Hindsight is a wonderful thing – just ask any cryptocurrency enthusiast who failed to invest in Bitcoin ahead of its meteoric rise in 2017.
In just one calendar year, the world’s best-known cryptocurrency leapt from a value of under $1000 US Dollars in January to just shy of $20,000 by December.
That unprecedented growth sparked a profit revolution for those whose cryptocurrency wallets were in possession of Bitcoin at the time, but its overnight success story immediately priced many would-be cryptocurrency investors out of the market.
Of course, since then, the coin has reverted back to somewhere around half of its December 2017 peak – but the market remains bullish about its prospects in the coming months.
Although Bitcoin may have matured, the cryptocurrency market continues to expand, with new currencies introduced into the market at a steady rate – and who knows if any of them possess the potential to tread the path laid out by Bitcoin’s 2017 inexorable rise.
While nothing is a given in the emerging realm of digital currency, LLM – Luxury Lifestyle Magazine highlights three emerging currencies to keep an eye on in 2020.
Theta Token
Already posting a four-figure percentage value increase this quarter, no cryptocurrency is rising at the speed of the Theta Token.
The currency gets its name from the crypto-powered eSports and video streaming app which offers token rewards in exchange for harnessing users’ excess bandwidth and computing power for blockchain purposes.
Theta’s astronomic rise in the past few months can, in part, be explained by a number of high-profile partnership announcements, which include striking a deal for the Theta.tv software to be pre-installed as standard on Samsung Galaxy phones moving forward.
In addition, Theta is slated to be included on the ‘Samsung Daily’ interface, which means that the app will also be introduced to the existing fleet of Samsung S10, S9, Note 10 and Note 9 devices worldwide – estimated to be around 75 million.
It is not just commercial partnerships fuelling the cryptocurrency’s rise in value, though, with Theta’s imminent Mainnet 2.0 upgrade helping to increase the market’s confidence in the currency.
‘Mainnet’ stands for main network – the original functional blockchain where transactions take place in the distributed ledger. Without getting into the specifics, a Mainnet is an essential part of legitimising a verifying a cryptocurrency, and it’s another sign that Theta has serious aspirations and is here to stay.
What’s more, Theta Labs announced in the last 24 hours that it has struck a deal for Google Cloud to validate its upgraded Mainnet. Not only is this a game-changer for Theta Labs, but also for Google, which continues to edge tentatively towards the cryptocurrency market.
OmiseGO
Although it has been around since 2013, OmiseGO (which trades as OMG) has experienced a rapid value increase of over 200% in just a few short weeks – although it still ranks well outside of the top-ranking currencies on value alone.
Despite being based in South East Asia, the Thailand-based company behind the Ethereum token, which powers a peer-to-peer transaction service, owes much of its value surge to the Silicon Valley.
San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase, which is the most popular platform of its type in the United States, recently integrated OMG into its system, which sparked a significant boom for the otherwise flagging digital currency.
With OMG now firmly on the radar in the West, it is entirely plausible that it could emerge as an altcoin of choice in the months to come.
Tezos
At the time of writing, Tezos (trading as XTZ) is valued at US $2.67, a rise of nearly 100% in the calendar year of 2020. This is not an astronomic price rise, but as a relatively established currency, which, thanks to its 2020 rise, is in the top 10 currencies for value, the signs are strong.
While many factors can be attributed to Tezos’ value increase, including its verification model, the biggest impact on XTZ’s rise may well be Bitcoin’s recent ‘halving’ – meaning that 50% fewer Bitcoins are available moving forward, making it less profitable for miners.
Many of those miners have chosen to switch their attentions the less competitive altcoin market, and Tezos has emerged as a relatively lucrative alternative.
