🥇Next 5 Crypto Currencies and their smashing returns! [Top 10 Series]

What! There is more than Bitcoin & Ethereum?? Get primed on Ripple (XRP), DogeCoin (DOGE), Polkadot (DOT), USD Coin (USDC), Solana (SOL)

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Coinmonks

9 min readAug 30, 2021

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What’s up with the Crypto markets?

Since I wrote my last article on the Top 5 cryptocurrencies (21 days back), the Cryptocurrency Market cap has jumped from $1.6T to $2.1Trillion. That’s an amazing 30% return in 21 days (not considering some coins that have doubled or tripled). During the same time, the high growth stock portfolio of US stocks has gone down 15% 🥺🥶

As the Chinese saying goes “May you live in interesting times”

In this article, I look at the “Next 5 Crypto Currencies”. If you haven’t read my earlier article 🥇Top 5 Crypto Currencies and their smashing returns! — now would be a good time to find out more about them. And if you are new to this space or my substack, you can read a few of the starter articles on:

Ok, So we have more than 11,000 tokens, you don’t know much beyond Bitcoin & Ethereum. Let's look at numbers 6 to 10 covering Ripple (XRP), DogeCoin (DOGE), Polkadot (DOT), USD Coin (USDC), Solana (SOL)

This is not meant to be deep dive into these projects but an initial primer to get you started on understanding what they are. If you decide to part with your hard-earned money because of what you read here, I would suggest “Do your own research” first.

6. Ripple (XRP) — Mkt Cap $59Bn

Ripple is a Blockchain technology that acts as both a crypto currency and a digital payment network for financial transactions. It was first released in 2012. It is a global payment network and has major banks and financial services institutions as its customers. The Token XRP is used to help with quick conversion between different currencies. What’s interesting about this project is that it allows seamless transfer of money in any form FIAT or Crypto. So similar to how the FX markets allow seamless transfer between currency pairs USDSGD (USD to Singapore dollar), EURCAD (Euro to Canadian Dollar) the ripple network with its participant of financial providers makes it easy to simply transfer BTCSGD, ETHCAD

Rather than use Proof of work-based mining, Ripple uses a consensus mechanism, based on a group of bank-owned servers (authorized participants) to confirm transactions. In comparison to Bitcoin, Ripple transactions use less energy, are confirmed faster, and cost lesser.

Unfortunately, Ripple has been riddled with legal challenges — a mixture of the Token economics and the how the company was structured. SEC filed a suit against Ripple and its current & former CEOs, claiming that selling XRP constituted offering unregistered security — essentially an illegal IPO.

As the case drags on with no clear resolution yet in sight, Ripple’s legal woes have become representative of the murky regulation enveloping digital currency, reflecting the mismatch between laws largely developed during the Great Depression and today’s fast-growing fintech & crypto ecosystem. While opinions differ on whether the SEC has a strong case against Ripple, almost everyone agrees that the underlying problem is a lack of clarity over how cryptocurrency can be regulated in ways that don’t sabotage the industry or unfairly target companies and investors who may have had little way of knowing they were running afoul of regulators

If you are interested in a more detailed history of Ripple and some of the challenges with its Tokenomics check out this great article on Reddit.

7. Doge (DOGE) — Mkt Cap $42Bn

I know! I know! There are lots of views on Doge — the good, the bad & the ugly. However, one thing is given, when something manages to have a market cap of $42Bn it does deserve to be understood.

So what is Doge. It is a peer-to-peer open-source cryptocurrency started in 2013 by Jackson Palmer & Billy Markus. It started as a joke based on a popular meme featuring a Shiba Inu (Japanese dog breed). The Doge blockchain has value and its underlying technology is derived from Litecoin (another cryptocurrency)

Dogecoin has a loyal community of supporters who trade it and use it as a tipping currency for social media content on Twitter & Reddit.

It moved into the limelight recently with Elon Musk tweeting about it and the potential anticipation of announcements when he was to appear on Saturday Night Live show. In a typical “Buy the rumor, sell the news” many people traded it successfully and filled their coffers.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Launching An Actual Dogecoin Mission To The Moon In 2022

In more recent news the Dogecoin Foundation Is Back With Elon Musk’s Adviser and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin

It’s hard to say how DogeCoin will play out in the future, but an interesting way to look at it is — “it is a very loyal customer base, that is looking for a product to be solved to them”. As thought leaders like Vatalik get involved in the project they can really craft the product offering of what can be developed — many more use cases to come ahead.

8. PolkaDot (DOT) — Mkt Cap $28Bn

In the crypto world, there are many Blockchains — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardona, Solana etc. They don’t really talk to each other or exchange information with each other. Wouldn’t it make sense to have some common interface for them to interact? Concept of Interoperability

Enter — PolkaDot 😎. It's like a bridge for Blockchains

Polkadot is a sharded bridge-like protocol, which focuses on maintaining communication, value transfer, and pooling the security of blockchains. It allows blockchains to operate with each other in a parallel manner by unifying them into one network. The unification compounds the strengths of different blockchains and mitigates their weaknesses.

If you are wanting to understand more details — Collators, Bridges, Staking Rewards, etc this is a great article to deep-dive.

9. USD Coin (USDC) — Mkt Cap $27Bn

Let’s first understand 2 terms:

Fiat Money is a government-backed currency that we use in our daily lives. Each country typically issues its own fiat currency and mandates it as legal tender.
Stable Coin is a crypto equivalent of the designated fiat currency, where it is meant to mimic the price of the fiat currency & external reference it is pegged to. They are not subject to price volatility in the same way that traditional cryptocurrencies are. If it is the same then why do you need a stable coin? Well, that is easy, because it gives you all the benefits of a cryptocurrency — fast & cheap to transfer, fractionalization etc.

USD Coin (USDC) is a digital stable coin that is pegged to the United States dollar and runs on the Ethereum, Stellar, Algorand, and Solana blockchains, as well as on the Hedera Hashgraph system. USD Coin is managed by a consortium called Centre, which was founded by Circle and includes members from the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Bitcoin mining company Bitmain, an investor in Circle.

Circle claims that each USDC is backed by a dollar held in reserve, or by other “approved investments”, though these are not detailed.

USDC is issued by regulated financial institutions, backed by fully reserved assets, redeemable on a 1:1 basis for US dollars, and governed by Centre, a membership-based consortium that sets technical, policy, and financial standards for stablecoins.

Remember Stable coins are simply crypto tokens that are meant to allow investors to hold money in Pegged currencies such as USD without converting to FIAT. These stable coins appreciate in value like other cryptocurrencies.

10. Solana (SOL) — Mkt Cap $23Bn

Solana is a web-scale blockchain that provides fast, secure, decentralized apps and marketplaces. It is currently the fastest blockchain network that supports 50,000+ TPS (Transactions per second) and 400 ms Block time. The system is able to support an upper bound of 710,000 TPS on a standard gigabit network and 28.4 million TPS on a 40-gigabit network — in simple English — there is more room to grow and it can get faster than what it is

Unlike Bitcoin which uses PoW (Proof of Work) — lots of processing and electricity to show that you did the work and write the next block, Solana uses a Proof of History method (innovated by Solana). With Proof of History, you are able to create historical records that prove that an event occurs during a specific moment in time.

Check out this article if you want to read more technical things about solana.

So this is a great technology, with lots of projects and many developers working on it. Did any of this help in the price returns for this token? Another rhetorical question 😂😂. Of course the answer is “YES”. I had take out my calculator to do the math.

In 12 months, it returned 2,445X — going from $9M in market cap to $22Bn. An investment of $1,000 in Solana 12 months back would be worth $2.4Million today.😱😱

Some of my earlier posts if you have not read them yet

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🚨Big Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. I am not an investment advisor. This information is meant to be for educational purposes. Please do your own research before you decide to invest your hard-earned money. If you are unsure seek help from a professional financial advisor who can understand the full breadth of your financial needs & commitments to advise you on what you should do.