Jul 1

Jul 1 Top 5 Altcoins To Buy As Interest in Crypto Expands Beyond Bitcoin

Five fast growing Altcoins as Crypto Goes Mainstream

The Emerging New Crypto Environment

Bitcoin (BTC) has been able to attract interest from retail and professional investors. Now Institutional interest in BTC is trending super-high and grows each day. Funds like Andreessen Horowitz are participating in ways no one could have imagined just a year ago. Andreessen has officially launched its third crypto fund, called Crypto Fund III with more than $2.2 billion to invest. The firm's portfolio includes Dapper Labs, Celo, Uniswap, and Near. Andreessen is also expanding its crypto unit with several key hires like Chris Dixon and Katie Haun. Just one example of many risk-adverse institutions rapidly moving into cryptocurrencies. If you are new to the world of Crypto, simply reading the basics of these 5 Altcoins can give you a sense of the size and scope of the digital currency market.

““The largest crypto fund ever raised to date, Crypto Fund III is a validating moment for the ecosystem and another sign that crypto becoming an ever more mainstream part of our financial infrastructure””

— Andreessen Horowitz

Hedge Funds Continue to Increase Stakes in Crypto

Hedge funds CEOs expect to maintain 7.2% of current holdings in cryptocurrency 5 years from today, or around $312 billion based on estimates. About 17% of the firms shared larger expectations, stating that hedge funds will probably be greater than 10% in crypto.¹ In order to execute oversized results, the crypto opportunities are attracting Wall Street's best and brightest.

Talent moves quickly to Crypto

The talent grab race is on as firms compete to get the best. The latest high-profile star to jump over to a crypto opportunity is Jodie Gunzberg who has now joined the CoinDesk subsidiary, TradeBlock, as Managing Director of CoinDesk Indexes. She was recently the chief institutional investment strategist for Morgan Stanley's $300 billion Graystone Consulting unit that serves ultra-high-net-worth family offices, foundations, endowments, and pensions.

¹ Based on Intertrust Global, April 2021 survey — polled the CFO's of 100 hedge funds globally about their intention to purchase crypto-assets.

Top 5 Altcoin’s Performance in Real-time

5 Recommended ALTCOINS

Way beyond Bitcoin, there are over 7,000 cryptocurrencies. The term altcoin refers to any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. Many altcoins are currently trading at much more reasonable prices, offering a lower threshold to entry and higher potential returns on investment. Here are five altcoins you presently should be researching to maximize your profits.

1. Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum is a blockchain platform that has its own cryptocurrency and programming language. Similar to other blockchain networks, Ethereum is a decentralized public ledger for verifying and recording transactions and its cryptocurrency.

Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap after Bitcoin (BTC). Many digital currencies and apps use its platform. It aims to process transactions faster than Bitcoin with lower fees. This crypto-coin has smart-contract capability on its network — which means individual payment transactions can be customized.

With the network in the middle of a major upgrade that will change the way transactions are verified and fees are charged, some observers expect the ETH price to advance to fresh highs.

Latest Ethereum News 2.0 Upgrade

At the start of December 2020, the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade got under way. This upgrade is designed to increase the network’s scalability and security.

What is Ethereum used for

The Ethereum ecosystem has emerged as the first choice for developers launching decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and non-fungible token (NFT) sales. Ethereum is key to the advent of DeFi, which runs smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It enables holders of various cryptocurrencies to use their coins as collateral for financial services, including loans, insurance, trading, and savings. The ability to attach real-world assets to contracts enables developers to launch NFTs on Ethereum. An interesting example to make sense of this is Trey Ratcliff, an American photography / artist who resides in Queenstown, New Zealand, and is the creator of the number 1 travel photography blog Stuck In Customs featuring his HDR landscape photography. He has recently begun to auction his NFT art on makersplace.com.

Every digital creation available through MakersPlace is an authentic and truly unique digital creation, signed and issued by the creator — made possible by blockchain technology. Even if the digital creation is copied, it won't be the authentic and originally signed version. Every digital creation on MakersPlace is digitally signed by the creator and permanently recorded and verified through the blockchain. Using blockchain technology, a creator can ensure that only a limited number of authentic editions can ever be owned, ensuring scarcity and uniqueness of a digital creation. As a buyer, you can resell NFT on any digital asset exchange.

Street Cred

Bloomberg reported that Goldman Sachs (GS) was planning to launch futures and options contracts on ETH, in addition to BTC futures. The bank’s head of digital assets, Mathew McDermott, said the introduction of ETH derivatives trading could be expected in the coming months.

Ethereum Future Outlook

The Ethereum forecast from Digitalcoin remains bullish, predicting the price will average $2,707 in 2021 and rise to $3,382 in 2022. Over the longer term, it projects the price will climb to average $5,852 in 2025 and $8,488 in 2028.

2. Cardano (ADA)

Cardano (ADA) is a third-generation blockchain which aims to solve problems such as scalability, interoperability, and sustainability. Cardano has peer-reviewed each step of its development. It uses a fraction of the energy of Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC), processes transactions faster, and eventually will host other applications and digital currencies.

Smart contracts can make blockchain more than a payment system. Also known as self-executing contracts, these small pieces of code run when certain conditions are met. Once the conditions are met, a smart contract can automatically pay the fee to the developer. Last week Cardano announced it is beginning to roll out smart contract capabilities on its network and testing should be fully completed in just a couple of months.

Cardano Future Outlook

Cardano is moving up because of its efficient Proof of Stake mining process that limits the carbon footprint. If the network moves further towards sustainability, then it might attract environment conscious investors, hiking the price up to $3.29 by the year end up from a $1.30 at the time of writing.

However, if the network does not complete any remarkable development, it might just carry over its current investors who like the increased scalability and user-friendliness. In such cases, the price may move up to a decent $2.76.

3. Polygon (MATIC)

Polygon aims to solve some of the issues faced by Ethereum.

The problem is because of Ether’s popularity transactions are slow and the transaction fees are high as the network faces severe congestion. However the ETH 2.0 update should solve many of these issues .

Polygon can improve the user experience. It sits on the Ethereum network and uses something called a sidechain (an extra blockchain that works alongside Ethereum to improve its speed) to process transactions quickly. Polygon hopes to fuel its growth by working along side many other networks increasing transaction speed and lowering fees.

Polygon Future Outlook

According to the latest long-term forecast, Polygon price will hit $2 by the end of 2021 and then $3 by the end of 2022. Polygon currently sits at $.1.10.

4. Stellar Lumens (XLM)

Stellar Lumens is a payment technology aiming to reduce the cost and time for cross-border transfers drastically. Stellar back by IBM is focused on developing markets. This digital currency crosses all boundaries and transaction fees are fixed at $0.00001 XLM. Ultimately, Stellar wants to create an inclusive financial system catering to the unbanked, estimated at approximately two billion people worldwide. Stellar makes it easy to create, send, and trade digital representations of all forms of money—dollars, pesos, bitcoin, pretty much anything.

Stellar Future Outlook

Since starting the year at around 12 cents, XLM has climbed as high as 70 cents a coin. It currently trades around 27 cents per coin. Analysts expect the price to rise to US$ 0.69. As early as 2022, the US$1 mark will be cracked. By 2025, the coin price will have risen to 1.88 US dollars. This would give Stellar a convincing price increase of over 300 percent.

5. Uniswap (UNI)

Uniswap is a is fully decentralized and community controlled exchange where users can trade coins directly with one another. As an automated money market, Uniswap is used to facilitate cryptocurrency trades for users globally. A big difference with this network is that you build / customize your own coin through the Uniswap DEX network and client and attract buyers via offerings of high interest rates. Uniswap presents investors with earning opportunities by allowing them to contribute liquidity to the DEX platform by way of staking tokens and drawing interest in return. Importantly, it makes it possible for virtually any Uniswap DEX client to create and list custom tokens on its decentralized exchange.

As of Q1 2021, the platform had handled over $200 billion in trading volume and over 40 million trades. Most crypto analysts and investors believe that Uniswap is cheap because it is a relatively new and untested cryptocurrency. These analysts and investors also agree that pitting the token's current price of $40 against its network's innovativeness and popularity, Uniswap is considerably undervalued. Analysis by crypto market experts suggests that Uniswap tokens will double in price and trade above $80 by the end of 2021.

SO IN THE END ─ Final Thoughts

Whether cryptocurrencies are a good investment for your portfolio will depend on your risk tolerance for trading highly volatile assets and whether you expect the cryptocurrency markets to continue rallying in 2021 and beyond. It is an exciting environment to watch.

The information above gives you a basic introduction to five coins worth watching in July and beyond. We suggest you look for cryptocurrencies that have a well defined useful purpose.

When investing in cryptocurrencies, it’s important to remember that the market is dynamic. Its volatility makes it difficult to not only give long-term forecasts, but to predict where the coin could be in a few hours. As such, before making any investment decision, we recommend you do as much research as possible, taking into consideration the latest market trends, technical analysis and expert opinion.

All investment strategies discussed are for informational purposes only and can involve risk or loss. Nothing contained in this website should be construed as investment advice.