Top ten coins to watch or own report by Crypto Club.

 

As with anything I share, this is purely for educational purposes and the decision to invest is entirely yours.  

 

*The price and market cap numbers are not dynamic so they may be out of date. Please check the current market data before placing any trades.

 

Bitcoin (BTC)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$4,236.73	$70,345,076,146	$1,098,310,000	16,603,625 BTC	21,000,000 BTC

 

What is it

Bitcoin is the grandaddy of them all.  The first decentralized ledger currency built on blockchain.  It is the most popular cryptocurrency with the highest market capitalization.

 

What we like

• Most adopted coin.  Most well known.
• 21,000,000 is the max supply.  Simple supply and demand will continue to drive up price.

 

Concerns

• Discord in community, developers, traders, miners all have different views on the path forward.  Leading to hard forks
• Regulation could be the one thing to kill the coin

 

Further Analysis

Almost everyone has heard of Bitcoin it’s the big dog and driving the entire cryptocurrency market right now.  As noted above with a cap of 21,000,000 simple supply and demand will drive price higher over time.  Regulation and hard forks are the only thing that could kill this coin short and long term.  There are better coins from a technical standpoint out there see Litecoin and Vertcoin, but Bitcoin has a huge head start in terms of adoption.

 

Assuming Bitcoin continues to be the dominant cryptocurrency some pundits are putting a price target out there of $100,000, $500,000, or even $1,000,000 per coin.  Doing the math if the price hits $100,000 per coin the market cap would be $2,100,000,000,000 which is two trillion, 100 billion.  

 

It is possible, see this infographic from 2015 http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization/?link=mktw

 

We’re educators sharing our journey in crypto, we like to share what we’re doing in the space and not tell you how to invest your money. That said, we believe putting a very small percentage of your net worth into bitcoin is not a bad idea.  Make sure you are comfortable with losing the amount.  You can also set up auto buys to buy x amount each or each month.  

Here is some more detailed notes on becoming a millionaire with bitcoin https://qz.com/990088/how-to-become-a-bitcoin-millionaire-according-to-wences-casares-of-xapo/

Ethereum (ETH)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$294.23	$27,948,042,604	$262,840,000	94,950,271 ETH

 

What is it

A decentralized ledger that supports smart contracts. This allows for custom applications and tokens to be built on top of it.

 

What we like

• More of a protocol than a currency, it’s a platform.  Utility + Currency = Value
• First mainstream chain to support Smart Contracts
• Very strong team (Vitalik Buterin’s Leadership)
• Second only to Bitcoin in terms of public awareness

 

Concerns

• Could another platform come along
• Are ICOs hurting the platform?
• Smart Contracts are an immature concept and come with risks ( The DAO Hack ) that unfortunately affect Ethereum as a whole
• Transitioning to Proof Of Stake in the next year or so which comes with it’s own challenges

 

Further Analysis

We’re long ethereum.  As noted above it’s more than a coin,  it’s a platform.  Think of Itunes but instead of media, coins, currencies, blockchain applications,  the potential is huge.  Yes another competing protocol could come along, (and they are coming for example NEO) and steal marketshare from ETH, but it is entrenched and the market is huge.  Ethereum has the team and foundation to withstand challenges and that said there is plenty of space in crypto/blockchain for multiple platforms.

 

Vertcoin (VTC)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$1.14	$45,796,946	$2,152,400	40,002,150 VTC	84,000,000 VTC

 

What is it

Another Bitcoin-like blockchain currency.  Some refer to it as the bronze currency to Bitcoin’s gold and Litecoin’s silver.

 

Differences between Bitcoin includes

• Stealth Address technology and
• ASIC resistant Proof-of-Work (PoW) function .

What we like

• Reasonable market cap
• Innovative technology
• Strong community

Concerns

• Low adoption/lack of market awareness
• Team is 100% volunteer

 

Further Analysis

Vertcoin continues to be one of our favorite coins. For a good third-party analysis please read: https://medium.com/@jshocrypto/vertcoin-investment-analysis-64bfb2ca89c9. The technology is solid. And more importantly, we’re comfortable with the market cap at slightly under $40M (at the time of this writing,  it’s not a crazy high number like other coins.

 

Our concerns remain to be the marketing and adoption of the coin. The team behind Vertcoin is anti-hype and they care more about strong technology and ethics than wealth. This coin needs more hype because it flies under the radar. The good news is the team has started to acknowledge some of the issues and has said marketing will be a focus over the next year, so we’ll see what they can do. Keep in mind they didn’t ICO so there isn’t a pile of cash there for the team and marketing initiatives. They rely on donations and volunteer efforts. In fact, their lead developer is a full-time graduate student at MIT with a 50-hour class load.

So Vertcoin is not going to be able to have the same marketing or development push as other coins that have ICO’d. What’s encouraging is they’ve done so much with so little. If they can drive greater adoption and hype I would look for Vert to follow Litecoin. They both will cap out at 84 million coins so the math behind them are similar. We’d be extremely happy if Vert goes to $10 and I will be ecstatic to see it go to $50+ like Litecoin.

 

OmiseGO (OMG)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$8.67	$852,522,547	$22,946,500	98,312,024 OMG	140,245,398 OMG

 

What is it

OmiseGO, the token is looking to be a wallet and payment platform that works across currencies. They will make the exchanging of currencies easier with a  liquid on-chain decentralized exchange giving their wallet holders the ability to utilize any currency for services. Their vision is to remove the need for a bank account and just use their wallet.

 

What we like

• Backed by a large, already successful company that is based in Asia (a huge market)
• Omise (the company) has proved they are capable of building technology and a business.

 

Concerns

• There is no product. For a coin that has reached over $1 Billion market cap it will be very important that they stick to their roadmap and show some developments on the technical end.

 

Further Analysis

 

OmiseGO has been one of the fastest growing Altcoins that the market has seen to date. This is due to a few factors. The first being the success of the parent company Omise. Omise is an Asian white label payment processing company, that was founded in 2013 and currently has over 100 employees. They have received at least $20 Million in combined funding and an undisclosed amount from Golden Gate Ventures.  Their annual transaction volume is unknown, but the total sales volume for Omise merchants has been estimated at 30 Billion. This list includes McDonald’s Thailand, Burger King, Siam Cement Group ( largest cement and building material company in Thailand) to name a few. This market reach has the potential of making the adoption of their OmiseGO network much easier.  

 

The next big factor is that the Omise Team has been very involved with Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum team for a long while now. Vitalik is an advisor to their team on OmiseGO and has talked about them being one of the first adopters of the Ethereum upgrade called Plasma. Plasma is an off-chain scaling solution for smart contracts.

 

Civic (CVC)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$0.365162	$124,291,730	$1,130,640	340,200,000 CVC	1,000,000,000 CVC

 

What is it

Civic uses blockchain for Identification verification and management.  The token will be used as the utility token in these verifications.

 

What we like

• Lots of resources after a $33M ICO
• Huge market that needs to be disrupted.  Look at recent equifax hack.
• Solid team

 

Concerns

• Surprised this didn’t shoot up after Equifax hack, but it’s still early and Civic is not very mainstream

 

Further Analysis

 

We like Civic, but there are lots of questions to be answered.  This is certainly a startup investment.  They have to get market share for the token to be worth anything and that will be a long haul.  We’re long on this and own it – the current problems related to identity are too real and too big to ignore. Civic got its first price jump when the token 0x required the civic app to register for the ICO, which was a nice look into the real world application of it. We expect this to be norm moving forward, but those relationships will take time to build.

 

On the team side, we feel they have a solid team to attack this market which is being led by Founder Vinny Lingham. He’s  had a significant amount of startup success which we feel is an x-factor and can help with adoption.

 

Ripple (XRP)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$0.215081	$8,247,031,856	$79,575,000	38,343,841,883 XRP	99,994,523,265 XRP

 

Tezos (XTZ/TEZ) (Pre-Launch)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$2.12	$ –	$545,999	– XTZ/TEZ	– XTZ/TEZ

 

NEO (NEO)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$32.25	$1,612,625,000	$54,874,600	50,000,000 NEO	100,000,000 NEO

 

Golem (GNT)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$0.248725	$207,195,884	$1,291,930	833,032,000 GNT	1,000,000,000 GNT

 

Litecoin (LTC)

 

As of 10/4/17 in $USD

 

Price	Market Cap	Volume	Circulating Supply	Max Supply
$51.87	$2,760,843,389	$69,605,500	53,228,157 LTC	84,000,000 LTC