When you combine a great team, strategy, technology, product-to-market fit and track record of execution, you’ve got the ingredients for a great success. In reviewing a number of cryptocurrencies to include in our groups fund, part of my due diligence process involves making sure that cryptocurrency groups qualify in at least 4 out of 5 on this list:
- Team
- Strategy
- Technology
- Product-to-Market fit
- Track Record of Execution
When it comes to meeting the criteria above, there should be few exceptions. Fundamental questions arise around each of these points such as:
Team
How long have the team members known one another? Have they worked together in the past? If so, for what period of time and through what kinds of circumstances?
Strategy
Do they have a well thought out strategy? Is their strategy too similar to that of their competitors. Do they know who their competitors are?
Technology
Is their technology unique or hard to duplicate? Is their approach scalable? Do they have any ‘technical debt’?
Product-to-Market fit
Since most early cryptocurrency groups are operating with a whitepaper alone, you’ll most likely have to do your own product-to-market fit for them. If they have a working product, ask them to see any customer feedback they can share.
Track Record of Execution
Does the team or any of its members have a track record that shows they’ve accomplished or executed anything to completion in the past? If so, how was it received? What was the projects impact, level of innovation and creativity?
Here are a select group of cryptocurrencies that meet most of the criteria mentioned above and that might also be worth positioning in sooner than later before they list on larger exchanges:
Quant (Exchange IDEX: QNT) Current Price: $1.24
Site: https://www.quant.network/our-technology/
From their site: “Quant Networks solutions help healthcare organisations by limiting the complexity of adopting blockchain technology.”
That quote is already sets the tone for a valuable crypto. The most common problem with user adoption in crypto is the complexity. It really is just too complicated for the average non-technical person to jump through all the hoops to trade and invest in crypto. Quant is here to solve that!
They also intend to advance science which is another significant indicator that QNT is a high quality crypto: “This in turn will improve their operational inefficiencies, so they can instead focus on what truly matters — helping patients and advancing science.”
QNT has also recently joined the the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium (GLBC), composed of more than 100 large companies, law firms, software companies and universities focused on developing standards and compliance guidelines for blockchain and smart contract technologies in the business of law. More on this here.
Given Quant’s reasonable total supply of 45M, our firm see’s Quant as one of the top 10 runners of this year. Time to load up!
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Vectorspace (Exchange IDEX-only: VXV) Current Price: $0.45c
Site: https://vectorspace.ai
These guys actually have a product called QuantBot, similar to the company above!
What’s interesting about VXV here is that they are doing an AMA in front of 16 million readers of the science community at reddit.com/r/askscience this Sunday. This is a real crypto with real technology folks. More on the AMA can be found here vectorspace.ai/reddit-ama.html — WOW!
They have an API here vectorspace.ai/api.html that uses a “wallet-enabled” API key which means everyone will have to buy VXV on the open market!
Their partners include Lawrence Berkeley Lab, the US Dept of Energy (DOE), Google and pushshift.io, a reddit data engineering company.
From their site: “The datasets are correlation matrices engineered with ‘feature attributes’ or continuously valued distance calculations. These ‘feature vectors’ are related to today’s ‘word embedding’ methods used in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Resulting feature vectors consist of scored and ranked relationships between entities and surrounding human language that define their contexts. What we do is not magic but basic and fundamental to any machine learning effort, however, as Andrew Ng put it, “Coming up with features is difficult, time-consuming, requires expert knowledge. “Applied machine learning” is basically feature engineering.” — Machine Learning and AI via Brain simulations.
We’ve had the opportunity to operate in different knowledge domains such as finance where we’ve developed datasets that allow for context-controlled correlations of sympathetic, parasitic and symbiotic known and hidden relationships between entities such as public companies correlated to the periodic table of elements, cryptocurrencies, human genes, diseases, phytochemicals, pharmaceuticals and other entities. So far we’ve received about 350 custom dataset requests in this area.”
VXV can go beyond the moon folks.
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Aeternity (AE) Current Price: $1.07
Site: https://aeternity.com
In very simple terms, æternity is a new blockchain platform, but it is also a vision for the future. This vision is being realized by a global community of believers, convinced in the disruptive potential of scalable, public blockchain technology. It is a movement that aims to propose alternatives to the existing governance, economic and financial intermediaries.
From a technological point of view, æternity is a public, open-source, blockchain-based distributed computing and digital-asset platform that builds upon decentralized cryptographic P2P technology. The platform is open to anyone, anywhere in the world to use.
For more detailed information, take a look at the Wikipedia article dedicated to æternity or visit the GitHub page.
AE are the access tokens to the æternity blockchain and act as a unit of account for the resources spent on æternity. AE tokens are the energy (or “crypto-fuel”) used to power any application implemented on the platform. Every action (and even inaction) on the æternity platform costs something, even if only fractions of cents.
AE tokens are the fuel for the new types of trustless apps (or æpps) that will be enabled by æternity. For more information regarding applications, visit the æpps website or visit the æpps FAQ.
Aeternity is certainly a top performer!
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Aurora DAO (Exchange IDEX: AURA) Current Price: $0.07c
Site: https://auroradao.com/
Aurora is a suite of DAPPs and protocols that make up a fully decentralized banking and financial network. The components of Aurora support the boreal, a decentralized stablecoin, and together enable global banking in the new currency. Revenue from the various components of Aurora will be used both to increase the asset reserves backing the boreal, allowing Aurora to expand boreal banking, and to provide economic incentives that ensure the system runs as designed.
IDEX will be the first exchange to operate on the Snowglobe network, transitioning from a semidecentralized to a fully decentralized exchange. All fees from IDEX are remitted to the Aurora reserves. As the reserves grow Aurora can increase the value of outstanding loans, generating additional revenue for the Aurora network. Fees from the Aurora banking system will then flow back to those who stake the AURA token and provide the economic foundation that holds Aurora and Snowglobe together.
Similar to other blockchain networks, Snowglobe requires a well-designed incentive structure to ensure that the integrity of the order book and transaction sequence are not compromised. Aurora has its own native network token, AURA, that aligns the interests of Aurora and the Snowglobe operators. All of the revenue from Aurora is used to compensate those who stake their AURA and provide security for the Snowglobe network. AURA staking aligns the economic interests of the operators with the health of the network, and makes it extremely costly for any would be attacker to disrupt operations.
Prior to the launch of Snowglobe, all revenue from IDEX will be deposited into the boreal reserves. This revenue will be collected for future use in aligning economic incentives with AURA holders after the Snowglobe protocol is live. In the event that there is not enough revenue from Aurora to provide sufficient security for the platform, fees from IDEX may be used directly to enforce security in the system, bypassing the remittance to Aurora reserves.
AURA definitely has the right stuff! This one is on our watchlist for double digits!
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TomoChain (Exchange IDEX: TOMO) Current Price: $0.29c
Site: http://tomochain.com
TomoChain is interesting because they are already up and running with a real blockchain product and getting great reviews similar to QNT and VXV.
From their site: “The Tomochain testnet 2.0 launch is a great proof marking a major step toward our mission to be a leading force in building the Internet of Value. Tomochain is The Most Efficient Platform for Token Economy, designing its infrastructure and working to create an alternative financial system which is more secure, transparent, efficient, inclusive and equitable for everyone.”
I like this valuable piece of information found in their whitepaper as it also validates their current product releases: “A consensus protocol is considered live if it can eventually propagate and make valid transactions onto the blockchain [12]. An occurrence of a liveness fault is when transaction omission, information withholding, or message reordering, among a number of violations are observed. This type of fault is unlikely to happen in TomoChain because the block creation masternodes list is ordered in a predetermined way for each epoch, thus if even an attacking masternode omits some transactions, the latter will be processed and validated by the next honest masternode in the next block.”
Conclusion
There’s a part of the due diligence process that’s more of an art than a science. It’s when you include another valuable but less tangible component, namely the Story. There was once a time when our fund was solely focused on traditional stocks and some of those were called ‘story stocks’, but that is of course, a another story.
These plays have massive upside and positioning on the ground floor here before they list on larger exchanges can result in tremendous profit! Happy Trading!