In terms of price action, the overall crypto market is pretty disheartening right now. The market can’t seem to make up its mind. Are we going to break out of this bear market? Or continue down to a triple bottom? Does it matter in the long run?
While the pundits concern themselves with price action alone, the fundamentals themselves have never been stronger.
We’re seeing slow and steady improvements from the market leaders (BTC, etc.), institutions are knocking at the door looking to participate, and the altcoin space is full of innovation (as well as plenty of junk). There is definitely a lot of exciting developments in the crypto space right now.
So let’s take a look at 5 coins to watch in June of 2018!
1. EOS.io ($EOS) – $10.3 Billion
Project Overview
EOS is a general purpose smart contract blockchain platform created by Dan Larimer and the Block.one team. EOS has prioritized speed, scalability, and end user experience.
EOS uses a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism to achieve high throughput, with no transaction fees. The EOS token is required to leverage shared network resources such as bandwidth, storage, etc.
Why You Should Watch EOS
There is a long list of reasons to invest in EOS, and here are a few things to keep your eye on in June.
Mainnet Launch
After a year-long ICO raising over $2 billion, the EOS blockchain will finally go live on the mainnet on June 2. There has been a ton of hype, but can EOS possibly live up to it all?
EOS is highly capitalized, which suggests that they will throw a lot of money into their launch. Besides their massive hackathon series, presumably the EOS team reserved some big news to announce during the launch.
Scalability Wars
Scalability is one of the most talked-about issues in 2018, and EOS is a high-performance blockchain positioned to capture that value.
EOS plans to launch with 1,000–6,000 TPS. If this is realized, they will have one of the fastest blockchains available today. EOS achieves high performance through the use of Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) with a relatively small amount (21) of Block Producers (a.k.a. nodes).
Will Solidity developers wait until Ethereum increases throughput via sharding, or will they jump ship to EOS, which can already process thousands of transactions per second? Adding fuel to the fire, EOS plans to offer the ability to simply port projects from Ethereum over to EOS.
Airdrop Culture
Most projects built on EOS have done (or are planning to do) an airdrop for EOS token holders. While this is by no means a requirement, it’s a great strategy to seed your community, and it makes the EOS token more valuable. There are at least 5 scheduled airdrops in June, most notably, Everipedia’s IQ token.
Buy the Rumor, Sell the News?
So far in 2018, EOS has been one of the best-performing tokens in the top 100 by market cap. As we approach the mainnet launch, will we see a selloff that typically follows big events? Or will the EOS token maintain its strength long term?
2. Zilliqa ($ZIL) – $743 Million
Project Overview
Zilliqa is a high-performance blockchain focused on on-chain scaling through the use of network sharding. Network sharding divides all the nodes into separate groups (shards), and then each group uses their own consensus protocol to create micro blocks which are then aggregated into the larger blockchain.
Zilliqa is focused on several high-value use cases, such as payment networks, sharing economy, insurance, digital advertising, decentralized exchanges, and gaming.
Why You Should Watch Zilliqa
The ZIL token has performed very well in Q2 2018, but that’s not all it has going for it…
Mainnet Launch Coming Up in Q3
Zilliqa released their public testnet in April 2018 and plans to launch their mainnet sometime in Q3. The excitement surrounding this project continues to build.
Zilliqa is the First Project To Implement Sharding
As mentioned above, scalability is a hot topic right now. ZIL is well positioned to capture some of that value. Zilliqa has shown 2,400+ TPS on their testnet while using 3,600 nodes. While testnet environments cannot possibly imitate real-world adversarial conditions, this is still very impressive.
One interesting fact about sharding is that you can in theory scale linearly as your nodes increase. The bigger your network, the faster you can process transactions. This is the opposite of Bitcoin/Ethereum transactions fighting for some space in the next block.
Being “First” Comes With Some Risks
Zilliqa is heading into uncharted territory with both sharding and their new programming language Scilla. Network sharding protocols come with new challenges. For example, in order to maintain security, the protocol must create true randomness among nodes. Also, each node needs a large amount of data storage, which theoretically leads to centralization.
Any time you create a new programming language (Scilla), you risk not acquiring the developer mindshare required to create a meaningful network effect. Scilla is not Turing complete, which allows for more secure smart contracts that should minimize risk related to DAO-type reentrancy hacks.
New Partnerships: Mindshare and Infoteria
At a recent meetup, they announced two new partnerships. The first is Mindshare who will be piloting a digital advertising application on top of Zilliqa. Although the information is vague, Zilliqa claims two publicly trading companies on the NASDAQ and NYSE will also participate in this pilot project.
The second partnership is Infoteria, Japanese company that is heavily involved with the Japanese Blockchain Consortium. This partnership signals an effort to expand Zilliqa into the Japanese Market.
3. Neblio ($NEBL) – $94 Million
Project Overview
Neblio is one of several projects trying to get enterprises on the blockchain. However, Neblio has a few features that make it stand out. Most notably, they’re focused on “making blockchain simple” by offering APIs, education, many programming languages, and extensive documentation.
Neblio uses the NEBL token to act as “gas” to power the network. Neblio is a pure Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain, and users can earn rewards by staking NEBL in their wallets. Check out their guide to staking to learn more.
Why You Should Watch NEBL
Enterprises are generally driven by a profit motive, which means they will start adopting new technology (blockchain) as soon as it makes financial sense. Neblio is positioning themselves as a blockchain service provider to help these enterprises unlock the value of the blockchain.
Here are a few reasons to consider investing in Neblio.
They Support Many Programing Languages
Neblio is starting with Python, Java, JS, Node.Js, .NET, Go, Objective-C, and PHP. This will help traditional developers leverage the blockchain without being forced to learn a new language.
Room To Grow
While the NEBL token is up over 45x since its ICO price of $0.20, they still have a relatively small market cap ($94 million). That is 15x smaller than another project in the same industry (Stratis), whose market cap peaked at $2 billion in early 2018.
Beta Release of Their Neblio API Suite v2
Sometime in Q3, Neblio will officially “go to market” with the beta release of their Neblio API Suite v2. According to their roadmap, they will start by targeting healthcare records management, supply chain contract negotiation and validation, and online identity management applications.
NTP-1 Token Protocol
Neblio has created their own NTP-1 token protocol standard (like an ERC-20 token, but for Neblio). This allows their future enterprise customers to launch their own tokens inside the Neblio ecosystem. The Neblio Orion Wallet currently allows staking of NEBL and will offer the ability to store other NTP-1 tokens.
From a momentum standpoint, it’s nice to see Nicolas Merten from Datadash say Neblio is a top 3 coin to watch in May 2018. He is very bullish on projects that get enterprises on the blockchain, and Neblio is no exception.
4. Ontology ($ONT) – $703 Million
Project Overview
ONT is a NEP-5 token native to the NEO blockchain. Ontology is a dual token system very similar to NEO. By staking your ONT, you receive Ontology Gas (ONG), which is used as the fuel to performance transactions on the Ontology blockchain.
Ontology is attempting to tackle a massive issue: how do we verify data and personal identity in order to confidently upload information from the “meatspace” onto the blockchain? Without digital identity and secure data, no one can participate in the smart economy being created by NEO.
It’s an ambitious project that aims to work with all the major industries such as government, healthcare, insurance, and banking. While Ontology is a public blockchain, they will be creating private chains for companies and governments to store (and share) sensitive data such as healthcare records.
Learn more about Ontology here.
Why You Should Watch ONT
Mainnet Launch in June 2018
Ontology is one of many projects launching their mainnet in June, and it has seen an impressive run-up since being listed on Binance back in April. We may start to hear announcements of partnerships coming out after the launch, which could keep the momentum going.
Massive Team Backed By Tons of Resources
It’s good to see that Ontology has an absolutely massive team to match the ambition of the project. They’ve also partnered with a handful of Venture Funds focused on developing companies in the tech space, namely Sequoia Capital, Danhua Capital, and Matrix China.
Not to mention, NEO and Ontology were both created by the parent company Onchain. Onchain was co-founded by NEO’s founder (Da Hong Fei) and Ontology’s founder (Jun Li), signaling a tight-working relationship between the projects.
Strength of the NEO Ecosystem
Instead of competing for market share, each new project in the NEO ecosystem seems to fulfill an important niche. This leads to increased functionality of the ecosystem, which benefits all projects involved. Over time, this shared vision may create an unstoppable network effect, making it nearly impossible for another ecosystem to overtake NEO in China. If this happens, the ONT token will be worth orders of magnitude more than it is today.
5. QASH ($QASH) – $168 Million
Project Overview
QASH is an ERC-20 token created by a Japanese company called QUOINE. By 2019, they plan to release their own QASH blockchain and swap the ERC-20 version for their native token. The QASH team is working with regulators to ensure longevity of their project.
The QASH team is trying to become the dominant financial services provider for large institutions in the blockchain space. Initially, they are focused on becoming a liquidity provider for institutions to participate in the crypto economy with their World Book (details below).
They aggregate all their services inside the LIQUID Platform, which is being launched in June 2018. Some features include a fiat–crypto exchange, a crypto–crypto exchange, prime brokerage services, world order book, and the ability to launch ICOs inside their ecosystem.
The QASH project is highly ambitious, and if they can fulfill their vision they have a good chance of becoming a top 10 coin by 2020.
Why You Should Watch QASH
The QASH project is undergoing an exciting time. The theme for 2018 seems to be “institutional money is coming.” If this does happen, then QASH has a good chance of benefiting.
The World Book
The QASH team is attempting to solve the “liquidity silos” problem by combining the order books from all exchanges into a single platform. By connecting multiple order books, traders can leverage trading pairs and liquidity from multiple exchanges with only a single account inside the LIQUID platform.
LIQUID Platform Goes Live Mid Year
The long-awaited launch of the most sophisticated platform on the market in almost here. I reached out to the QUOINE team to get an update about the upcoming launch of the LIQUID platform. Here’s what Mario Gomez Lozada, Co-Founder, the President and CTO had to say:
We are all very much looking forward to bringing the world our LIQUID platform. We are approaching this from every angle in order to present the most secure, most accessible, most user-friendly crypto platform we can. Security will always be at the heart of everything we do and that will continue with LIQUID. With our JFSA licensing, we have the foundations in place from a regulatory standpoint to be able to really build our platform, so we are now able to focus more on the user experience. We’re also taking a long, hard look at who we want to be as a company and a brand. We’re moving firmly in the right direction and the launch of LIQUID by QUOINE will not only strengthen our position as a leading trading and exchange platform in the crypto economy, but also enable us to grow our liquidity partnerships with an ever-expanding global network.
To understand the Liquid platform from the viewpoint of one of its creators, take a look at the video below.
QASH is Focused on Serving Big Institutions
Big institutions are conservative, which means they only work with companies that are regulation-compliant and secure. QASH is focused on appealing to these institutions, as is evidenced by their being the only crypto company in Japan regulated by the FSA and requiring full KYC/AML for all users in their system.
Also, they offer Prime Brokerage services to institutional investors, which is a huge selling point for large trading desks.
QASH is Hosting ICOs on Their Platform
This means the QASH team offers end-to-end solutions to help blockchain projects conduct an ICO on their platform. This benefits both customers and issuers of the ICO. Since their launch, QASH have already hosted the ICO for the VUULR project.
According to the VUULR website, they are:
Building a digital marketplace to buy and sell films and tv shows on the blockchain to ensure that broadcasters can purchase better content for viewers to consume.
Learn all about ICO Mission Control here.
Let’s Wrap Up
Everything on this list has interesting developments coming in June. They are well-positioned with regards to the crypto trends of 2018, and they have the potential to succeed long term.
Does this mean they’re guaranteed to increase in price? Of course not.
At the moment, investment in any cryptocurrency is still highly speculative. However, these 5 projects look promising in the short term and have a good chance to become major players in the years to come.
Do you agree or disagree with these projects? What do you have your eye on for June and the rest of 2018?
Disclaimer: Author holds EOS, QASH, and some ONT from the NEO airdrop. This is not professional financial advice and you should always do your own research before investing.
Related: 5 ICOs to Watch in May and June 2018
