Some of you who are reading this are probably hoping and hodling for a miracle, with portfolios in the red by 80% – 90%. Others may be downright giddy with excitement at the prospect of buying bags full of your favorite coins and tokens for lower prices than seemed reasonable to imagine 6 months ago. Perhaps a few fall into both camps.
Whatever the case may be for you, there is plenty to be excited about as an investor in cryptocurrencies in the current market. While prices continue to spiral downward, the state of development in the blockchain industry has never been better.
Now is not the time to get cute and look for quick gains. Now is the time to make contrarian bets and invest in the projects that have legitimate use cases and solve real problems in society. If you feel a strong conviction that cryptocurrencies are the future, then the time is ripe to set yourself up for a massive ROI in that future.
With that being said, this article will present you with information about 10 promising cryptocurrencies to watch in Q3 2018 and beyond. It’s only a start, but hopefully you will do further research and find a few projects that you believe in.
If you want to look back for a review, here are our picks for Q2 2018.
Let’s get started!
Sapien ($SPN)
Project Overview
Sapien is a decentralized social news platform that aims to solve several of the biggest problems with online media today. It uses smart contracts to develop a user reputation system that can combat the fake news that proliferates on centralized social media platforms, while also giving content creators a much bigger slice of the revenue pie than they can get elsewhere.
Importantly, Sapien is also a big proponent of free speech. In today’s politically correct times, we very much need platforms that encourage ideological diversity and open discourse in order to keep society moving forward. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others have all shown an increasing willingness to censor or demonetize contrarian thinkers, and that leaves the door open for platforms like Sapien.
Why You Should Watch SPN
Sapien had numerous noteworthy developments in Q2. The SPN token just recently became available for trading on several exchanges including LAToken, IDEX, and Radar Relay — a DEX built on the 0x protocol.
Additionally, Sapien released mobile apps for Android and iOS to complement the desktop version of the platform. Since launching their Beta program on April 30, the Sapien community has been very active in using the platform, an encouraging sign for the network’s future prospects.
Next up on the roadmap for Sapien in Q3 is to incentivize network effects and revamp the platform’s UI/UX for crypto novices. In other words, Sapien is taking the first steps towards rapidly expand its user base and redesigning the platform in such a way that it can be used by anybody, regardless of their awareness about cryptocurrencies.
This could well be the social news and media platform of the decentralized future, so Q3 is a great time to jump on board before it takes off.
CoinJanitor ($JAN)
Project Overview
It’s an undeniable fact that the cryptocurrency market is oversaturated with scams and vaporware from the top all the way down to the bottom. CoinJanitor is a new project that addresses that issue by buying out failed coins and decommissioning dormant blockchains.
The project’s aim is to convert assets that would otherwise go to waste into tools with real utility that improves the cryptocurrency ecosystem. These assets include the blockchains themselves, but also marketing and other technological assets such as social media accounts and unreleased code.
Why You Should Watch JAN
The CoinJanitor ICO was completed in May, successfully raising $2.5 million. With those funds, the team can now begin buying out micro-cap (< $50k) coins that have been inactive for more than 2 years, of which there are many.
And they won’t be going at it alone, as CoinJanitor recently partnered with Deadcoins.com, the largest online database of inactive cryptocurrencies.
Each time CoinJanitor buys out a dead coin, the investors who were left holding those coins will receive JAN tokens. This process not only unlocks trapped value at the bottom of the market, it also serves as a fantastic growth mechanism for expanding the CoinJantitor community of token holders.
As more and more dead coin holders are converted into JAN holders over time, it will create a powerful network effect and lead to positive price pressure for JAN as demand grows and available supply shrinks.
Investing in JAN isn’t going to make you rich immediately in Q3, but it’s an interesting project with a lot of long-term upside. Most of all, it serves a valuable function for the greater cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Cryptyk ($CTK)
Project Overview
Cryptyk is a decentralized cloud storage and cyber security platform. It employs a hybrid blockchain solution to shut off all 5 of the major attack vectors that hackers have been using to exploit centralized cloud storage platforms on a regular basis for years.
There are numerous benefits of decentralized cloud storage, all of which lead us to believe that it will be the default data storage method of the future for businesses such as banks, legal firms, insurance companies, government organizations, and others who deal with confidential data.
Cryptyk reduces the attack surface hackers can try to exploit by more than 99% relative to centralized platforms, and does so while still having access latency of 200 milliseconds, enabling real-time file collaboration.
Why You Should Watch CTK
Cryptyk is the 5th notable project to enter the decentralized cloud storage market. What sets them apart from the other 4 (Siacoin, Filecoin, Storj, and MaidSafe) is that they can compete with centralized platforms for the big enterprise cloud storage customers.
To put it another way, Siacoin, Filecoin, Storj, and MaidSafe are all competing with each other for business from individuals and small businesses, while Cryptyk stands alone as the only decentralized cloud storage solution that can serve the needs of large businesses.
As a utility token with sound token economics, CTK can see rapid and sustainable growth when enterprise customers begin using Cryptyk’s cloud storage platform. That helps separate it from security tokens that are more susceptible to the being influenced by market sentiment.
The CTK public token sale will be launched on July 18 and continue until August 31, or until the $25 million hard cap is met. It’s shaping up to be one of the best upcoming ICOs in Q3, and makes Cryptyk a project well worth watching during the months to come.
Augur ($REP)
Project Overview
Augur is an open-source, decentralized oracle and prediction market platform built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. The basic idea behind prediction markets is that you can harness the wisdom of the crowd to come up with more accurate forecasting of future event outcomes than is possible from individuals or even small groups of experts.
In order to make the prediction market decentralized, Augur incentivizes REP (Reputation) token holders to report on the outcomes of real-life events. If they report honestly, they earn more REP as a reward. If they are dishonest, they’ll lose REP.
By distributing outcome reporting, Augur is able to operate at lower cost than centralized platforms, meaning that successful predictions can earn higher payouts for the platform’s users. Not only that, but the payouts are controlled by smart contracts so that they are transparent, trustless, and automatic.
Why You Should Watch REP
The idea for Augur was first conceived in 2014, so it is one of the older blockchain projects out there. However, prediction markets and oracles are a highly complicated niche, and development has been a grind.
On July 9, Augur’s smart contracts will at long last be deployed to the Ethereum mainnet. This will be a monumental moment for the Augur community, the Ethereum community, and the decentralized ecosystem at large. Prediction markets are one of the most promising potential applications for blockchain technology, and that makes Augur an extremely intriguing project to watch in Q3 as years of work finally come to fruition.
For more details about Augur, you can read our project overview: What is Augur?
Colu ($CLN)
Project Overview
Founded in 2012 in the startup-rich city of Tel Aviv, Israel, Colu has the ambitious goal of driving global economic change by building decentralized financial infrastructure from the local level on up. Using a simple digital wallet and a concept called community currency, Colu empowers independent local businesses and helps bring about a more inclusive and transparent monetary system wherever it is used.
Some of the first community currencies were launched as a sort of digital fiat in cities including Tel Aviv and Haifa in Israel, as well as London and Liverpool in the UK. These 4 communities account for greater than 150,000 happy users of Colu already.
But with Colu moving their network to the blockchain and enabling the creation of new community currencies in the form of Ethereum ERC-20 tokens, it will soon be possible for communities all over the globe to bolster their local economy by launching their very own community currencies on the Colu Local Network.
Why You Should Watch CLN
Although Colu has been around for over half a decade, it has just recently begun to really pick up steem. The Colu user base has grown by over 1700% since January 2017, while the CLN crowdsale last February successfully raised nearly $20 million. With that capital secured, Colu now has the means to expand its enterprise across the globe and establish new community currencies in untapped markets.
From a big picture perspective, community-focused cryptocurrency projects can play an important role in achieving mass adoption. For one thing, it appeals to our tribal instincts and instills a sense of pride in users who can support small businesses in their hometowns and find all sorts of discounts and special deals in the process.
On top of that, Colu’s digital wallet application seamlessly bridges the gap between laypeople and the cryptocurrency world by offering a simple user interface that works the same way with cryptocurrencies as it does with traditional fiat.
Because it enables people to use cryptocurrencies in their everyday lives and realize the benefits of doing so without requiring them to have any background knowledge or tech-savviness, Colu’s potential user base includes just about everybody with a mobile phone.
It will be very interesting to see how much growth Colu achieves now that they are able to fully utilize the advantages of Ethereum’s smart contract capabilities. For that reason, it’s worth keeping a close eye on the project in Q3 and beyond.
Ontology ($ONT)
Project Overview
You’ve no doubt heard of Ontology already, as it has been making headlines non-stop in 2018 on its way to a $1 billion market cap.
Ontology is a high-performance public multi-chain focused on distributing trust and creating an interoperable blockchain ecosystem. It is designed to serve the needs of both government institutions and businesses, with private chains and consortium chains that all connect to the public Ontology blockchain.
There is no shortage of things going on with this project, so we recommend that you read our overview What is Ontology?, if you aren’t already familiar with it.
Why You Should Watch ONT
Ontology launched its mainnet on June 30, the final day of Q2. Considering how well ONT has performed while the market has otherwise been bearish, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see a dip in value to start off Q3 as has occurred for other cryptocurrencies following their mainnet launches.
That being said, the team should have no trouble keeping enthusiasm about the project high in the months ahead. That’s because Ontology has a very ambitious roadmap for the remainder of 2018, including the development of many new technological features.
There’s a distributed data exchange marketplace (DDXF) for trustworthy digital ID verification, a cross-chain interoperability protocol to enable efficient and secure data sharing between blockchains, a sharding protocol for scalability, plus a whole lot more.
A large market cap is no guarantee of success or even competence, but Ontology’s meteoric rise up the MC ranks makes it all the more interesting to watch how their mainnet launch and other developments play out in Q3.
Skycoin ($SKY)
Project Overview
Unlike the other projects discussed here, Skycoin has made its way into this article because of negative news rather than positive. (More on that in a moment.)
Skycoin was founded way back in 2013 as one of the original platform cryptocurrencies. With up to 300 transactions per second and just a 2 second transaction time, plus a unique consensus algorithm, Obelisk, which is non-energy intensive and resistant to 51% attacks, the Sky platform is well-suited to support a robust collection of applications built on top of it.
The platform’s flagship project, Skywire, is decentralizing internet access and gradually eliminate our dependance on internet service providers (ISPs). Individuals are incentivized to run nodes in the mesh network in order to earn SKY, while users can pay for exactly the amount of bandwidth they consume rather than the often overpriced monthly fees that ISPs traditionally charge.
Why You Should Watch SKY
As alluded to above, there has been some negative news about Skycoin recently. Members of the Shanghai Skycoin Chinese Community Operation Team apparently kidnapped, threatened, beat, and robbed the project’s co-founder and his wife.
The full story is difficult to even wrap your head around, but its impact on SKY’s market value has been quite clear.
So why does Skycoin make the list of promising cryptocurrencies to watch in Q3?
The recent events involving Skycoin team and community members in China are the very definition of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Nothing has changed about the project’s fundamentals and, in fact, Skycoin’s digital wallet security proved its resiliency in the whole ordeal considering that the attackers were only able to steal some 18.88 BTC and 6,466 SKY – significant but far less damage than was possible.
Having lived in China for a brief time, I can personally attest to the potential that Skywire has in improving internet infrastructure. VPNs and Tor Browser are about the only ways to access the Western websites on the ‘world-wide’ web in China, and they are slow and inconvenient, not to mention unreliable.
Skywire can provide a superior alternative that better connects internet users in China with the rest of the world, while at the same time providing necessary competition for ISPs elsewhere.
If that does indeed come to fruition, the economic ramifications would be substantial and widespread. SKY is the currency that would be used to facilitate that progress, and that’s only one application on the Skycoin platform.
All of that is not to say that you should invest in SKY. The probability of failure is still high, as with any young business. However, the huge price drops as a result of all this recent drama present a mouthwatering opportunity to go against the grain and buy low for anybody who believes in the project’s underlying technology.
Decred ($DCR)
Project Overview
Decred is unquestionably the cryptocurrency market leader when it comes to blockchain governance. Founded by former Bitcoin developers at a time when the block size debate was just beginning to heat up, Decred is a sustainable solution to not just the scalability problem so many projects face today, but to unknown problems that may arise down the line.
You see, the rate of technological change in modern society is constantly accelerating. As a consequence, it is the projects that can evolve and grow with the market that are most likely to sit atop it years and even decades down the line. Decred’s governance is its standout feature because with strong governance, the possibilities for other features are endless.
Why You Should Watch DCR
Very recent times excluded, Decred has been one of the best performing cryptocurrencies during the 2018 bear market.
As Decred developer Luke Powell explained in a twitter thread, Decred contractors send invoices denominated in USD and get paid in DCR. The result of this dynamic is that developers are incentivized to work more during a bear market because they are earning a higher rate in terms of DCR.
In the short-term, marketing seems to influence price more strongly than any other factors. But in the long-term, it’s the development team and the project community that will determine a coin’s success.
There are plenty of reasons why you should keep an eye on Decred in Q3, but biggest of them are the same reasons that you should keep an eye on Decred always. That is: best-in-class governance and therefore adaptability, a team of motivated and talented developers, and a knowledgeable community that actually has a say in the project’s future development.
OriginTrail ($TRAC)
Project Overview
OriginTrail is a promising blockchain startup in the supply chain management niche. With its decentralized platform, business can efficiently process, store, and share data in a secure and transparent manner. This allows businesses to greatly reduce there operating costs.
What started in 2013 as a simple system for tracking and selling meat, dairy, and produce has now evolved into a full-fledged optimization solution for businesses in industries that include IoT, e-commerce, logistics, and even forensics.
Why You Should Watch TRAC
No general list of 10 promising cryptocurrency projects should be without at least one supply chain project, as it is one of blockchain use cases that can have the largest immediate impact.
OriginTrail is the obvious choice for this list because of the rapid progress they have been making on their roadmap and the major events they have coming up in Q3.
The first beta version of the OriginTrail testnet, Apollo, was released just a couple of days ago on June 29th. Soon after the launch, there will be the 1st open call for use-cases, a process in which TRAC token holders can vote via a smart contract for up to 10 different projects they want to see developed in the future.
Not ones to waste time, the OriginTrail team plans to launch their decentralized network in Q3, along with a 2nd open call for voting on use-cases, a protocol update with additional standards for IoT, and the establishment of new offices in the United States that will help with the formation of valuable business partnerships in the western hemisphere. That’s in addition to their existing offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
VeChain and WaltonChain tend to get most of the buzz when it comes to supply chain blockchains, but OriginTrail appears undervalued in comparison and might well force their way into the conversation in the months ahead.
0x Protocol ($ZRX)
Project Overview
0x is a open-source protocol that can be used by anybody to create decentralized exchange functionality for ERC-20 tokens. 0x uses off-chain order relays with on-chain settlement, making it fast and scalable while maintaining the trustlessness of the Ethereum blockchain.
The full list of dapps and relayers that are using 0x Protocol has been steadily growing since the project went live in mid-2017. Augur and Request Network are some notable inclusions on the list of dapps, while Radar Relay — mentioned earlier as one of the exchanges that supports SPN — is a top relayer along with Ethfinex and several others.
The 0x protocol is free to use if you know the other party involved in the trade, but relayers charge a fee in ZRX for hosting order books and matching buyers with sellers.
Why You Should Watch ZRX
There are several reasons to watch 0x protocol that are worth considering.
0x already has a functional product that is being used by over 30 dapps and relayers, putting it a step ahead of the majority of new projects out there that are still vaporware. And as the 0x development team works to lower the barrier of entry for dapps and relayers to build on the protocol, its utility (and the value of ZRX) stand to continue increasing over time.
Moreover, there are 2 big possibilities to watch out for in the coming months that could lead to a big surge for ZRX. One is the possibility that the 0x community might vote to make 0x Protocol compatible with blockchains besides Ethereum in the future. This could result in a substantial rise in adoption of the protocol and ZRX, as projects throughout the blockchain industry aim to increase the use of decentralized exchanges and capture their benefits.
The other possibility that’s worth monitoring is that of Coinbase adding ZRX to their exchange. There are some strong connections between 0x and Coinbase, including Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam being an advisor to 0x. This is pure speculation and has been out there for several months, but it’s nonetheless noteworthy considering the potential impact being added to Coinbase could have for both adoption and token value.
Related: Top 10 ICOs to Watch in Q3 2018
