Bitcoin is still the most well-known and talked about cryptocurrency available. It’s the one that even people who know nothing about cryptocurrency are most likely to have heard of. However, it’s not the only cryptocurrency in existence, and it would be a mistake to neglect others because you’re too focused on Bitcoin. One lesson to learn from Bitcoin, however, is that getting onboard early is a good idea. As newer projects continue to develop, it’s worth looking at which ones could turn out to be lucrative if you buy into them now. There’s still plenty of time left this year, so take a look at these top picks for 2018.
NEO
NEO functions similarly to Ethereum, but it hasn’t got as much attention yet. A lot of people have picked NEO as a top one to watch for 2018 for a variety of reasons. Investment rating bureau Weiss Ratings has awarded NEO an “A-” or “excellent” grade, ranking it above Bitcoin. Some signs that it could be time to get onboard include upcoming NEO-based ICOs and its interest in the smart economy. It supports development languages like Java too, which is useful.
OmiseGO
Omise has the Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin on their team, which is a promising sign for a newer cryptocurrency. Their slogan “unbank the banked” expresses their aim to offer public and decentralised currency. They have a convenient service and will be launching their own plasma network. It has support from Stripe, which is a big name in cloud computing and payments. OmiseGO will also be PoS (proof of stake) instead of PoW (proof of work), which will make it more lucrative to invest in.
BAT
BAT or Basic Attention Token is a digital advertising platform based on Ethereum that held their initial coin offering in May 2017 and raised $35 million. BAT has released a web browser called Brave, which was designed to improve the efficiency of the industry. Co-founded by the person who created Javascript and co-founded Mozilla Firefox, one of the ways BAT is being talked about is as an alternative method of raising capital for content creators.
Golem
Golem is a network where people can share their computing power, intended to work like similar sharing economy businesses, such as Airbnb. Someone with a powerful computing setup can earn money from letting someone else use their CPU or GPU power. This enables them to use any computing power around the world that might be sitting idle. Golem keeps everyone up to date with the progress of their project using a Trello task board, so you can see what’s happening.
Civic
Security is always a hot topic when it comes to cryptocurrencies. Civic wants to help protect people’s identities, providing low-cost and low-cost identity verification. Civic tokens will be used for ID verification services transactions. Civic also has the Civic App, which uses QR codes for easy identification on the blockchain. They are teaming up with big names like wikiHow.com.
Keep an eye on these emerging cryptocurrency projects this year, and you could be part of the next big thing.