largest financial groups in South Korea.
Zilliqa (ZIL)
A Singapore-based project called Zilliqa is strong contender for tackling the problem of scalability, and has quickly established itself as one of the hottest coins of 2018. Then they went under the radar, mostly due to their own fault and missed deadlines.
The primary strength that Zilliqa brings to the table is that it is one of the first projects to successfully harness the power of sharding as a scaling solution. While other projects (including Ethereum) are planning to implement sharding, Zilliqa was among the first to demonstrate that it can really work.
Zilliqa is not just some generic fork like many other altcoins; this is a team that tries to really build something: Scilla programming language and sharding are best proofs for that. For this reason, Zilliqa deserves props up from the whole crypto community.
Sharding technology is of high importance, not only for Zilliqa, but for the whole cryptocurrency industry. Should this scaling solution proves its value on Zilliqa’s blockchain, it can be implemented on other networks which would lead to a huge breakthrough on one of the biggest painpoints of the whole crypto world.
Conclusion
No amount of read or listened material can make up a good research. And that is our first and foremost recommendation – do your own research. Our suggestions should only serve you as pointers and one of the information sources you take into account while making your decision as to where to invest your money.
Be vigilant, don’t trust anyone and verify everything.
Read more at: https://captainaltcoin.com/penny-cryptocurrencies/
