With 2020 in full swing, I want to take a moment to point out my favorite projects in the space. While there are dozens of amazing and undervalued projects, these are the ones I am watching closely and researching constantly. Therefore, here are my top crypto picks for this year.
Nothing should be considered investment or financial advice. Enjoy the ride.
Top Crypto Picks for This Year
Please remember, these are only my PERSONAL picks. The reason for these are typically because I see long-term potential in each of these projects. That may not be your personal focus when choosing what projects for you to invest in. Make sure you decide what your focus is before you make financial decisions.
Are you a long-term hodlers, or do you want short-term gains? Are you looking to diversify your portfolio, or go all in on the big one?
All of these are questions that only you can answer.
In addition, make sure you understand you dig into your beliefs. You need to fundamentally understand the difference in technology from project to project. These days, every single crypto or blockchain project can be completely different from the next one.
The first you look at might be centered around healthcare data while the second one may be an oracle solution for decentralized financial institutions. Some might not even run on a blockchain! Therefore, do plenty of research before investing. Ask around and make sure you are confident before you put any of your hard earned money into any project.
Biased Crypto Picks
In addition, make sure your sources for crypto information and education are relatively unbiased.
Ironically, this post is undoubtedly slightly biased. Why is this post biased?
Simply because my money is in these projects. Hence, I might not touch on all of the cons for these projects so you may want to dig deeper and find out more yourself. Obviously, I will try to be unbiased, but that is truly not possible to some degree.
Furthermore, if you do end up investing in these projects, I would try the grandma test as a last precaution.
What is the grandma test?
It is where you have to explain the project in layman’s terms to your grandmother. If you honestly can not explain any of the projects you invest in simply enough for your grandmother to understand it, you probably should not invest. Therefore, take your time, dig into the trenches and learn about the things you put your money into.
Trust me, granny isn’t gonna lie to you. If she don’t get it, you probably don’t either.
Whew. With all of that out of the way, lets dive into our first top crypto asset for 2020, Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Projection
Without a doubt, the number one asset on the crypto Market in 2020 to invest in is Bitcoin. Of course, this might seem like the easy answer, but you would be surprised how many crypto investors lost money going all in on altcoins instead of hedging their bets by purchasing the market leader, BTC.
I would say on a standard approach, 65% of your portfolio should be in the most stable assets. I would consider the top 3 assets in the crypto market place to be the most stable. That leaves you with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. While these digital assets are volatile, they are stable relative to most of the altcoins across the market. Scary right?
Bitcoin Utility
As time progresses and the crypto industry continues to develop, Bitcoin is gaining more and more utility. Specifically, Bitcoin has found stable markets in lending, interest accounts, and reserving. Most notably, the company Blockfi has opened their doors recently securing upwards of 6.2% compounded interest annually by simply holding your Bitcoin in their Insured interest accounts. Other lenders and custodians have started to emerge pushing this trend into a global FOMO.
Bitcoin Halving
Another important thing to remember is the Bitcoin halving event that is set to take place this year in May. This is going to dramatically shake up the industry since the network strength is at all time highs, the demand for Bitcoin is growing, and the competition is getting fierce.
Like any traditional economics model, if you cut the supply of something, the increased demand forces the price upwards. While this may take time to price into the market, the fact that the OTC market will slowly start to squeeze the miners is undeniable.
Bitcoin Mean of Exchange
The last point to make on this asset is its unprecedented acceptance among the crypto industry. There are very few exchanges besides DEXs that will not allow you to trade your Bitcoin or hold it there. In addition, almost every single major cold storage wallet provider, custodian, and obviously exchanges will provide BTC solutions or services.
In terms of fiat, Bitcoin would be the equivalent of holding the US dollar. Except much more stable in terms of relevancy, and it is growing in terms of acceptance instead of diminishing.
Bitcoin Price Projection
Everyone has heard of the huge leap Bitcoin made in late 2017 and early 2018. After the bear market, we are creeping steadily back to the $10,000 levels and beyond.
Personally, if Bitcoin can break through to $15,000 and hold those levels by end of year, I would consider it a huge success. Most people want to shoot for the $100,000 levels, but I would rather see organic gains rather than bubble characteristics.
Ethereum Projection
The second digital asset on my list is of course, the great ICO craze initiator, Etheruem.
Ethereum, has been around the block longer than most cryptos. It saw amazing success in early 2017 propelling it to the second highest market cap only to Bitcoin. It has maintained that place since then with one exception in a short period when XRP over took it for a few weeks.
Etheruem is another easy pick because of the constant development, exposure and infrastructure being built around it. Companies all around the globe are constantly learning to work smart contracts in order to increase automation, learn about the blockchain, and try to leverage technology on the market.
Ethereum Casper Update
Most notably in 2020 for Ethereum would be the upcoming Casper implementation of staking. This update will take the Ethereum chain from a proof of work consensus model to a proof of stake consensus model. The difference is that instead of using computational work to become awarded blocks to confirm, miners would stake their coins and be rewarded with blocks to confirm for their contribution.
The economic implications of staking are huge. Similar to the halving of Bitcoin, as more people stake their coins, they are taking those coins off the market circulating supply essentially. This has a similar effect of the halving which will cut the supply and demand will passively increase the price of ETH organically over time.
Ethereum Utility
Similar to Bitcoin, Ethereum has a massive adoption rate and is accepted almost everywhere Bitcoin is. That would include custodians, interest accounts like Blockfi, cold storage wallets, and most exchanges. If you were to really compare the two in terms of their coin value, Ethereum could now be considered the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. While this was historically Litecoin, I think Ethereum takes the cake now as the second in command in terms of volume, liquidity, and fungibility.
A big plus with Ethereum is that native DEXs, which are decentralized exchanges, will more often than not run based on Ethereum’s chain. This means you can usually get tokens before they launch on large exchanges, and you have increased liquidity for those tokens as well.
Ethereum Price Projections
Similar to Bitcoin, Ethereum had the same massive leap in price back in 2017 and early 2018. With it reaching well over $1,000 a coin. With the current price inching up over $200 a coin, it would be great to see the digital asset’s price leap back to the $500 levels.
Any price over this level will be a considerable gain for the project that seems obtainable and hopefully sustainable. Again, I personally would rather have organic growth than a huge surge to dip in price levels.
Cardano’s Big Year
Third on my list is the ever present, Cardano crypto currency. While most people were hyped up about Cardano in 2018, the project has been taking its time bridging into the traditional market market view. While it is still at a healthy level itching at the top ten spot, Cardano has had to take a step back in order to move forward.
This is partly due to the immense amount of research and development the dev team, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), has gone through. In additional to traditional development on Rust and Haskell code, IOHK has also taken on the responsibility of publishing over 50 academic research papers on all things relating to the project. This includes their innovative Ouroboros consensus algorithm, Plutus coding language, and Shelly mainnet structuring.
Cardano Updates
At the start of 2020, the CEO of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, told the world he meant business. This year is Cardano’s year he said. Therefore, he is actively doing AMAs and interviews to promote the coin and increase exposure. In particular, Cardano is looking to launch their Shelly mainnet this year.
For instance, at the start of the year the team pushed out the initial incentivized testnet on the Rust coding language in order to work out a few things:
- Business economics for rewards and incentives for staking
- Stake pool structures
- Bugs and hot fixes
- Test community participation
Although, the testnet was not written in the native Haskell language that the mainnet will be on. This means the actual test net will hopefully be much more secure, not allow any bugs, and implement the updated business economics learned from the incentivized testnet.
Cardano Utility
While the Cardano coin does not hold as much relevancy compared to mean for exchange as Bitcoin or Ethereum, the project has huge potential. Why does Cardano have huge potenteial?
Well, Cardano’s smart contract ecosystem will be built with checks and balances through the proofs. Mathematically proving stability for the projects being built upon it and eliminating coding error. This is huge for financial institutions and government based needs. The problem with most other languages is the lack of security in terms of development.
For instance, Ethereum had multiple smart contracts or ICO projects lose hundreds of millions of dollars due to poor coding, hacks, or implementation errors. Cardano is aiming to fix that.
Cardano Price Projections
Ironically, the price of Cardano was recently close to its initial token sale price. With the prolonged bear market that lasted throughout 2018 and most of 2019, ADA held strong relative to its peers. In fact, it started to climb back into a top ten position, and they have not even fully started marketing or refreshing the brand yet.
The all time high for this coin was back in December 2017 and January 2018 where the price of one single coin breached $1.00. Today and in the past months, Cardano has been under $0.06 a coin. Anyone can see where this is going, so I will not say anymore.
Ideally, if the Cardano coin price can reach back to the $0.30 levels, then I would say the project is finally back to reasonable price levels for the depth of this project.
IOTA
The last project on this list is non other than IOTA. If you have read this blog before, you know how much of a fan I am of IOTA. Although, there are several reasons for this.
The first reason would be diversity. You see, I know not everything I invest in will make it big, and not everything I invest in will be “correct”. Sometimes the best projects do not win on the market, and sometimes good things fall apart.
That is why I hedge my bets. IOTA is really the biggest direct competitor to almost any of the top blockchain projects becoming the go to utility for micro and machine to machine payments. This is because the transactions on IOTA are fee-less, nearly instant, and built for frequency.
Therefore, IOTA was a natural choice to hedge against my other projects. To be honest, I also heavily looked into Nano (formerly Raiblocks), but chose IOTA due to its market exposure, and innovative development of the Tangle.
IOTA Development This Year
Specifically, a great thing about this project is their marketing. The videos, content, and even posts are all immaculate. Go watch one of their marketing videos compared to almost any other project, and they win hands down. I know you should never invest based on marketing, but just because I would not, does not mean the general population would not.
In terms of communication and transparency, just take a look at their recently released 2020 roadmap. This thing is an amazing effort by the team to communicate the upcoming developments to the world. This tells me a few things. One, they are organized and focused on the mission ahead. Two, they have strict time frames for these developments. And finally, three, I know what I am buying into.
Most notably, is the development of Coordicide. This is the removal of the coordinator.
To protect the Tangle network against 34% attacks in its infancy stage a temporary protection mechanism is used called the Coordinator or COO for short. The Coordinator is a special node run by IOTA Foundation and this node is used to directly or indirectly validate the transactions.
– Iota-news.com
This is the most anticipated update yet to date. Currently, centralization is the main critique coming from decentralized projects across the market. With Coordicide, that centralized support system is removed, and the IOTA network will finally be a decentralized top notch project.
IOTA Price Projections
IOTA was actually in the top 5 digital assets on the market for a short period in time. Over the bear market of 2018-2019, the project lost considerable ground relative to its peers. Recently, the project has pushed its way back into the top 20 on the market.
This is a decent spot considering the level of development yet to be done. Although, if the IOTA coin price can push back to the $1 range, it should be in good standing by the end of the year for the next bull cycle.
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