Intro
Currently my portfolio is broken down as follows
As you can see my main holdings are XEM (New Economy Movement), BTC, and SYS (SysCoin) all three of which I think offer amazing potential and/or current functionality which I'll describe why later on. The rest of my portfolio is relatively simple, as I always aim to have at least one whole ETH, XMR, and LTC, as I've found not only is this a good indicator of how the market is going, but they each have the potential for very big value gains.
ARDR was picked simply for profit taking purposes, as I see the potential for some good value growth there. BLOCK on the other hand I choose because I believe in their development team, their goal to provide blockchains as a Platform-as-a-service, and their goal execution. I invested in some ANS/NEO as I find the smart contract platform of NEO to be one of great potential, and ease of use. PING simply because I will occasionally use their CryptoPing bot subscription. HEAT is another major although not as high in value investment of mine which I will touch on briefly.
You might be wondering why I haven't talked about Tezos, and this is because although I have invested a large sum of money into it, the assets aren't yet publicly available so I wouldn't consider it part of my liquid/active portfolio. Despite this, Tezos is the blockchain technology I'm looking forward to the most this year, despite the criticism during their ICO. I absolutely love their functional smart contracting language which is something that I think will make Smart Contract design a lot easier for more people to get into.
XEM/NEM
XEM/NEM is a blockchain technology I have been following with a lot of interest for quite some time, but only recently decided to take the plunge and buy a good bit. The initial reason that I was drawn to XEM/NEM is t hat they use a low-cost and therefore low entry barrier PoI (Proof of Importance) harvesting algorithm, and their corresponding Eigentrust++ solution, and their multi-signature contracts.
Mosaic Asset feature was also another significant factor in drawing me to XEM/NEM as they can be combined with Namespaces, all of which allow for easier construction of blockchain based organizations.
Delegated Harvesting was also something I found cool, allowing people who don't have the ability to have a 24/7 NIS node to do remote harvesting.
In terms of release schedules for XEM/NEM their next major release known as Catapult should be out this fall bringing with it major changes, giving it more credibility among financial institutions, with the ability for transaction reversal.
The whitepaper for catapult can be viewed here https://www.nem.io/catapultwhitepaper.pdf
BTC
I don't think much needs to be said about why I hold BTC. It is the most recognized cryptocurrency, the most resilient, and a great value store. I don't generally hold a large amount of BTC, what I hold I usually divide into two chunks, half for saving/investing, the other half to use for day trading.
SYS
Interestingly enough this was the second cryptocurrency I ever purchased, and is responsible for getting me back into cryptocurrency investment/trading. The first thing that caught my eye about SYS was their partnership with Microsoft and the Azure cloud. Granted this isn't something that is uncommon in the blockchain world, however their involvement with Microsoft appears to be more deeper/important than it is with other blockchains (No evidence other than my assumptions from reading articles and such).
SYSCoin's Blockmarket which is a fully decentralized marketplace equipped with multiple payment options (including BTC), escrow, and encrypted messaging was also one of the main reasons that drove me to invest
Another major aspect of SYS that I think will contribute to it's growth and was the most important factor in me deciding whether to invest or not is the ability for Distributed Certificate Management, to enable secure on-chain transaction of digital certificates of any kind, which will be HUGE in the finance industry. One such example could be decentralized SSL certificate management as opposed to the current method which involves large, centralized entities.
HEAT
This is possibly one of my top 5 most promising investments in terms of potential profits, simply due to it's extremely low entry proof of stake setup, which had me earning $81 a month in PoS rewards, off a $110 investment. I've wrote about this in greater detail in another one of my posts (https://steemit.com/heatledger/@linuxguy/why-i-think-heat-ledger-ltd-is-an-extremely-undervalued-low-cost-entry-proof-of-stake-system-with-high-rewards-and-interesting)
Outro
So there you have it, what I'm holding onto and why. I hope that this was of some help to anyone reading this post, and that maybe it gave you some ideas of additional coins to invest in that you might have not invested in already