Back in late 2017, Bitcoin (BTC) was the belle of the cryptocurrency ball. Unless you were living under a rock, you probably heard about its meteoric rise to nearly $20,000 a coin – and the long list of early adopters that became overnight millionaires.
Bitcoin’s massive rally was truly spectacular and a sight to behold, giving birth to a new asset class that straddled the line between commodity and currency. Many investors considered cryptocurrency (and Bitcoin in particular) to be a kind of digitalized gold.
After all, much like Bitcoin, gold occupies a grey area that sits somewhere between commodity and currency. While gold may technically be a commodity, it also behaves more like a monetary asset than anything else. It really isn’t comparable to other commodities, save for its ability to protect investors from inflationary risk – another purported benefit of Bitcoin.
So, while this new “digital gold” was able to capture over 2,000% gains last year during its rise from $900 to almost $20,000, several other newly minted cryptocurrencies were able to achieve even better results.
These new digital currencies, dubbed “altcoins”, were created through Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) where investors traded in sums of their existing cryptocurrency to give life to brand new tokens.
Many of these ICOs fortuitously occurred during crypto’s price explosion last year, rewarding investors with sky-high profits that rivaled even Bitcoin.
Don’t believe me? Just look at OmiseGO, a token that returned an impressive 2,692% for ICO participants after its July 2017 token sale. Or even Neblio, which held its ICO in August and pocketed a much more modest 1,685% ROI for its investors.
Obviously, things haven’t gone as well for Bitcoin in 2018.
But with prices bottoming out yet again and a short uptrend over these last few weeks, we could be entering yet another “perfect storm” for a few upcoming ICOs. All of which would kick off at the start of crypto’s second renaissance.
So, without further ado, let’s take a look at the five next best ICO opportunities you may want to keep a closer eye on:
Uchain- ICO Start: July 10th, 2018
Uchain is an ambitious project that targets the sharing economy, which is merely an economic system where private individuals can share their assets or services for a fee over the internet. Right now, it’s limited to familiar services like Airbnb, but as time goes on and blockchain technology becomes more integrated into our lives, people will become more interconnected than ever before. New start-ups in this space will eventually allow you to rent out virtually anything you own, even your Wi-Fi network when you aren’t using it.
This sharing economy is expected to be worth $520 billion by the end of 2018, and in anticipation, Uchain is establishing an infrastructure blockchain that will serve as the intermediary between parties engaged in rental contracts.
In addition to the “big picture” goals of Uchain’s ICO, the team behind the new token will also allow enterprises the ability to build decentralized applications (Dapps). Uchain’s proprietary currency will be used as the backbone to power the entire operation.
This ICO is exceptionally intriguing because not only is it trying to harness the power of the world’s next significant economic shift, but it already has an exclusive partnership with U-Bicycle – the fourth largest bike sharing platform in the world – as well as strategic partnerships with other transportation sharing services that currently serve over 100 million users combined across 4 continents.
If the Uchain team can pull this off, it could potentially become Ethereum for the sharing economy.
Deepcloud AI - ICO Start: Mid-Late July 2018
In a world dominated by “the cloud”, numerous centralized applications now rely on the services of companies like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services, Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Cloud, and Azure to operate.
While this already well-established industry works very well for serving non-blockchain based apps, it is entirely unsuitable for the next wave of decentralized (blockchain based) applications that will eventually overtake their centralized predecessors.
Deepcloud AI will offer a cloud-basedsolution for running decentralized apps, much like the many existing projects already available (Golem, SONM, and iExec to name a few). However, unlike those other products, the Deepcloud team has developed an AI to elegantly match up developers with the resources they need from network providers.
ICO investors have already bet heavily on decentralized cloud computing in the past, but none of those other solutions enjoy nearly as much of a competitive advantage as Deepcloud AI from a purely technological standpoint.
DxChain - ICO Start: Mid-Late July 2018
DxChain is a project that will combine the power (and benefits inherent to) blockchain technology with “big data” – which is simply a large set of information that requires significant computing power to analyze.
Up until now, finding patterns or trying to process big data has been something reserved only for major corporations. Running big data tasks requires prohibitively expensive computer hardware as well as a wealth of consumer data – both things that are unavailable to small businesses and the average person.
In 2017, oil was overtaken by data as the most sought-after commodity, and through the use of advanced machine learning and a data exchange, DxChain will allow users to have better control of their own information.
That includes buying data, selling data, or analyzing large sets of information (big data) on the DxChain platform. As a means of powering the whole system, the proprietary DX token created during the ICO will be used as the primary method of payment between parties within the network.
ANKR Network- ICO Start: Late July 2018
ANKR Network, much like Deepcloud AI, is working on a solution that offers cloud computing to developers for different types of applications. However, unlike the other cloud-focused ICOs, ANKR will be the first to use what’s called “trusted hardware”.
Trusted hardware is a term used to identify any computer or device that has been certified to perform specific tasks and satisfies a set of pre-determined requirements. While this will limit the amount of hardware available for computing, it also makes the network of devices far more reliable.
While the decentralized cloud computing space may be somewhat congested, ANKR will offer a unique service that could be far more attractive to applications and systems that require consistent performance.
This means that ANKR could be the preferred choice of large-scale, potentially enterprise level applications. Which leads me to the next ICO to watch....
Cognida - ICO Start: July 20th, 2018
Enterprise level applications are large software systems explicitly designed to operate in a corporate environment, like a business or government entity. They are sophisticated, robust, scalable, and more than anything else – critical to a company’s continued success.
Despite being so important and impressive, enterprise applications (EAs) still have one major flaw – security, which is something that blockchain-based decentralized apps (Dapps) have in spades. Because the EAs are centralized, they are much more vulnerable to malicious attacks.
As a result, EA developers have started to incorporate the security benefits that are native to Dapps into their own enterprise level platforms.
In theory, the concept sounds simple. But in practice, it’s much more complicated. Because EAs and Dapps are built on entirely different foundations, sharing information between them can sometimes be like pulling teeth. Companies don’t have an easy way of transacting data between the two types of software, making the conversion to blockchain based solutions cumbersome at best.
That’s where Cognida comes in. Through the use of their third-party service network, companies can leverage the power of Cognida’s cloud services in a user-friendly interface.
By facilitating the conversion of centralized applications into more secure Dapps, Cognida could be the catalyst that pushes corporations all over the world into the future. This would have a major effect on not only how blockchain technology is used, but how a modern large-scale business operates.