There are presently over 18,000 cryptocurrencies in existence, but major digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ether as well as famous meme coins like Shiba Inu and Dogecoin tend to grab the limelight. Some deserve their obscurity, while others may be golden investment opportunities. Here are three obscure cryptocurrencies you haven’t heard of that might be hidden gems.
1. Filecoin
Filecoin ( FIL-3.18% ), with a market capitalization of about $3.6 billion, is not your average cryptocurrency. It uses a peer-to-peer architecture to store data more efficiently. Users on the network contribute extra storage space on their own devices to store other people’s data and are paid in Filecoins for doing so. Customers can save even more money by utilizing the network’s distributed cloud storage, as it is less expensive than traditional data storage. Customers of the network may select from a variety of redundancy, access speed, and cost combinations based on their specific needs.
Naturally, for these networks to become truly sustainable, a lot of things will need to happen; however, I see blockchain technology being applied outside the payments industry as one area of the blockchain universe with a lot of distinction and potential.
2. Harmony One
Harmony ( ONE ) is a new blockchain network with a market capitalization of $1.4 billion. It’s an extremely solid technical platform from that standpoint. Harmony claims it has resolved many of the issues that have kept other blockchain networks from scaling successfully, including network congestion problems while still preserving the decentralized nature that makes blockchains so appealing. It uses a technique known as sharding, which divides its network into many groups of validators that collaborate on subsets of the blockchain database to create new blocks and approve transactions. It’s the technology that many blockchain projects, including Ethereum, are currently implementing.
With a similar number of transactions that Visa can manage, Harmony’s network may process 2,000 transactions per second. However, Harmony thinks its network might one day have the capacity to handle 10 million transactions per second using a proof-of-stake approach. To validate transactions on its network, Harmony uses a proof-of-stake method in which validators stake tokens to confirm blocks. This is much more energy-efficient than proof-of-work mining schemes like Bitcoin, which use a significant amount of computing power to solve cryptographic problems. All of these elements have helped Harmony in maintaining low “gas fees” (the cost of executing transactions) in comparison to other networks.
3. Zcash
Zcash (ZEC-5.00%) is a crypto that runs on a blockchain network that focuses on privacy and has a market cap of $2.1 billion. One of the primary aims in the creation of the first blockchain networks was to develop an accessible system that allowed anybody who has internet access to send and receive money. Another was to build a decentralized system so no single entity had too much control over money movement across the network. However, since a blockchain is a public log, it’s virtually impossible to fully secure transactions carried out on one. They are difficult to trace, but they are accessible to anyone.
Zcash has developed a network where users may conduct transactions in the open or privately. Users can accomplish this by using either the private “Z-address” for a transaction or using a public “T-address.” All of the events are still visible on the public ledger, but transaction amounts and memos are hidden among Z-addresses. Z-addresses and T-addresses can also send transactions to one another. For people who value their privacy, Zcash is an appealing choice. The block reward for a single day is set at 25 ZEC, which equates to 210,000 Zcash tokens. Interestingly, the maximum number of Zcash tokens that may ever be produced is 21 million – a limit comparable to that of Bitcoin.
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