In my work as a marketing advisor I get the chance to see so many companies, business models, and trends and two years ago I started to get interested and invest in the area of cryptocurrencies.
If you look at Bitcoin and its high growth it is impossible not to spot the big number of tech startups or better said fintech startups built around this cryptocurrency.
There are today companies paying their employees with digital currency and for me, in early 2017 I had the first fee paid in a digital currency.
It was a huge shift for me.
Towards the end of February, I went to a cryptocurrency site - to take some quotations for the most popular coins available in the market so I got some stats. You can go anytime to Coin Gecko if you want updated stats.
Here were the findings where "today" means the end of February, and the circulated supply is the total number of coins in the market and the volume exchanged is the volume exchanged on that particular website:
1. Blackcoin = The value of BlackCoin for today is $0.03582948. It has a current circulating supply of 76 Million coins and a total volume exchanged of $13,350.4
2. Dash = The value of Dash for today is $28.61082155. It has a current circulating supply of 7.13 Million coins and a total volume exchanged of $2,457,748.6
3. Dogecoin = The value of Dogecoin for today is $0.00020965. It has a current circulating supply of 108 Billion coins and a total volume exchanged of $75,736.9
4. Litecoin = The value of Litecoin for today is $3.89284449. It has a current circulating supply of 50 Million coins and a total volume exchanged of $2,316,762.6
5. Namecoin = The value of Namecoin for today is $0.26088317. It has a current circulating supply of 14.7 Million coins and a total volume exchanged of $7,555.0
6. NXT = The value of NXT for today is $0.00691765. It has a current circulating supply of 999 Million coins and a total volume exchanged of $27,983.7
7. Peercoin = The value of Peercoin for today is $0.32148921. It has a current circulating supply of 23.9 Million coins and a total volume exchanged of $20,344.1
8. Primecoin = The value of Primecoin for today is $0.04388852. It has a current circulating supply of 18.1 Million coins and a total volume exchanged of $3,180.5
9. Ripple = The value of Ripple for today is $0.00545900. It has a current circulating supply of 37.1 Billion coins and a total volume exchanged of $1,038,160.0
10. Bitcoin = $ 1,187.62, market capitalization $19,226,340,425.09
The values of the coins are floating all the time so I want to show you the variety existing already.
In this Top 10 was not included Onecoin which already has 3 million users but it is controversial and uses a network marketing type of business development strategy. So far so good for them, they have thoughts for an IPO in 2018 which would be a great move for the cryptocurrency industry.
At the time I did the assessment (end of Feb. 2017) Onecoin was valued at $8.32 and they allowed anybody to create an account in their platform without the need for purchasing coins.
If you want to get your feet wet you can open an account here in Onecoin's platform.
From the discussions I had in the last 12 months with very important, and knowledgable people from this industry, I sensed the idea that it has built something that follows after the www as we know it.
What is built is a ... "web for money."
So after www comes a web for money which is not an impossible concept but a very out of the box one.
Earlier this year another very important thing happened. It was officially launched RAIDA aka Redundant Array of Independent Detection Agents and is considered already the second technology after Blockchain to solve the physical integrity problem faced in general by digital currencies.
RAIDA is the system on which a new cryptocurrency was built -- CloudCoin -- which started to be traded on the 15th of March at $0.01 for 1 CloudCoin. CloudCoins consist of 3,200 bits of secret data that only the owner knows.
These bits are written into jpg images or in text files that can be stored on your computer and sent to your people by email, Skype, SMS, Facebook or even by regular old paper mail. In other words you can embed money into a nice (or ugly .jpeg picture).
Since the launch of CloudCoin, I made some purchases and gathered as much data as possible about it. This currency has all the elements to become number one in the next decade. I would say that the investments in cryptocurrencies are still very volatile -- but something which will possibly be changed as soon as we will see IPO's and other major developments here.
Here is a useful link to find out more about CloudCoin: