This article is not financial advice, and buyers of these tokens do so at their own risk.
Global Token Review has partnered with Novum Insights to provide a regular series analysing particularly interesting tokens to look out for in the rapidly expanding cryptocurrency sector. The goal is to flag some of the interesting innovations occurring in this frontier market on a monthly basis. Generally, the cryptocurrency markets are so volatile that beyond holding present core currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, a conservative strategy is to build a diversified portfolio of more than 10 tokens, as winners and losers are difficult to predict. This series is designed to look beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, although they are highly recommended as cryptocurrencies to gain familiarity with, their qualities are covered well across the internet.
FIVE UPCOMING TOKEN SALES
Quant Network Overledger
One of the biggest limitations the blockchain industry is facing is to interlink public, private, and side-chains to each other, and to overcome this, Quant Network’s objective is to provide an operating system to facilitate interactions between all the existing, as well as upcoming, blockchains providing endless possibilities for data and applications. They want to transform the concept of DApps to MApps which will be multi-chain decentralized applications, and want to set up an app store for MApps to incentivize the developments of MApps.
The token sale of QNT tokens is planned to commence on April 2, 2018, with hard cap set at $40.6 million. The tokens will operate on their own Quant platform which will also reward and generate revenues for Mapps. No prototype has been developed to show the practical application and operation of the platform. The first prototype is planned to be released in Q2 2018. The project has a long roadmap with substantial progress coming from early quarters of 2019, and hence, it is a strong long-term investment opportunity.
Blockchain Terminal
There is a proliferation of exchanges in the coin investing world, leading to confusion and frustration among traders of tokens. Blockchain Terminal will provide a way for traders to view particular tokens all in one location. It is being regularly talked about by traders of cryptocurrencies, as a potential token which will solve many of the information problems they grapple with on a daily basis. It will also provide needed transparency, and so make the token market more efficient. It is led by Bob Bonomo, who was Chief Information Officer of both Alliance Bernstein and Oppenheimer Funds. The business is currently in presale but is expected to move to its public sale shortly.
Polyswarm
At time of print, white hat hacking group Polyswarm was concluding the sale of the tokens for its distributed antivirus and threat intelligence marketplace. The business incentivizes security experts to provide software and detection services to security companies, so that users get a better experience, in coordination by Polyswarm. The business was founded out of a frustration held by its management team; that multiple interesting solutions on the security side were not being acted upon, because the enterprise client base of its previous company did not want to act on updates which were not seemingly large issues to the customers, but still weakened network security. By turning to a decentralized marketplace, this could unleash security creativity. The experienced team has won plaudits from the likes of the former CIO of McAfee, Mark Tonesen, and has big plans to transform the world of cybersecurity. Other security tokens include Augur, while PolySwarm views its centralized competition as Google’s Chronicle and Virus Total, which are centralised incumbents.
Amon
With fascination for cryptocurrencies taking off in the public, it is important they have ways to spend them. Amon is designing a multi-currency debit card for everyday usage employing Artificial Intelligence to curb the effects of turbulent fluctuations happening in the cryptocurrency markets. The card supports LTC, BTC, ETH, ERC-20, and many more which will be made compatible with company’s progress. The AI system will choose the best currency at the time of the payment and will decide the currency based on account volatility, historical data, and the company will issue 3 types of cards- Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Amon is still in its last phase of crowd-sale which is ending on April 4, 2018. Amon has offered Gold cards to each of their token sale participants which will make their card fees, delivery fees, and monthly fees free, and will provide 5% of AMN tokens cashback for every transaction. The project may take time to gain market share due to rigid competition in the transaction-based token platforms.
HUB Token
Social media platforms, messengers, and the internet as a whole are facing one of the most fundamental challenges; validating trust in content. The reputation data stored in servers is being embedded and exploited by various application creators. Hub aims to demolish this shortcoming by building a decentralized human trust protocol where trust is incentivised, verifiable and portable, with multidimensional reputation. The man behind this idea is Eric Ly (Cofounder, LinkedIn), with Rich Miller (CEO, Telematica Inc.) and Miko Matsumura (Cofounder, Evercoin) being the CTO and CMO of the firm respectively.
The HUB token will be used to reward users for being trustworthy, increase decentralization in the network, developing other applications on HUB’s platform, and increasing the engagement of users on HUB’s platform. The dates for token sale have not been finalised yet, but the company is going to make the exchange of data more legitimate, genuine, and reliable, and this has already made investors enthusiastic about its ICO.
FIVE ACTIVELY TRADED TOKENS
OmiseGo (OMG)
There is arguably no more respected figure in the blockchain world than Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, so a project which he is personally championing is always worth taking seriously. OmiseGo has an incredible team on the back-end consisting of well-known blockchain developers. Their advisory board consists of Buterin and his Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, as well as lightning network creator Joseph Poon. Omisego is the first Plasma project, which is an attempt to allow Ethereum to be used at scale.
OmiseGo is a Thailand based project and is a subsidiary of Omise, a very popular payment gateway in Southeast Asia. OmiseGo in itself plans to offer businesses and other users a mobile e-wallet designed to run on and alongside the Ethereum Blockchain to provide services like payments, payroll deposits, supply chain finance, asset management, trading, P2P and B2B transactions in a decentralised and inexpensive environment. Their biggest target is the remittances markets in Southeast Asia including other markets namely payments, loyalty and rewards, gaming, and messenger platforms. They have 500 merchants and partners supporting their platform which include Credit Saison, Mizuho Financial Group, Central Bank of Thailand, and McDonald’s. Strongly worth a look.
Stellar Lumens (XLM)
A good way to gauge the strength of a project is which organisations it partners with, Stellar Lumens has aligned itself with one of the true IT heavyweights IBM, to tackle the financial sector. Stellar, founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb (creator of eDonkey2000) and Joyce Kim (co-founder of Simplehoney), is a hybrid blockchain protocol which aims to provide cheaper, quicker, and more reliable financial services which include transfer of digital assets, remittances, micropayments, and mobile payments to people from all income levels across the globe. Stellar was working on Ripple’s protocol when it originated and was later updated with a new consensus method from scratch. The entire team focus on harnessing the blockchain to help the poor with their non-profit initiatives. Stellar’s ecosystem generates profits through operation fees, asset-pair trading, commercialization of protocol, and using their token Lumen (XLM) as a medium of exchange. Lumens was the most profitable cryptocurrency of 2017. Stellar gave away 95% of their tokens in their token sale and offer incentive programs to accelerate the growth of projects working on their platform. With a growing list of partnerships, straight-forward services, setting up of the Stellar Decentralized Exchange (SDEX), and the addition of the lightning network layer on their platform.
Stratis
The market to provide the Blockchain-as-a-service platform to corporations and institutions, in order to help them to implement blockchain technology with various operations and use cases. Stratis aims to become the Amazon of Blockchain services and focuses on offering all Blockchain services on a single platform including private chains and side chains interacting with smart contracts. Stratis also has an educational services program in Blockchain Development called Stratis Development Academy, which also helps to accelerate development of open-source platforms on Stratis and organise hackathons to find extraordinary talents.
Since ICO the market cap of Stratis has soared to 500x, dropping from 2000x in January 2018. Stratis has enormous potential to enter the real-world industries like Medical Research, Internet of Things, FinTech, Provenance, and Identity verification. With this, the inclusion of Masternodes, Breeze Wallet, and a segwit-ready platform are just a few other reasons why investors see prices of Strat rising tenfold of what it currently is.
Wanchain
Digital assets are entering the financial ecosystem at an unprecedented rate, and Wanchain aims to build a financial market for them. Wanchain is a global financial platform which will act as a bridge between different blockchains for cross-chain transfer of assets providing privacy protection to the transactions. It is operating on its own blockchain network and provides a platform for developers to build more complex applications based on smart and intelligent contracts and universal protocols. Although it will be competing with companies like BlockNet, Polkadot, and Ripple regarding interconnectivity between blockchains, accomplishing privacy protection for smart contract transactions is definitely a standout.
Wanchain had the fastest ICO in the history of ICOs with the crowd-sale ending in only 35 seconds. The KYC was strict, and they kept individual caps on investors to prevent whales getting into their markets. They have a strong team consisting of experts in cryptography, engineering, and development. The value of the project according to the roadmap stands at $35-70 billion which brings the price of their tokens to 150-200x their current price. Their target market is huge which makes it an intriguing long-term investment.
Locicoin (LOCI)
Loci, a DIY patent research company, is applying its search engine to a decentralised database for patent research, discovery, and licensing. The company uses a combination of intuitive user interfaces, machine learning, and blockchain technology to optimise this process. The business has huge ambitions to transform intellectual property, enabling smaller inventors to secure more patents. If successful, this will make the company and tokens extremely valuable.
That said the company will almost certainly face significant competitive pressures from large corporations and big patent holders like Intellectual Ventures. Also, its trading price has been hit by more than 90% from its peak in February during the market selloff, and so is one of the highest risk coins listed, but its work on searching intellectual property is highly interesting.
About Novum Insights
Novum Insights helps you to predict opportunities and save time in making decisions. It is a global market monitor of complex technologies. Novum Insights unpicks the sub-sectors that use the latest thinking in Blockchain, Cybersecurity, AI and IoT, with a database of ICO’s.
DISCLAIMER: THE ABOVE REFERENCES AN OPINION, AND IS FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY. IT IS NOT INTENDED TO BE INVESTMENT ADVICE.
