More than 10 years have passed since the first cryptocurrency appeared. During this time, the market managed to survive numerous ups and downs, and to expand significantly. Today, there are already over 3500 cryptocurrencies. Many of them have long lost their potential and disappeared from radar. Others, on the contrary, managed to surprise us, achieve success and recognition. It is not an easy task to select promising and fundamentally strong projects from such a huge number of crypto assets.

The most promising cryptocurrencies to invest in

At present, it is rather difficult to determine the main market trends. Bitcoin is at a crossroads due to a halving in May 2020, while Ethereum is undergoing major innovations. Nevertheless, we tried to select the most promising projects that have the greatest potential for development and growth in 2020-2021.

Bitcoin

Date of foundation: January 3, 2009.

Idea: The first decentralized means of payment.

Bitcoin has been and remains the most popular and talked about cryptocurrency. In May 2020, there was a lot of buzz around the most anticipated event of the year – the Bitcoin halving. However, at first, all this resulted only in unsuccessful attempts to overcome the $ 10,500 limit, which remained impregnable for many years, which further contributed to the bearish mood in the market.

In August 2020, Bitcoin nevertheless managed to overcome its psychological milestone, soaring above $ 12,000 and successfully gaining a foothold in new positions. According to many experts, Bitcoin is simply doomed to success.

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Here are some reasons why:

It is the most famous and popular cryptocurrency in the world.
At the moment, more than 80% of all coins have been mined, and with a decrease in supply, as you know, the cost also increases.
Bitcoin has become widespread. It is presented on all exchanges, in all exchangers, and is accepted for payment in many stores.
On the Chicago Stock Exchange and the MICEX, futures for trading in MTC appeared.

Ethereum

Date of foundation: July 2015.

Idea: a platform for creating blockchain projects based on smart contracts.

Ethereum is the second most popular and capitalized cryptocurrency, on the platform of which users can create decentralized applications (DApps) using smart contracts.

The prospects of this cryptocurrency are primarily due to its demand and usefulness for the industry. The Ethereum platform allows independent developers to build decentralized applications for a wide variety of purposes. Thanks to her, ICOs spread and the era of transition to DeFi began, and Ethereum smart contracts were adopted by the governments of many countries to modernize the state system.

Throughout its existence, ETH has shown stable growth, and there are no prerequisites to assume that anything will change for the worse. The developers, headed by Vitalik Buterin, are actively developing their project, constantly introducing new features, and most importantly, the demand for the project only increases over time.

XRP

Date of foundation: 2012.

Idea: creating a real-time gross settlement system for fast transactions around the world.

The Ripple project, the token of which is XRP, is backed by serious developers, high technologies and numerous partners around the world. Ripple has come up with a technology that could revolutionize payments and become an alternative to SWIFT, which has been used for transfers for over 45 years.

Today the company’s partners are large banks, payment systems, and liquidity providers. And the developers are working hard to attract even more partner companies to use their technology, which will ultimately have a positive effect on the value of the coin.

XRP is currently the third largest cryptocurrency by capitalization, which has already managed to show growth of over 30,000%. At the same time, due to the huge emission of Ripple tokens, it remains a low-risk investment with great prospects.

Litecoin

Date of foundation: October 13, 2011.

Idea: the main competitor of BTC, used an alternative hashing algorithm for faster transaction processing and easier mining.

The Litecoin cryptocurrency was developed by Charlie Lee as an alternative version of Bitcoin. We often refer to PTC as digital gold. In this case, LTC is digital silver with lower fees and higher scalability.

Litecoin is an attractive cryptocurrency in the long term investment. There are several reasons for this:
LTC coins, just like BTC, have become widespread as a means of payment. The number of places where Litecoin is accepted for payment is constantly increasing.
The system has very low transaction fees. Bank transfer is usually more expensive, and usually takes twice as long.
Litecoin almost always follows Bitcoin. Predicting the future growth of MTC, we can say that the value of Litecoin will also go up.

Litecoin has managed to acquire a reputation as a “boring” crypto-asset, because its founder Charlie Lee advocates a cautious approach to innovation. But in the coming year, the asset will face global changes. LiteCoin plans to switch to the new Mimble Wimble PoW protocol algorithm, which should increase the scalability and privacy of the network. It is expected that these changes will positively affect the value of the coin.

Chainlink (LINK)

Date of foundation: September 2017.

Idea: the platform is designed to act as a link between smart contracts and the ability to use them in the real world.

The ChainLink platform is a decentralized oracle network that connects smart contracts with data from the real world. This is a simple, but at the same time very significant goal, which will make it easier to use smart contracts and their results more accurate.

Analysts positively assess both the potential of the Chainlink platform itself and its LINK cryptocurrency. The popularity, demand, and, accordingly, the price of the coin are due to the relevance of the use of smart contracts. Cooperation with the largest interbank organization SWIFT is also singled out as a factor for success.

EOS

Date of foundation: July 2017.

Idea: a platform for creating decentralized applications and services based on smart contracts.

During its ICO, the EOS project managed to raise about $ 4.2 billion. This project has a huge capital for development, and at the moment EOS can even be called more technological than Ethereum and Bitcoin.

The system allows the development of decentralized projects of a commercial scale and is capable, like Ripple, of processing millions of transactions per second, against 20 Ether operations and 3-4 Bitcoins. Not surprisingly, EOS is growing at a faster pace.

In the near future, the organizers of EOS Block.one are planning to launch the Voice social network, with the help of which it will be possible to earn tokens for creating content. At the moment, the beta version of the social network is openly available. This is also expected to have a positive impact on the value of the coin.

NEO

Date of foundation: June 2014.

Idea: the Chinese equivalent of Ethereum, working with smart contracts.

NEO is one of the oldest projects that continues to carefully develop its platform and follow the outlined roadmap. In the near future, several large-scale updates and the introduction of new modifications are planned on the platform, which, according to forecasts, should have a positive effect on the value of the coin.

Among the main prerequisites for growth:

NEO plans to move to a new blockchain that will allow for increased throughput, stability and security.
The coins were added to the Binance.US exchange, which opened them up to the US market.
Coinbase and Coinbase.Pro are planning to add coins to the listing.

NEO is a fundamentally strong and promising project. Its developers are not interested in course manipulation, but are focused solely on development. If they manage to realize their plans, then NEO will most likely enter the TOP-10 coins.

0x (ZRX)

Date of foundation: August 15, 2017.

Idea: a platform that provides functionality and tools for creating custom exchangers and exchange platforms.

Ethereum has set a new standard for the entire crypto industry and brought more than 1,500 new blockchain projects to the world, most of which use ERC20 tokens. But the question regarding their exchange with each other is resolved a little clumsily, and in most cases they can only be exchanged through Ether. In such conditions, it is difficult to overestimate the prospects of the 0x project, designed specifically to provide a quick exchange between tokens.

The project is led by two developers of the Coinbase exchange – Will Warren and Amir Bunday. The team is small, numbering only 25 people, but they all have experience of working in such monsters as Amazon, Apple, Google, Bloomberg and are first-class specialists.

Currently, the value of the coin is below one dollar, and at the peak of its take-off, it barely reached two. But, as you know, it is these promising small-cap cryptocurrencies that show extra high ROIs afterwards.

Monero

Date of foundation: April 2014.

Idea: cryptocurrency with enhanced anonymity.

Monero is an anonymous cryptocurrency using ring signatures and hidden addresses. At the beginning of 2020, the coin is in the TOP-20 of the market in terms of capitalization, but it has all the prospects to gain a foothold in higher positions.

Several significant advantages affect the positive movement of value, the demand and prospects of the coin:

complete anonymity of users within the network;
no restrictions on emissions;
resistance to ASIC miners;
extensive network of partnerships.

Over the past few years, the coin has been incorporated into many projects. A special leap in the rate was provoked by the collaboration with the AppStore. Developers are constantly striving to make the coin even more anonymous, to improve the degree of its protection against hacker attacks. If this continues, then Monero has every chance to rise even higher.

Cosmos (ATOM)

Date of foundation: March 2019.

Idea: to create an ecosystem that would allow various blockchains to communicate and exchange information.

Promising small-cap cryptocurrencies can generate colossal profits if there is a good project behind them with a sought-after idea. This is exactly what the Cosmos cryptocurrency is, which has an ambitious idea to solve one of the most difficult and significant problems of all blockchain networks – the inability to communicate with each other.

At the moment, the project is still under development, and the coin is showing growth trends. But how events will develop in the future depends on the success of the implementation of the idea. If the developers do everything they planned, then the cryptocurrency will definitely be a tremendous success.

Bitcoin-price

Cardano

Date of foundation: September 2017.

Idea: an intelligent platform for concluding contracts.

Behind the Cardano project is not just an idea, but a whole philosophy: to make the crypto industry simpler, more accessible and scalable. The project team consists of a large number of engineers and scientific researchers led by Charles Hoskins, one of the founders of Ethereum. Charles aims to make Cardano the leading smart contract platform with more advanced features than previously developed protocols.

Despite the fact that the value of the coin only once exceeded $ 1, there is every reason to believe that the situation will change in the foreseeable future. Hoskins’ experience in developing similar projects, philosophy and commitment to innovation make Cardano an attractive investment project, available even for investors with little capital.

What is the most promising cryptocurrency?

Bitcoin remains at the top of the cryptocurrency Olympus and is the best digital coin to invest in. It has been around for over 10 years, and became the founder of the entire industry. No one has yet succeeded in surpassing it in cost, significance, popularity.

According to one of the pioneers of the crypto history, Hella Finney, the final cost of MTC could be more than $ 10 million. In addition, if you track the growth trends in the value of the main cryptocurrency, then it has always increased after halving. As a reminder, after the first division in 2012, the coin’s value increased 407 times from $ 2.55 to $ 1037. After the second, the value of the coin increased 28 times to $ 1037. We can still guess what the price of military-technical cooperation will be after halving in 2020, but history shows that takeoff should be expected.

Investor memo

No matter how promising the project may seem, when investing in cryptocurrencies, you should definitely adhere to the following rules:

If you are a beginner, you should definitely do your first study of the basics of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

You need to choose your investment strategy and stick to it.
Don’t try to “guess” and invest everything in one project.
Don’t invest in promises. Always conduct a comprehensive project analysis.

One of the main investment risks of the cryptocurrency market is its immaturity, manipulation, and very high volatility. Now all this is exacerbated by the fact that there are many uncertainties in the global market due to the pandemic.

Of course, cryptocurrencies are somewhat detached from the stock market and the global economy, but nevertheless, at times of instability in the world, alarming trends are observed in the digital asset market.