This is not investment advice!
With 2021 quickly approaching, cryptocurrency markets have seen a strong bull run towards the end of the year. With this in mind, I want to dive into some of the cryptocurrency assets I'm most excited for come 2021. My plan is to diversify my portfolio with around 60% BTC and ETH (the top dogs) while holding some smaller cap coins to hopefully see altcoin season arrive sooner than later.
1. Bitcoin (BTC)
Bitcoin offers digital pioneers a chance to own digital gold. This cryptocurrency brings together longevity, the largest pool of users and developers, and the most potential for a digital global reserve currency. While BTC still has a long way to go before being scalable to serve a global population of over 8 billion.
2. Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum brings together another long-standing cryptocurrency asset with a plethora of different applications. Through the diverse applications offered by ETH, I like to think of this as digital oil for the 21st century, powering applications across the web. While we await the faster approaching launch of Ethereum 2.0 and a new era for this asset, the future seems bright for ETH.
3. CRYPTO.COM Coin (CRO)
Crypto.com pioneered the user experience for cryptocurrencies with their Visa card connected directly to cryptocurrency assets. While this innovation has been followed by others such as COINBASE offering a visa connected card, it still shows the ability of this asset's (and those behind it) ability to innovate. With innovation in mind, I see a bright future for the CRO token.
4. Monero (XMR)
Monero brings out another classic use case of cryptocurrency, privacy. When you think about what use cases money can offer the world, a means of transactions ranks in the top three. Combined with the fact that governments around the world continue to erode civil liberties such as privacy, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency brings many things to be excited about.
5. Basic Attention Token (BAT)
As Google begins to be dethroned as the global provider of search, browsers and search engines offering different solutions will be poised to thrive. The BRAVE browser with it’s BAT token brings this message to a point with their user-focused privacy settings. Through this network, I believe BAT will see an exciting future as web 3.0 becomes more apparent in our world.
6. Zcash (ZEC)
Using a different technology stack than Monero to achieve privacy, Zcash also offers a potential means of transaction for the world through a private network. While I am (for no real reason) biased to Monero, I also hold Zcash with hopes that one of these two assets (if not both!) can bring the world a means of transaction that is cryptographically private.
7. Uniswap (UNI)
As we get into DeFi technology, my understanding starts to weaken. That said, the wonderful logo attracted me to learn more about Uniswap. (Being honest with the shallow reasoning here!) UNI's represents a future with no financial intermediaries. After watching first hand the banks get bailed out in the 2008 financial meltdown while being one of the main culprits responsible for causing it, I have a special distaste for banks and many of the financial intermediary services offered by banks. Enter Decentralized Finance and assets like Uniswap.
8. Filecoin (FIL)
Peer to peer solutions for file sharing offers another industry prime for blockchain technology. As the world saw with the largest peer to peer network, BitTorrent, these solutions can scale globally in an impressively decentralized manner. Filecoin seems to be one of the latest file-sharing protocols to help break up the centralized powers that offer cloud file storage currently.
9. Kyber Network (KNC)
My knowledge about the next two assets, KNC and ALGO, varies from little to none. That said, Kyber Network advertises itself as, "The On-Chain Liquidity Protocol for the Tokenized World" Through this, the network offers a decentralized governance protocol and the ability to stake the tokens.
10. Algorand (ALGO)
Introduced to this asset through the Coinbase earn section, I again do now know too many things about Algorand. The Algorand website advertises the network as, "We are the technology company that built and developed the world’s first open, permissionless, pure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol that, without forking, provides the necessary security, scalability, and decentralization needed for today’s economy.
Other Top Contenders
Defi, defi, defi! I need to research and learn more about this relatively new asset class within cryptocurrency. You'll see in some of the other contenders listed out below that I have a few DeFi players (ALGO may be considered DeFi as well!) but I certainly would like to see that improve. I suspect we will see a drastic change from the 2021 end of year top 10 cryptocurrency assets
Other contenders included Hive, VeChain, Tezos, Maker, Compound, and Kava. That said, I'd love to hear what cryptocurrency assets you have your eyes on for 2021. It certainly will be an exciting year for cryptocurrency as we see new use cases emerge and more recent applications such as DeFi and Peer to Peer file storage begin to mature.
