A look at three cryptocurrencies that show tons of promise. 
June 2017 has been a wild month for cryptocurrency. First, Bancor set the industry record for the largest-ever ICO at just over $150 million. A week later, Status.im (SNT) raised $275 million in under 3 hours during its ICO, contributing to an Ethereum “flash crash.”
Tezos (tez)
Tezos could theoretically have all the abilities of Ethereum—but in addition, it’s switching straight to proof-of-stake,” said Hendren. “The idea behind proof-of-stake is that it’s much less energy and time intensive, which would lead to faster transactions at a lower cost.”Tezos allows for a much easier way to upgrade and manage the system and insure that it has constant upgrades,” said Hendren. “If you’ve been following Bitcoin and Ethereum, a big problem they’ve been having is how they go about upgrading. With Tezos, if you join part of that system, there’ll be a periodic vote to determine if they’re going to upgrade the system, and if so, what they’re going to upgrade it to—this is a massive simplification of it.
Without a doubt, the name that’s hot on every crypto-enthusiast’s lips this month is Tezos, “a new decentralized blockchain that governs itself by establishing a true digital commonwealth.” With its ICO occurring July 1 (yep, that’s tomorrow), the buzz of speculation is inescapable. Jeremy Epstein of Never Stop Marketing recently heralded its ICO as the “Netscape of the blockchain”—in other words, the ICO that inflates the blockchain bubble by capturing the attention of the broader public. Naysayers point out that, while the ethos of Tezos is sound, it won’t be able to hit critical mass in the face of a stronger and more established competitor. Proponents cite its robust security, capability to scale, and emphasis on true decentralization as natural next steps in the evolution of the ideas laid out (and arguably, confirmed) by Ethereum.
“Tezos could theoretically have all the abilities of Ethereum—but in addition, it’s switching straight to proof-of-stake,” said Hendren. “The idea behind proof-of-stake is that it’s much less energy and time intensive, which would lead to faster transactions at a lower cost.”
By launching the system with a proof-of-stake model from the onset, Tezos could sidestep some of the growing pains that have faced Ethereum. Furthermore, the governance system Tezos has built into its system gives it the capability to grow over time.
“Tezos allows for a much easier way to upgrade and manage the system and insure that it has constant upgrades,” said Hendren. “If you’ve been following Bitcoin and Ethereum, a big problem they’ve been having is how they go about upgrading. With Tezos, if you join part of that system, there’ll be a periodic vote to determine if they’re going to upgrade the system, and if so, what they’re going to upgrade it to—this is a massive simplification of it—but if a certain quorum is met and a vote passes, the entire system upgrades.”
The Golem Project (GNT)
The whole idea behind GNT is it allows you to sell your processing power,” said Hendren. “That basically means that you as an individual—if you have, say, any laptop that you aren’t using—you can sell your laptop as a server and make money from it. So you end up with this massive distributed computing network; it basically turns into the world’s largest supercomputer in a decentralized format. I think that is a very powerful idea that has a lot of potential.”
Golem purports to be the “new way the Internet will work,” and when you start to look under the hood, you realize how and why they can make such a bold claim. (And if you’ve kept up with the latest season of Silicon Valley, it’ll sound eerily familiar).
GNT has already ICOed, but will entering its Alpha in very short time (very likely this month)—and that Alpha is aiming to make high-intensity computing tasks like animation and CGI rendering much easier.
“Their Alpha will allow you to do CGI rendering and other animation rendering on their Golem network, potentially at a much cheaper cost than normal,” said Hendren. “And that’s going to be released very soon—making it something to watch right now. There’s a very high chance that GNT could gain a lot of value.”
MaidSafe (MAID)
On the flipside of the computing equation, MaidSafe offers users the chance to sell their computer’s storage on the network.
“MaidSafe allows you to safely secure your assets on a distributed network and distributed applications,” said Hendren. “So it’s similar to Golem but it’s more set up for data storage than it is for processing, and that is also a very useful, powerful idea.”
The idea here is that there’s tons of storage going to waste right now, and MaidSafe lets users “sell” this storage the same way one might rent out their apartment on Airbnb.
“If you have a laptop, you can sell your storage space on this network,” said Hendren. “This is a simplified version, but: I have a laptop in my room I’m not using at the moment
SolarCoin Is A Cryptocurrency Earned By Generating Solar Electricity
Instead of a digitally “mined” product, this cryptocurrency’s proof of work happens in the physical world, and those who have photovoltaic arrays can earn SolarCoin just for generating solar electricity. It’s essentially a global solar rewards program, and is designed to help incentivize more solar electricity production, while also serving as a lower-carbon cryptocurrency than Bitcoin and similar alternative currencies.
We initially covered SolarCoin in 2014, right after it launched, and since then, the project has rewarded more than 10,000 solar installations for their electricity generation (totaling somewhere north of 200 megawatts). [As a side note, it’s actually somewhat surprising to me that the number is only 10,000 solar generators, considering that the currency is granted essentially for free to “any solar producer” that gets verified.
Cryptocurrencies Not the Only Assets to Reach Heights
It may be important to note, however, that digital currencies are not the only assets which have seen gains to record levels in recent months. The returns on the leading cryptocurrencies so far in 2017 have been unparalleled in other areas, but other asset classes have also made impressive gains. Nasdaq and S&P 500 indices are at record levels, despite the widespread uncertainty surrounding global markets. At the same time, housing prices seem to have mostly recovered from an earlier burst.
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