Projects you (probably) won’t have heard of
This article was first published on FlatOutCrypto on the 24th April. Please follow @flatoutcrypto if you enjoyed this article
The market is recovering, green arrows are everywhere and investors are looking for a fresh batch of projects they can dump their money into. With that in mind, here are some projects most won’t have heard of — although the first two are admittedly now picking up traction in the various crypto subreddits/Twitter feeds.
Auctus
Auctus is an Ethereum based retirement plan platform which enables users to create portfolios comprising both traditional and crypto assets. It aims to cut out the middleman to reduce costs, as well as provide savers with greater transparency and power over their holdings. It will eventually tokenise traditional assets so that they can be bought/sold on the platform, as well as virtually upload existing retirement plans so that all savings can be seen in one place.
Auctus also aims to provide robo advisory services as well as peer recommendations and automated allocations/rebalancing. The AUC token is required to be held in escrow by users to access the system, with all transactions on the marketplace also made in AUC.
The project only just completed its ICO last week, raising $3.8m and thus making it a fairly easy contribution. It launched for trading on IDEX at the perfect time as markets began to recover, going 3x vs ETH in the first 24 hours of trading before subsequently retreating to 2x. The current market cap remains low ($12m) for what is an above average project.
The team has already launched its alpha platform and has a beta release scheduled for Q3. It is partnered with other projects in the Ethereum ecosystem such as Ethfinex, Ripio, Request Network, 0x, Melonport, Bluzelle and Aragon. This will bring additional exposure, and all are well respected projects.
I doubt Auctus will see long term adoption and certainly not quickly (is there a more risk averse product than pensions to target?) but I bought at ICO and will continue to hold as I think it is a fairly safe bet it will continue to rise vs ETH in the coming weeks. It is only available in real volume on IDEX (and volume has been substantial, constantly above $1m per day since launch and as such one of the most popular tokens on the site) so expect any exchange listing to boost prices. I am targeting $40–50m market cap in the coming months.
TE-Food
Ok, I’m cheating here with this one as TE-Food is not exactly unknown for anyone closely following crypto. It is another entrant into the now congested supply chain market, focusing specifically on covering food from ‘farm to table’.
TE-Food was started in 2016 and claims to serve 6,000 businesses that in turn cover 34m people, with 400,000 transactions per day. This includes tracking 12,000 pigs, 200,000 chickens and 2.5m eggs daily. They currently operate in Vietnam but are aiming to expand to 19 countries by 2019.
The team conducted their ICO (which raised $19m) to move to a blockchain based solution, citing the same reasons as usual (transparency, immutability etc).
TE-Food aims to check quality at every stage of the food processing supply chain
I started buying TFD at 0.00006 on the ratio and continued to buy as it slumped to 0.00004 recently. It has since recovered to 0.000065 on the ratio, but the recent burst of buying has only brought it back to its ICO raise of $19m.
Like Auctus, it is only really tradeable on IDEX at present. I can see TFD getting listed on larger exchanges moving forward and think it is undervalued vs other supply chain competitors when considering the business that is already built to support it moving forward. Businesses which are able to transition existing companies to their own solution are less of a risk long term in terms of getting adoption.
I am expecting TFD to get to c. $50m market cap by May.
Qchain
Now we get into the weeds.
Not even listed on CoinMarketCap due to lack of trading volume, Qchain aimed to raise $17m at ICO but fell far short and has suffered badly since launch. 1 ETH at ICO would buy 4000 EQC; that same 1 ETH would now obtain over 25,000 (taking into account ETH’s own loss vs $ since launch and ICO investors are over 90% down).
The project is intended to appeal to marketers, with the team building a platform for digital advertisers, content publishers and internet users. It aims to solve the issues of adblockers and the apathy towards internet advertising in general to create an adverts marketplace.
I’m not going to go too deep into the project, but I would note the team’s communication has been consistent and far better than much larger projects — especially unusual for such a small project. It is similar in some respects to Basic Attention Token (BAT) but is aiming more at sponsored content/native advertising which provides them with a different angle.
I think there are two points of interest with Qchain.
- It operates on both Ethereum and NEM (another blockchain platform). There are very few projects on NEM and as such there is the potential for Qchain to distinguish itself in a way that is very hard on the much more crowded Ethereum.
- The market cap is c. $800k for EQC (the Ethereum based chain)
Qchain is too much of a risk to put much more than a small (1% or less) portion of your portfolio into as it is one of many projects that could disappear without a trace given the lack of exchanges or CoinMarketCap listing. However, it offers great upside in the event it does pick up traction.
In any event, expect to hold this for a while — it likely won’t be good for a quick flip.
Masari
Privacy coins are one of the most immediately obvious uses cryptoassets have. Masari is a fork of Monero, the pre-eminent privacy coin, and is starting to pick up traction. In recent weeks it has already seen substantial growth (so pick your entry point carefully), having gone 4x.
It is another that is unlisted on CoinMarketCap but trading volumes are near the $100k mark required for listing. It achieved the attention of Riccardo ‘fluffypony’ Spagni, the Monero lead developer, and as such seems well placed to be the little brother equivalent to Monero that Litecoin is to Bitcoin. I thought Sumokoin might fulfil this role, but the ill will between the two teams now seems to have ended any hope of that.
I’m not going to go into the differences between Monero and Masari as it’s beyond the scope of this article, but essentially the project aims to implement features that Monero (a much larger project which has to be more cautious) is unable to do as quickly.
I had $100m as my target for Sumokoin and think Masari could reach a similar point if it continues on this trajectory — but again, it could take a while.
HealthyWormCoin
I have decided that my fifth choice deserves an article of its own so instead I thought I’d pick a random coin off CoinMarketCap’s nether regions. That coin is HealthyWormCoin (WORM).
The project appears to be the brainchild of someone who runs a worm shop, with the site offering live superworms and superworm beetles for sale. The project is based in Wisconsin, USA and has a no limit order size with just $5 shipping.
I have literally no idea what WORM is used for (I did look but could find no explanation), but if you are in the rather unusual venn diagram of someone who both loves crypto and loves buying worms AND wants a token to reflect that then WORM might well be for you.
Poured them all out after sifting out the food they came with so I could count them. Ordered 100 and received 120, with not a SINGLE dead worm, which is amazing! Whenever I buy from the pet store, there are several dead, no matter how good they look when you buy them, they don’t last.
— Another happy customer of HealthyWorm.com
With a market cap of $86k and a daily trading volume of $22 WORM is surely primed for an imminent breakout, coming off previous highs of $400k and $20k daily trading volume (seriously, who is trading $20k worth of this stuff?).
I also now feel slightly sick having being subjected to so many pictures of worms and beetles.
Disclaimer: I hold AUC, TFD, MSR and EQC. I can safely say I do not hold and have no intention to buy WORM.
