With Bitcoin dominance nearing 60%, I conclude that Altseason is starting. I can already feel the FOMO kicking in, when I have a list of coins to research and everything colors green while I sleep at night.

I’m getting so busy, I even had to skip my nap yesterday.

I’ve had a great napstreak for about a year, so things are getting serious now…

This is part 3, and the last part of my research of “old generation” alts. If you haven’t yet, check out part 1 and part 2, because some of those altcoins already started their way up.

Before You FOMO Into Altseason

The crypto coins I’m researching (and buying) now are midterm holds for me. I do not plan to hold them for 3 months+ and I have an exit strategy for each one of them in place. I always make sure I’m selling on the way up, and possibly also on the way down.

I do not want to end up with a bag for 50 alts when markets crash on me.

The main reason is that alts tend to crash way harder than Bitcoin. And that’s exactly why there is potential today in these altcoins. They have a lot of catching up to do since the last altseason.

While you let that marinate, let’s have a look at some coins.

1. NEO (NEO)

• Marketcap: 1.73 B
• Price: $24.52
• From ATH: -87%
• To ATH: 709%

The Chinese Ethereum, or at least that’s how they hyped themself back in 2016-2017. I remember trying to read the Antshares (former name of NEO) whitepaper. Which was in Chinese, and I didn’t get very far with Google translate. It was confusing to say the least.

Much like Ethereum, NEO is a smart-contract platform. Projects are built on top of it as NEP-5 tokens, like Ontology of my previous post. There are some differences like the platform’s code language, block sizes, transaction speed, what is used for gas fee’s and such. But in today’s altcoin world, the differences aren’t that big.

In 2020, they have kept their eyes on the trend and started developing ways to enter the DeFi space, and adding an Oracle, which is the hype word of 2021. Check their blog post of December to get more information on the 2020 developments.

Of the 2018 NEP-5 token landscape, only Ontology is still in the top 100 of cryptocurrencies, and that token isn’t doing much.

As they want to compete with Ethereum, I find it important that it’s used as a platform for other projects. Not only to fundraise on but actually being used. NEO is lacking that, as I find limited information on new projects being launched on it.

NEO 3.0 is on the testnet as we speak, and the oracle implementation is one to closely follow if you want to invest in this one during altseason.

They have a tight community of supporters, but by looking at Google and social media trends, I don’t see an uptick I want for this project. We’re going to need new people to get excited about NEO to reach previous highs.

Will I buy it?

Not at this time. However, I will keep an eye on their social media to follow the updates on NEO 3.0 and to see if the community is getting excited again. It’s a tough landscape now for platforms competing with Ethereum, but it’s not impossible to go up in price regardless of adoption by projects.

2. Ethereum Classic (ETC)

• Marketcap: 1.01 B
• Price: $8.65
• From ATH: -80%
• To ATH: 412%

Another hard fork from a top coin is Ethereum Classic. They forked after the notorious DOA hack back in 2016.

Since then, they have been going their own way, trying to onboard projects on their platform to compete with ETH.

Similar to NEO, I don’t know any project that is successful that is on Ethereum Classic’s network. Do you?

So I’m going to skip the fundamental research for this one and focus more on price on probabilities.

Similar to Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic’s marketcap is psychologically tied to Ethereum. It’s a fork of ETH, and every person that held ETH at the time of the fork, received ETC (including me). This ignites a thought in people’s minds, “What is a fair % of Ethereum’s market share should this hardfork have?”

There was a price battle for this right after the fork, which peaked at 1 ETH equals 0.5 ETC. Not a bad ratio to start with!

However, a few months later the price was hovering between 0.05 ETH and 0.08 ETH, which means the market decided that Ethereum Classic was worth about 5-8% of Ethereum.

During the bear market, this ratio has been slowly declining, and we’re near the bottom now of 0.005 or 0.5% of Ethereum. This looks extremely low to me.

Grayscale, the largest crypto investment fund is accumulating ETC over the past few months. Does that mean they see the same thing as I do?

2 Days ago, they purchased $76 Million worht of Ethereum (which pushed the price to a new ATH). And possibly they will start adding more Ethereum Classic in the near future. Or if they don’t do it, other investment funds might grab this opportunity.

Will I buy it?

Yes, I will. I don’t believe Ethereum Classic is a worthy opponent of Ethereum. However, if hedge funds and people see it as a hedge to ETH, there is money to be made.

I will allocate a small % like 0.1-0.25% of my holdings here and will start selling as soon as ETC goes over 10% of ETH price, or when it reaches the USD value ATH. I’ll purchase it with ETH, as I believe they can catch up on that ratio, that way I’m winning more Ethers. Also, ETH is pretty much at ATH now, I never feel bad cashing out on ATH’s.

3. Basic Attention Token (BAT)

• Marketcap: 527 M
• Price: $0.355
• From ATH: -63%
• To ATH: 170%

I remember sitting at my desk in Thailand, my Ethereum wallet open and ICO address in place. Once the ICO opened up, I tried to enter, but the S30 Million ICO got sold out in 9 seconds. I got outplayed by the whales, GG.

At the time it we were in altseason 2017, and ICO’s were easy to flip for profits. Good times, but many of those projects are dead today. BAT is still alive and kicking though.

If you haven’t heard of this project yet, The Basic Attention Token is a ERC20 token for the digital advertising industry. It pays publishers for their content and users for their attention, while providing advertisers with more in return for their ads, using their native Brave browser.

As I’m writing this, I’m using the Brave browser and I earn some BAT tokens every day, while they also respect my privacy. Unlike their competitors like *cough” Google.

Their browser is actually ranked #1 in the google play store with 4.8 stars of 238,000 users. With over 10 Million downloads, I conclude that they are here to stay.

Community & influencer wise they are doing a great job. They have earning mechanism in the browser, which always gets the public excited. And influencers like Joe Rogan are avid promoters of Brave.

On top of it all, the Grayscale investment fund also opened a trust for BAT in Q4 2020, similar to Filecoin. So there is a good possibility that big money will be coming pouring in soon.

Will I buy it?

Yes, however, this will also be a smaller allocation. I’m earning BAT’s every day while I surf the web. As we’re “only 170%” from the previous ATH, this token doesn’t have as much short term upside potential as other candidates I’m discussing. I’ll look for a decent entry on this one with 0.1-0.25% of my portfolio.

4. NEM (XEM)

• Marketcap: 2.51 B
• Price: $0.27
• From ATH: -85%
• To ATH: 575%

Let me start with a sad story on this one. I’ve held NEM since 2017, all the way through the bear market. Safely stored on their official Nem Wallet. My laptop crashed in 2019, and my backup I only stored the login for the wallet, not the private key. If you understand cryptocurrency, you already know where I’m headed with this.

Ofcourse, I can’t access my wallet anymore and my coins are lost forever. Not your keys, not your coins! I’ve learned this the hard way, several times actually.

NEM evolved in March 2015 as a fork-out version of the NXT, another “old” blockchain platform. It is operated by a Singapore-based non-profit organization called NEM.io Foundation. Following the fork, NEM.io decided to develop its own codebase for advancing NEM, to make it more scalable and faster. Thus emerged a new NEM cryptocurrency platform, which was completely different from the original NXT.

Another Fork project, however, NEM surpassed its big brother because NXT is pretty much dead, with a current marketcap of $18 Million vs the $2.51 Billion by NEM. So I’ll skip the ratio price comparison on this one.

When reading through their newsletter, i conclude they are mostly focussed on partnerships and adding (+ funding) new projects on the NEM blockchain. Like I stated with NEO when it’s a platform it’s important that it gets adopted by businesses. Otherwise, your platform’s functionality is pretty useless.

For 2021, I’m waiting on a technical and commercial roadmap to make a more accurate desicion on its potential for this year.

Will I buy it?

Yes, I will buy in again. Sad times that I lost my former XEM, but since I can’t go back in time the biggest mistake I can make today is cry over the losses and ignore the potential it has. I can only agree with their strategy of 2020, and since they will announce their 2021 roadmaps soon, I expect the community to get excited again. Hopefully that pairs with a price increase.

5. Zilliqa (ZIL)

• Marketcap: 925 M
• Price: $0.079
• From ATH: -65%
• To ATH: 190%

Zilliqa is the first public blockchain designed to implement sharding, allowing for linear scaling as the blockchain grows in size.

Back in the days (2017-2018), scaling was a public discussion. Can Bitcoin handle all the transactions when mass adoption comes? As this was seen as a tremendous problem, many projects arised to solve it.

Today, this is not really something people care about. Yes sometimes the networks get busy and the transaction takes longer. But that’s how technology moves forward. You reach limits, you create a software solution and implement it.

They have a semi-active community and are dipping their toes into the DeFi space today with ZilSwap today.

Their blog is very active with updates on partnerships and developments, which is a strong signal for upwards potential. The community needs to know what’s going on to get pumped up.

Their 2021 focus will be more towards DeFi, and expanding partnerships and adding liquidity. Which makes sense for a project around since 2018. They were a bit late to the party in the previous altseason and are trying to be relevant during this one.

Will I buy it?

No, the project doesn’t have anything that stands out for me.

6. Nano (NANO)

• Marketcap: 483 M
• Price: $3.63
• From ATH: -89%
• To ATH: 828%

In its white paper, the Nano team takes aim at Bitcoin as the first cryptocurrency to gain wider adoption and introduce the public to the blockchain. While solving (old) issues like scalability, latency and the proof-of-work mechanism.

When scrolling through their announcements of 2020 and 2019, I don’t see anything that stands out . It’s mostly weak partnerships or speculative blogs how “Nano might be adopted by Nigerians, because they struggle with crossborder payments and Nano solves that!”. Uhm, ye great, but not only Nano solves that problem.

I struggle to find a 2021 roadmap, and they seem to miss the DeFi boat completely.

For some reason, they do have a community that seems to stay active and loyal, regardless of the lack of big developments. One of the perks of being a good horse of the 2017 altseason I guess.

Will I buy it?

Hard skip for me. Nothing that stands out, and I don’t believe in the original problem they are trying to solve.

7. ICON (ICX)

• Marketcap: 464 M
• Price: $13.16
• From ATH: -94%
• To ATH: 1545%

Also known as “The Korean Ethereum”, ICON is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that seeks to connect every single blockchain in the world, regardless of its design or consensus mechanism (e.g. proof of stake, proof of work, etc.)

After raising over $40 Million with their ICO in 2017, the project struggled to keep up with its marketing name as the Korean Ethereum. However, throughout the bear market, they kept developing their platform and adding functionalities and improvements. Their mainnet got revised, new token standards like the IRC-16 and adding ICONFI to earn and stake ICX.

With a recently supportive community, and a strong base in Korea this coin does have some hype potential.

Similar to other platforms, I can’t name a single token built on ICON that is blowing peoples minds. Can you?

Will I buy it?

Yes, a small bet in here just because they are actively developing forward with 1545% away from their previous all-time high. Korea used to have a huge influence on crypto prices, and things have been a bit quiet there. I’m not sure why they are on the sidelines, but if they do decide to play again, I believe ICON is a coin many Koreans will look at. I’ll place a bet of 0.1-0.25% here, but if nothing happens in 2 months in Korea, I’ll gladly sell it again.

Missed Opportunies

Nearly every day I miss opportunities. The worst ones are when you wake up and see one of the coins you “wanted to buy” moon. Do you recognize this?

Don’t feel bad about it. But most importantly, don’t FOMO into coins at their peaks just because you wanted to buy it when it was low.

This altseason will have hundreds. or thousands of spots to make money. When you miss one, focus on the next. And try to figure out what mistake you made in your decision making process, so you can tackle it and avoid making the same mistake.

New Generation Alts

In the last blogs I’ve discussed altcoins from the previous altseason that have room to catch up.

But, I’m not ignoring the new generation of alts coming out. So I’m currently also holding:

• 1Inch
• AAVE
• UniSwap
• SushiSwap
• REN
• Chainlink
• MakerDAO
• Polkadot

I will also cover these coins later this month or in March and help you find new hidden gems in the wild west of Altcoins 2021.

You can buy all the alts I talked about on Binance, and if you sign up through this link we both receive 10% cashback of your trading fees. Not bad right?

As always, be careful and don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.

Time For a Break

Like I said at the start, I missed out on my nap yesterday. I’m not planning to make a habit of that.

I’ve published 3 blogs, in 3 days about altcoins. Normally, I’m on a 1 blog per month pace. But since altseason is starting, it was time to roll up my sleeves and work on my portfolio. I hope I helped you do the same along the way.

I’m going on a short holiday to Chiapas – Mexico next week and will be back later this month with updates on newer altcoins and my crypto trading bot, which has been on fire the last few weeks! As I stated in the first blog, I have several buckets in my crypto portfolio, Altcoins is 1 bucket, but the Bot bucket is also growing exponentially.

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