Market sentiment is changing constantly, requiring individuals to adapt their views. As crypto projects grow, stall, or even die, people must change their expectations and speculations. That being said, here are five crypto assets to watch in 2019.
1 – Bitcoin (BTC)
This one may be a somewhat obvious pick. Nevertheless, bitcoin has a lot going for it. It has the most institutional interest, by far.
The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) employed their cash-settled bitcoin futures over a year ago, boosting institutional interest, as well as bitcoin’s credibility.
Last year also saw a mass influx of further institutional interest in bitcoin that will carry over into 2019. Interest includes multiple bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF ) proposals and Intercontinental Exchange’s (ICE) much-anticipated Bakkt platform with bitcoin-settled futures trading.
Bitcoin is also the crypto industry’s largest asset, making up 51.8% of the market cap for the whole asset class according to CoinMarketCap at the time of this writing.
Bitcoin is also at more than a 75% discount from all-time highs, priced at just over $4,000 on Blockmodo at the time of this writing.
In last year’s interview with YouTuber CryptoBobby, notable bitcoin maximalist Tone Vays also mentioned several points as to why bitcoin stands out from the numerous other projects in the crypto space.
2 – Monero (XMR)
Monero is another project of interest for 2019. Monero is different than bitcoin, in that it employs anonymity features.
Bitcoin can be anonymous as well, but requires added steps to do so, including buying bitcoin over-the-counter (OTC). Monero makes the anonymity process simpler (although Tone Vays and his group have questioned Monero’s anonymity potential).
Additionally, Monero is an interesting choice because unlike most crypto assets, Monero was built using different codethan bitcoin, and its founder’s identity is also unknown, as is the case with bitcoin.
Monero also has a relatively small circulating supply under 20 million. Although it does employ minor inflation over time, based on their model, making for a controversial topic.
Currently at around $54 at the time of writing, Monero is at quite a discount from all-time high prices of more than $400.
3 – Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum is another somewhat obvious choice for this year. The project is still the most popular choice for building initial coin offerings (ICOs). According to an ICO report by Suicide Ventures, 87% of ICOs launched their projects on the Ethereum platform as of October last year.
Ethereum is the second highest ranking crypto asset by market cap on CoinMarketCap, at the time of writing, and sits at a major discount from all-time high prices of more than $1,300. Ethereum sits at roughly $152 at time of writing.
Based on price alone, buying Ethereum now roughly is equivalent to buying Ethereum back in May of 2017. A recent CoinDesk article also mentioned Ethereum’s price chart currently looks similar to bitcoin’s chart back in 2015, near the end of the last bear market.
In contrast to potential price upside, however, TechCrunch wrote an interesting article last fall that described a scenario in which Ethereum’s price fell to zero, but the network still succeeded.
4 – Stellar Lumens (XLM) and Ripple’s XRP
Regardless of the centralization debate (mostly regarding XRP), both XLM and XRP are making blockchain application headway in the banking sector.
Ripple, in particular, has made many headlines over the last several months with its RippleNet. Just recently, RippleNet announced 13 new clients.
There is a distinction between Ripple application and parties that actually use the XRP asset. That being said, of the recent 13 new institutional additions to RippleNet, five of them “will use Ripple’s digital asset, XRP, for liquidity when sending customer cross-border payments,” according to a CoinTelegraph report on the subject. It is hard to imagine XRP disappearing at this point. Although some speculate that XRP is still an unregistered security.
XRP is a controversial subject when talking about ideals in crypto. Speaking from a profit perspective, however, XRP is below $0.40 at the time of writing, down from almost $4.
Stellar is also partnered with powerhouse IBM, and XLM is down considerably from its all-time price high.
5 – Hedera HashGraph
Hedera Hashgraph is an interesting project that has yet to hit crypto exchanges for trading. The project differs from blockchain technology. According to Hashgraph’s website, its “platform is lightning fast, fair, and secure and, unlike some blockchain-based platforms, doesn’t require compute-heavy proof-of-work.”
Hashgraph is an interesting project due to its possible potential to scale, unlike many blockchain-based crypto assets which have seen substantial scaling issues thus far.
According to ICODrops, Hashgraph concluded its ICO last August, fairing considerably well when taking into account 2018’s bear market.
One concern regarding Hashgraph, however, may be its possible centralization. One Reddit post several months ago stated, “[t]his thing is barely even a distributed ledger. It is like ripple on steroids in terms of its centralization.”
Still, Hashgraph appears to be a different technology, and it will be interesting to see how the asset plays out if it hits exchanges.
2019 will be an interesting year indeed.
Disclaimer: This author holds BTC, ETH, XMR, NEO, ETHOS, LTC, and a minute small amount of other various altcoins.
*Nothing written is financial, investment, or trading advice whatsoever. Everything was written based solely on the author’s opinions and biases. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making any decisions.
