Hey everyone. After an exciting start to 2021, I decided to post another article and share my thoughts. Generally, I am a huge advocate of DYOR in crypto space (do your own research). I believe it is a rewarding approach that makes me feel comfortable and confident about my decisions. It also doesn’t make me feel bad for missing out on well performing projects that I was maybe considering, but decided not to invest for whatever reason, because I sticked to my plan and strategy and that is what matters in the long run. There are plenty of ways how I DYOR. You can check out given project Telegram or Discord groups, check what kind of debate flows there (lambos and moons or serious chat), read whitepapers, read road maps, compare road maps with actual achievements in the past, watch first hand YouTube content (avoid mostly paid influencers), check out technical trading data, check Twitter, Facebook and other social sources from team members and many other things.
I dare say, I’m doing a decent job of it, but don’t take my word for it. Check out my article from June 2020:
So I was bragging about Cardano (ADA), CoinMetro (XCM) and ChainLink (LINK) and let’s see the results:
- ADA up from 8c to 36c = x4.5
- LINK up from 4$ to 22$ = x5.5
- XCM up from 3c to 21c = x7.0
We are now just past a huge bull run, which brought BTC over 40000$ before stabilizing at the low 30K. So let’s compare my picks to BTC price growth, which at the time of my previous article was trading at around 10K USD. Today we find it at around 33k USD which adds up to a multiplier of x3.3. I admit, my suggestions were no x50 or x25 miracles, but I did manage to beat BTC with all my picks!
Which brings us to the topic of today. I got a few more undervalued dark horses you might want to check out, so without further ado:
Vectorspace AI (VXV) https://vectorspace.ai/
Whenever I saw the word AI in a crypto project, my breaks would kick in immediately as it was usually just a bunch of hype words and no substance. That is, until I stumbled upon VXV. But let’s start with what AI is. Most of you probably know, AI does not translate to Skynet controlled terminators, but rather a set of sophisticated computer algorithms which contrary to traditional deterministic approaches, also add probabilistic side of things into the mix.
There are many fields in the AI land and VXVs bread and butter is NLP or natural language processing. Plainly said, it is a science of extracting information from large collections of text (or speech). NLP goes hand in hand with big data, and what Vectorspace team does is, use their knowledge of NLP to produce high quality datasets that give alpha (advnatage) to their customers.
I’ll give you an actual example: Remember COVID-19? It probably wouldn’t take a genius to figure out, that big pharma companies stock would rise as they got closer to the development of vaccine. But it takes some fancy NLP and data mining to figure out which seemingly unrelated (but actually correlated) stocks would rise as well. So what they did is analyse a giant amount of scientific articles and other available information to create a correlation matrix of size 500 x 500, columns and rows representing big pharma companies, with matrix values indicating the correlation. Their hand picked basket of stocks from this dataset recorded a 3000% price increase over the course of 2020. This is an advantage companies are more than willing to pay money for.
How does the tokenomics model work? VXV token is used to give you access to a specific data set. In order for interested companies to gain access to that data set, they have to take a position in VXV, and there are some who are already on board: S&P Global among them ( https://www.spglobal.com/en/ ). What’s on the menu in 2021? Ongoing production of datasets, onboarding of more clients and listing on a major exchange for starters.
Price wise, we just saw a mini pump from 30c to 60c after the listing on CoinMetro. At the same time we saw Uniswap liquidity pool maturing, but don’t let that price jump scare you into thinking the pump is over. There are only 30 million coins in circulation with planned buybacks from the company.
KDA, Kadena https://www.kadena.io/
So I want to use Uniswap or maybe Sushiswap. Connecting my Metamask wallet, check, swap a token, check, confirm in my Metamask, chec…WAIT WHAT? 100 bucks for the transaction fee? Are you nuts?
If you ever used Uniswap you probably encountered this problem, related to the limitations of Ethereum blockchain. 2020 saw wide adoption of DEFI and DEXes. This will continue in 2021, no doubt about it, but current blockchains don’t cut it, fact.
Onward to a solution. There have been many attempts to move away from PoW (proof of work) consensus algorithm, but the simple fact remains, PoW is still the only battle tested consensus algorithm. But PoW means low transaction rate per second (tps) right? Wrong! Not if you’re Kadena anyway.
By utilizing a fixed graph approach (inter chain dependency scheme) and parallel chains, they can scale to satisfy even the most demanding scenarios (400k tps? we got you). Check out this link to see how it works and also check out real life blockchain and block mining as it happens. I was talking about DEFI, so I’m obliged to throw out the link to KadenaSwap. Looks familiar?
But hold your horses, we can’t just drop our ETH and BTC, buy KDA and move everything on its chain just to swap some tokens. And you don’t have to! Kadena is working on something called bridges, which allows you to transfer your coins and tokens to KDA platform into a wrapped form (a concept common on Uniswap, but limited only to ETH to create a tokenized version of ETH: wETH). Do I need to emphasize what all this summed up means?
The price aspect on this hidden gem? It started at 30c, dropped all the way to 6c, got pumped to 80c, dwindled back to 13c, and now is slowly but surely getting the attention it needs which is starting to reflect in its price (currently around 20c). Bombs start falling February 18th and just to remind you, ETH was also only worth a cent at some point.
XCM, CoinMetro https://coinmetro.com
This fella just made x7 already and yes I’m throwing it in again. There’s so many reasons, but I’m just gonna write some bullets:
- XCM is an actually used utility token. Its usage grows with adoption and CoinMetro has seen exponential increase in the last 2 months. Their user signups have reached 250–800 new accounts per day in january 2021. They are basically beating their own records on a monthly basics (users, volume,…)
- XCM use cases grow and naturally increase demand for it. (lock in to get higher level services, paying less fees and probably what’s most important… passive income by staking)
- XCM is traded only on CM, this gave them a unique option to set the price floor of the token to 12c: https://coinmetro.com/blog/xcm-liquidity-growth/ which essentially means, if you buy at 15c you can’t drop lower than 12c and that effectively creates an anti-dump protection. This is unheard of.
- CoinMetro is introducing new products monthly (new pairs, staking, copy trading, bond products,…) in order to attract new customers or catch them as they are driven away from other exchanges that don’t care. Yes Kraken, I am looking at you and your inability to scale under load… since 2017!? Or you Bittrex for your super fast support service response times of about a week.
- Just btw, you can find both KDA and VXV on CoinMetro because these guys have a knack for finding good projects. Don’t believe me? They listed, no, they actually helped Parsiq (PRQ) with their initial coin offering, which went from half a cent to 1.4$, currently trading at 1.13$. That’s x280 to ATH. They are constantly on the lookout for good projects with low market caps.
- The level of trust people get from these guys is amazing and it will only fuel their entire ecosystem further, but there’s a good reason for it. The level of transparency on all levels, from support staff all the way up to the CEO is unrivaled. They way they handled extortion incidents and hack attempts should set an example throughout the industry. Show me another company where you can tag the CEO in a Telegram group with a question and he gives you a thorough answer regardless if you ask about company development, response to a hack attempt or a pancake recipe.
Again, don’t take my word for it, join their Telegram group and see what a great, genuinely positive community they created over the last 3 years.
Price prediction: This is an interesting one. We had x7 in the last 40 days, but there was no retracement, people are just not selling, they realize the potential of this beast. With addition of price floor at 12c, this coin basically “only” did +1.5x, so it is still early to jump in. Perhaps most importantly: CEO Kevin Murcko has announced a goal of 1 EUR (1.2$) price for XCM by the end of year. There isn’t a single promise he failed to keep so far that I know of.
Okay, there you have it, 3 dark horses, 3 opportunities to make a buck. Let me know what is your opinion. Time for me to grab a coffee…
