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To the surprise of many, 2017 was the year in which cryptocurrencies became a dominant trend. As for the best participants, Bitcoin was not even in the top ten. The value of Bitcoin grew more than 1,000% in 2017, but that was not enough to even place it among the 10 best cryptoactive of the year .

In a year of growth for the cryptocurrency trade, the biggest winners were Ripple , which is touted as a new type of payment system for banks, along with lesser-known names like NEM , Ardor and Dash .

When it comes to annual profits, the ether was not left behind. The market’s favorite ICO platform rose more than 9,000% in the year, placing it among the main winners.

At the end of 2017, there were almost 1,400 cryptocurrencies in circulation with a combined market cap of approximately $ 610 billion . At the beginning of the year, the total market limit was only $ 18 billion, which represents a gain of almost 3,300%.

Here are the 10 best cryptoactives of 2017:

The cryptoactives include independent cryptocurrencies and tokens emitted in the blockchain ethereum . Our classification is based on a comparison of the one-year gains made by the 10 most valuable crypto-active ones until January 1, 2018, measured by the data provider CoinMarketcap .

Ripple ended the year as the second largest cryptocurrency in the world with a market capitalization of more than $ 85 billion. The XRP tab only recently managed to overtake Ethereum as the digital asset no. 2 of the world.

Ripple’s large profits , which increased by an astonishing 36,000%, came in large part at the end of the year. This is how your 2017 looked compared to Bitcoin:

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In comparison, Bitcoin’s year-end growth was only 1,300%. At its highest point, it rose 20 times more than the levels of January 1.

Bitcoin goes a little better when compared to rival cryptocurrencies that have their own block chains. This excludes the tokens issued through so-called initial currency offers(ICO), which were crazy last year. Bitcoin reaches the eighth place in this ranking, although it is still surpassed by ethereum and litecoin:

The ICO fever attracted more than $ 3.7 billion in funds this year , according to data provider Coin Schedule. Many of these projects were only launched months ago. However, big names like Golem and OmiseGo lagged behind the lesser known ones like Ardor in the performance charts.

Bitcoin’s performance may seem boring compared to its newer and brighter siblings, but it’s worth putting your winnings in context. After all, the Nasdaq composite index barely gained 27% last year.

The 10 criptoactives with the highest growth in 2017:

1. Ripple

Official Site:  https://ripple.com/

Created in 2012, Ripple is both a payment network (RippleNet) and a cryptocurrency (XRP). RippleNet connects banks and other large institutions and allows them to transfer money and other assets through the network. All transactions are recorded in the decentralized XRP ledger .

Ripple XRP is the currency used in the payment network for all transactions, which reduces the time and money associated with cross-border payments. Each transaction through the system is processed in just four seconds. In comparison, Ethereum takes more than two minutes, Bitcoin takes more than an hour, while traditional systems can take between three and five days.

The currency is also scalable: it can handle 1,500 transactions per second. On the other hand, Bitcoin, according to reports, only manages seven at the same time, which is one of the reasons why Bitcoin Cash was created .

In addition to being fast and scalable, the Ripple network also offers low transaction fees. Due to its benefits, the system is already being used by more than 75 financial institutions around the world.

The New York Times once described Ripple as “a cross between Western Union and a currency Exchange, without the high fees” because it is not only a currency, but also a system in which any currency, including bitcoin, can be traded . “Ripple connects banks, payment providers, exchanges of digital assets and companies through RippleNet to provide an unrestricted experience to send money worldwide”, say its creators.

The current supply of XRP is approximately 38.7 billion of a maximum supply of 100 billion, which is much more than the rest of the cryptocurrencies in this list.

Unlike other cryptocurrencies, you can not mine Ripple, but each transaction destroys a small amount of XRP, which adds a deflationary measure to the system. As already mentioned, all the coins, 100 billion, have already been created. About 40 percent of them are in circulation, while the rest of the coins are owned by the company.

They will be released to the market gradually: one billion Ripples per month. This is to show investors that Ripple will not sell all the supply in the market immediately, which would have a negative effect on the price.

2. NEM

Official site:  https://www.nem.io/

NEM (XEM) is a  peer-to-peer cryptocurrency  released in 2015. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, NEM has its own original source code.

NEM or New Economy Movement is a business-level solution to boost the impending blockchain economy. Originally intended to be a fork of the NXT platform, the community decided to go with a completely new code base with an alpha version released on June 25, 2014 and the first stable version on March 31, 2015. In 2016, NEM jumped to be one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. The platform is currently being rewritten in C ++ and will be released as the “Catapult” update sometime in early 2018.

NEM has introduced new features of blockchain technology such as its  importance test algorithm  (POI), multifirm accounts, encrypted messages and an Eigentrust ++ reputation system. The NEM software is used in a chain of commercial blocks called Mijin, which is being tested by financial institutions and private companies in Japan and internationally.

The average generation time of the block is one minute , 10 times lower compared to Bitcoin, so NEM is able to execute and validate many more transactions in less time.

NEM allows instant money transfers worldwide, without large installments. All portfolios are highly secure and exclude any possibility of unauthorized access.

NEM offers a truly impressive system that promises to be an important player in the next blockchain economy. The ease of development, flexibility and the exclusive PoI system make NEM a very attractive platform for any developer or company looking to build a blockchain solution.

3. Burning

Official site:  https://www.ardorplatform.org/

Ardor is another project whose goal is to bring blockchain technology to the masses. Its beginnings go back to the community and the Adel project, which later developed the Nxt technology and, ultimately, the Ardor ecosystem.

Ardor is, in fact, just one member of a family of projects that are technologically related. All the projects are in charge of the company Jelurida .

The Nxt project was first created in 2013 by the anonymous developer BCNext . Although it remains anonymous, the trio of tokens of the company Jelurida ( Ardor, Nxt and Ignis ) reveals that there is also a small team composed of a legal expert and two programmers, all of them from Bulgaria. In the white paper of Jelurida’s technologies, the list of founders includes Kristina Kalcheva, legal expert, and Lior Yaffe. It is not known where BCNext is located in the Jelurida project.

While Nxt is a rising star in Bittrex , Ardor is a coveted asset in Chinese stock markets. And this can be a big boost in the price, since the fiat money in the form of Chinese Yuan is injected into this tab.

As you can see, the pressure on Ardor prices comes from two main sources: demand in Asian markets and pressures from Bitcoin owners in Bittrex and Poloniex. In a way, Ardor is a token that offers a diversified price risk, since it is favored by different types of buyers.

Ardor seems a promising record with a relatively low price. Even so, the sudden high-volume exchange suggests speculative bombs . The equipment seems to be well established, and a functional version of the system will soon be available.

4. Stellar

Official site: https://www.stellar.org/

Stellar Lumens announces itself as an open source distributed payment infrastructure, built on the premise that the international community needs “a global financial network open to all.” Stellar Lumens will cover this need, connecting individuals, institutions and payment systems through its platform.

The Stellar Lumen team wants to make monetary transactions cheaper, faster and more reliable than with current systems. In addition, its protocol would connect people from all over the world by allowing more efficient cross-border payments.

Founded in early 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim, Stellar was originally a hard fork in the Ripple protocol . After making some changes to the important consensus code, the network generated the creation of the ” Stellar-core “.

The technical document and the new code for this update were launched in April 2015 and the network was launched in November of the same year. The original asset in the Stellar network was called “stellars” (launched with 100 billion units in 2014); the name was changed to Lumens (XLM) after the 2015 update.

XLM is backed by a strong team of developers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. If you check the list of board members and advisors, you will find great names of people like WordPress, Y-combinator, Microsoft, Apache, Stripe, Google and many others. In general, it is a positive indicator when a list of big names supports a project.

The Lumen / XLM is another asset in the field of cryptocurrencies that is rapidly populating. It seems to be positioned as a digital currency solution for the developing world, but it has been flying below the radar in recent years.

As of November 2017, Deloitte, Stripe and, most notably, IBM have created partnerships with Stellar. A big step in the right direction.

5. Dash

Official site:  https://www.dash.org/

Dash (formerly known as Darkcoin ) is an open source cryptocurrency peer-to-peer and based on Bitcoin software that claims to be fast, easy to use and scalable. Dash began its journey in 2014 and is currently the tenth largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization.

Two of the biggest advantages of Dash are speed and low rates. You can send money to anyone in the world for less than $ 0.4 in four seconds; which is almost impossible to do through a bank.

Banks charge higher fees, especially if you are sending money abroad. A transaction can also take a few days to complete, although most banks can speed up the process if you are willing to pay more.

Another benefit is anonymity. Although all transactions are public, you do not have to share personal information such as your name and address.

With Bitcoin the transactions are published in the blockchain and anyone can check who made them and to whom. In the case of Dash, the anonymization technology makes it impossible to trace those transactions.

Compared to the SHA-256 algorithm of Bitcoin, Dash incorporates a total of 11 algorithms , collectively called X11. This makes it much more difficult to enter or hack the Dash network. Because of this, Dash is considered a more secure cryptocurrency payment method than Bitcoin.

6. Ethereum

Official Site:  https://www.ethereum.org/

Ethereum is another of the most popular solutions for today’s cryptocurrencyinvestors and will continue in 2018. Designed by Russian programmer Vitalik Buterin , Ethereum works in a completely different way from Bitcoin. Although it can do many of the same things that Bitcoin can do, its main objective is to act as a platform to create decentralized applications.

The biggest difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is the use of blockchains. While the Bitcoin Blockchain registers contracts, showing how digital funds have moved from one place to another, Etherum has expanded this concept. The Ethereum blockchain uses a much more complex scripting language, and its intelligent contracts can form complex applications that have a wide range of potential uses. These open source contracts can be used to safely execute a wide variety of services , including: voting systems, financial exchanges, crowdfunding platforms, intellectual property and autonomous decentralized organizations.

The developers have recently begun to realize the potential that Ethereum can offer, building projects on the cryptocurrency. Some people have even used Ethereum to raise millions of dollars through mass sales known as ICO , and the trend is still strong today. This makes Ethereum a powerful option for those who invest in finance. However, the popularity of the currency means that the price has skyrocketed.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, recently launched an implementation guide that reveals that the network’s developers will start with a “hybrid” system that will merge bitcoin-style work test mining with its highly anticipated and still experimental participation test called Casper .

7. Golem

Official Site: https://golem.network/

Golem is an innovative piece of technology that works for the decentralization of computing power. Although Golem is still in its infancy, if it succeeds, it would be a global supercomputer distributed and accessible to all. It is currently under development by a dedicated team of programmers and engineers, all of whom have extensive knowledge of P2P software and blockchain engineering.

Golem aims to redistribute the power of computing. Encouraged by the financial reward, taxpayers donate their ‘CPU cycles’ to Golem by carrying out tasks delegated by the users of the network. Computers around the world can benefit financially by using downtime to perform calculations for the Golem network.

The initial offer of Golem coins (ICO) began on November 11, 2016. Users who would like to participate in the project could exchange ether (Ethereum digital token) for Golem Network Tokens, or GNT for short.

In the ICO, 1000 GNT could be purchased for an ether, where the minimum and maximum financing were 150,000 and 820,000 ethers respectively. The crowdfunding included an 18 percent total endowment, where 12 percent was delivered to the Golem Factory and 6 percent to the Golem team. The creation of the Golem token has ceased since then ; it is a limited supply token (one billion tokens forever), as defined by the intelligent GNT contract. Limited supply means greater demand as the network grows.

Golem is a promising project. If successful, Golem could be an indispensable tool for medicine, machine learning, business, graphics and cryptography. The team will have to overcome many challenges for the future, but important advances have already been made. It is now possible to use Golem in its current state to generate images and video, which gives it great long-term potential.

8. Binance Coin

Official Site: https://www.binance.com/

Binance Coin (BNB) is the cryptocurrency of the Binance Chinese exchange platform  . The token was created during the fundraising event (ICO) to finance the development of the exchange. Currently, the cryptocurrency has a market capital of 180 to 218 million US dollars, of which between 18 and 35 million US dollars are traded daily.

Binance  is one of the newest exchanges in the industry. The Hong Kong-based company raised about $ 15 million in its initial coin offering last July (2017) and immediately acquired 20,000 registered users as part of the collection. The platform has achieved enormous success in a very short time and focuses on the global market, with an emphasis on China.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, has an impressive resume with years of experience in cryptocurrencies. He was Director of Development at Blockchain, Cofounder and Director of Technology at OKCoin, and Founder and CEO of BijieTech before working at Binance.

From its ICO to date, Binance has grown enormously and is now in the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Currently it has more than 140 altcoins listed on it, and the number increases as the days go by.

Binance tokens can be used to reduce fees for trade costs and commissions. If you pay using your own token, you currently receive a 50% discount on the negotiation rate, which drops to 0.05%. With this discount, Binance easily has the lowest rates in the industry.

Recently, Binance announced a buyback plan of up to 100 million Binance Coins in the first quarter of 2018. This purchase is intended to increase the value of the remaining currencies, thereby also benefiting investors.

9. Litecoin

Official Site:  https://litecoin.org/

Litecoin is a global and open source payment network that is completely decentralized and without central authorities. Created by  former Google engineer Charles Lee in 2011 , it was announced as an alternative to bitcoin. Lee essentially set out to reduce the time required to confirm new transactions and modify the way bitcoin was mined to ensure anyone could participate.

It is the sixth cryptocurrency by market capitalization and the third oldest cryptocurrency that still exists. Litecoin is also one of the four currencies that you can currently buy through Coinbase, the most popular broker to buy cryptocurrencies, along with bitcoin and ether.

Litecoin comes from the bitcoin source code, and like bitcoin, it operates in a chain of blocks. Charles Lee has said that in the past he intended litecoin to be considered silver if bitcoin represented gold. But there are some key technical differences that have made litecoin attractive recently.

For starters, the litecoin network is faster than the bitcoin blockchain: extracting a “block” of litecoin transactions takes an average of 2.5 minutes compared to 10 minutes of bitcoin. Litecoin’s transaction fees are also lower: sometimes close to zero. (Bitcoin transaction fees vary depending on network activity and can be very high in places like Coinbase). Litecoin has a supply limit of 84 million coins, compared to 21 million bitcoin.

Unlike bitcoin, created in 2009 by someone (or someone) using the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of litecoin is very public and popular on social networks. Lee was an engineer at Google in 2011 when he created litecoin. He joined Coinbase in 2013 as one of the company’s first employees, and was engineering director there until he left this year to focus on full-time litecoin. December 19 (2017), Lee announced it had sold all its litecoin to avoid any accusation of “pumping” ( pumping ) the currency for their own financial benefit.

10. OmiseGO

Official Site:  https://omisego.network/

Founded in 2013, Omise is a capital supported payment service company operating in Thailand, Japan, Singapore and Indonesia. OmiseGo , created by this company, is an extension platform operated separately. It is owned by its users and card holders, not Omise.

OmiseGO (OMG) is a smart contract platform and ERC-20 token (the Ethereum code standard). OMG uses a participation test algorithm (PoS) and has a total supply of 140,245,398 million with a current current supply of 102,042,552 million tokens.

The ultimate goal of OMG is to be a preeminent high value exchange and settlement platform . With OmiseGo customers will have the ability to monitor fiat tokens, digital forms of money and different resources (for example, reliability and reward approaches).

According to the World Economic Forum, the number of people around the world who do not have access to bank accounts amounts to more than two (2) billion. This number represents around 35% of the world population . OmiseGo can solve this problem, especially in economically developing countries, and aim to use the blockchain technology to carry it out.

OmiseGO’s core development team is made up of highly respected figures within the blockchain community. OmiseGo has a distinguished team of advisors, including Vitalik Buterin and other members of the Ethereum Foundation. The Omise group has also worked on numerous projects, including Hydrachain, Golem, Tendermint and Cosmos.

The popularity of OmiseGo is currently on the rise . Although this may simply be the result of someone artificially “pumping” the OMG price, the token has a fair amount of trading volume. At this time, a GMO has a value of $ 21, which is a fairly high value considering that there are almost 100 million tokens in circulation.

How to invest in cryptoactives?

Investing in cryptoactives can be risky, but if you are sure of the advantages offered by this platform, have read the technical documentation, and are inspired by the founders of the project, then this is what you should do:

Buy something from Bitcoin or Ether

Many of the potentially successful cryptoactives do not have a payment mechanism that allows direct exchange for fiat money, in fact, a large percentage of tokens must be exchanged initially by Bitcoins or Ether. Therefore, your first step will be to acquire one of these 2 cryptocurrencies through an online broker. Coinbase is one of the best sites to buy your first Bitcoins, they have a solid reputation in the market, advanced security measures to protect your funds, and allow you to make payments by credit card and bank transfer. In addition, the site has other popular buying options, such as Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash .

Open an account on an exchange platform

Once you have purchased your first Bitcoins, you must open an account in a cryptocurrency exchange platform such as Bittrex, Poloniex or Binance. Binance is our favorite exchange, since it allows us to exchange BTC and Ether for promising cryptoactives such as Ripple, Stellar Lumens or Cardano, among others. Binance is currently one of the most successful exchanges on the market, with advanced security measures, a large number of cryptoactives to choose from, and its transaction rates are quite low. To start trading in Binance, you must transfer some balance in Bitcoin or Ether from your Coinbase wallet to the address to receive deposits from your Binance account. Once this is done, you can start trading in the exchange, for which you are offered 2 options: a basic mode that is ideal for beginners, and an advanced mode that has more negotiation tools.

conclusion

It is expected that the number of altcoins in circulation will increase as more companies issue offers of currencies. The ICO market raised more than $ 5 billion in 2017, with increasing activity between September and December. The next few months could see an avalanche of initial offers of currencies as companies seek to capitalize on the crowdfunding model before regulators introduce new legislation. China has already banned ICOs, while South Korea recently decided to reverse similar restrictions. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is carefully evaluating token sales to determine if they should be following federal securities laws.

The ICO quickly became one of the most important developments in 2017 , but it is not clear how the market will evolve in the next 12 months. The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, believes that the vast majority of existing tokens will fail, but that a select group of these will reach the top. Buterin uses the term “Tokens 2.0” to refer to the next generation of higher quality ICOs.

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