Introduction Are you confused with all the new crypto projects coming out? Well, our team has curated nine different coins that might just tickle your fancy. We all know that Bitcoin is the king dog of crypto. However, being on top has its drawbacks, especially for us investors. For one, the chances of Bitcoin getting 100x or even 10x returns are just pure hopium in this cycle. Anyway, long term, all bets are off. It's probably going to go up forever. But hey, most of you probably want to get rich sooner than a decade or two from now. However, we have altcoins to fulfill our desire to see mind-boggling gains. Of course, with risk. According to a CoinGecko report, top altcoin narratives have given investors an average of 1300% returns in the first quarter of 2024. Those are wild numbers! Predictably, a meme coin gave the best returns, followed by real-world assets (RWA) as well as AI crypto coins. So, make sure to watch until the end as we explore some small to medium-cap altcoins that just might give us that 10 to 100x that we have been looking for. Please note, by the way, no one has paid us to be featured in this video. The information is provided to you for free for educational purposes. This is not a recommendation for you to go out and to buy, sell, or hold any of the coins being discussed here. Investing in crypto is risky. You can lose all your money. If you want a full risk statement as well as seeing the coins that I hold personally, I do own the coins being discussed here either by private OTC, Tails, Public Market, or early-stage investments. For full portfolio and full risk disclosures, please see the link in the description on YouTube or the pinned comment. 1. Phantom Our first stop is Phantom, a smart contract-enabled layer one blockchain comparable to Ethereum or the other major layer ones. But unlike Ethereum, whose gas fees can be compared to well, highway freaking robbery, man, Phantom's transaction fees cost a cent on average. You might say, "Well, Lark, come on, other layer ones like Solana can do that too. What makes Phantom so special? Why should I care?" Well, thank you for asking. Phantom will soon have the Sonic upgrade. Most projects will pump leading up to a major upgrade. If we look at the top 50 performers of the last 90 days, Phantom has already ranked 13, beating Bitcoin, Solana, and Ethereum. People are paying attention to the Sonic upgrade. Now, upgrades are good, of course, but will it bring real value to users? Will it kick off a Phantom trend? Well, I believe that the original Phantom Opera was a great blockchain when it was launched in 2019. However, tech is always evolving, and what was good in 2019 might feel a bit dated these days. So, Phantom Sonic will keep this blockchain up to date and highly competitive with the top blockchains out there right now. The TLDR is that Sonic will make things faster, capable of 180 million daily transactions, about 2,000 transactions per second, at subc finality, while keeping fees cheap. This could potentially make Phantom one of the fastest, if not the fastest, blockchain to date. Another reason to be bullish is the launch of the stablecoin USDC, which is supported by Circle and Wormhole, coming natively to the Phantom blockchain, which will inject liquidity into the network. The Phantom Foundation has also announced several big angel investors, including Michael Igv, who's the founder of Cure Finance, Sam Kamean, the founder of Frack Finance, and Fernando Martinelli, the CEO of Balancer Labs. Now, it does not take a genius to see what is going on here. Phantom is onboarding these big protocols. Phantom could be ready for some very interesting price actions. So, perhaps worth paying attention to. 2. NB Chain Our second coin is a relatively new layer one project called NB Chain. What makes this special is that it is designed to handle up to 100,000 transactions per second, which makes it faster than Ethereum or Solana on paper. It combines the security and immutability of Bitcoin and the programmability of Ethereum. Now, this was built on the Cosmos SDK on the Tendermint core consensus, which makes NB Chain interoperable with other blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem. Another advantage over other layer ones is the hybrid consensus mechanism. It combines proof of stake and proof of work, which enhances both security and performance. The tech behind NB Chain looks pretty gosh darn interesting, but we all know that it does not guarantee success. Narrative is so often what will make or break any crypto project. Now, NB Chain also has this covered. Not just being the 10th Phantom planet out there somewhere, anyway, its EOS system hosts real-world assets, DeFi gaming coins, among others, with lots of big things rumored to be coming soon that could drive a lot of hype. It also has some big names backing it up like Kraken Ventures, Tribe Capital, and Hash Key. As for tokenomics, its current market cap was around $80 million at the time of recording this video, with a 1.5 billion token maximum supply. If you are looking for some kind of low-cap layer one gem, well, you might want to go out and do some more research. Do your own research, as we say in the crypto world. 3. Paria In a data-driven society, one of the biggest concerns, of course, is privacy. Harp online Paria is a new blockchain that was created to address this very issue. And no, it's nothing like privacy coins like Monero, which hide all transaction details and stuff like that. But the TLDR is Paria blockchain uses a special technology called multi-party computation or MPC to offer secure and private transactions for businesses and for governments. Pretty interesting, right? This MPC tech acts like a privacy filter for data while also ensuring that everything's being analyzed, ensuring thus high security and impressive speed with under 1 second finality. Now, I know that is maybe a bit confusing, a lot of stuff. So I'll just give you an example. The EU implemented General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR to protect people's privacy. Paria uses MPC to anonymize data while letting companies use it. So imagine you're an online seller. GDPR says you cannot analyze customer data like email and purchases without anonymizing it first. Well, Paria helps by acting like a privacy-protecting blender for this information. You feed in the purchase data, and it scrambles it within the blockchain. Now you can analyze trends like popular colors without ever actually seeing personal information. So you stay compliant with these kinds of regulations. Another practical use case is surveys. For example, Paria can guarantee the anonymity of respondents to surveys. Surveyors will be able to get the results, get the data without compromising the privacy and the identity of the participants. Paria even connects and shares information securely with other blockchains, making it ideal for handling sensitive data like medical records or some kinds of financial information. As you can imagine, it can be implemented in a wide variety of different fields and use cases needing privacy, because a lot of things need privacy, which is basically everything when you think about it. Now, the project is still very young, but it does boast some pretty big partnerships like Google Cloud, Red Cross, and others. As for tokenomics, its MPC token has a supply limit of 1 billion tokens and a market cap around $50 million at the time of recording. 4. Tao This is one of the tokens we've tackled in our top five crypto airdrops video that could earn you some of that sweet ka-ching, ka-ching. Tao blockchain is a permissionless rollup-based blockchain aiming to tackle Ethereum's scalability issues. Essentially, it's an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. This is a new network built to handle more transactions per second than Ethereum can do today. Now, it does this by working alongside Ethereum, much like an extra lane on a highway. It also has some pretty good backers. The project has already raised $37 million in three different funding rounds. Investors include big names like OKX Ventures, Lightspeed Capital, and Hashed. There is still no news yet of the mainnet launch. Thus, the testnet farming airdrop opportunity. So keep an eye on this one.
5. Jupiter Jupiter on the Solana network. I personally think this could be the next Uniswap. Jupiter is a decentralized exchange aggregator platform, which means that it allows Solana users to find the best token prices. Well, at least that's when Solana is working. Solana, anyway, its super simple interface makes it super easy, even for DeFi newbies. As an added bonus, Jupiter also has a perpetual swaps exchange, allowing those with a higher risk tolerance or more skills to bet on the future price of an asset. It even offers 100x leverage for all the crazy DeFi enthusiasts out there who like living on the edge. It also has a bridge that allows users to send assets cross-chain. So lots of great features. The hype surrounding Jupiter is also evident in the increase in trading volume. Last March, it registered $46.8 billion in trading volume, a 3x increase from December 2023. Some noteworthy partnerships here include Mercurio, which is a fiat on-ramp provider, Star Atlas, which is a blockchain gaming metaverse. Jupiter also has a very active and interesting staking rewards program. This is a model that incentivizes participation in the project's governance mechanisms, which thus rewards stakeholders for voting. So you get Jupiter incentives, launchpad fees, and airdrops. With Solana getting a lot of traction, it could be a good idea to look at the projects within the ecosystem. And I believe that even though Jupiter has already had some big moves and has around a $2 billion market cap at the time of recording, that it could go much higher and even reach Uniswap's peak valuation of $25 billion or so. Which is about a 10x still from here. Maybe! 6. Ory Swap Bitcoin Maxis, this one is for you. It's called Ory Swap. This is an automated market maker built on top of the Bitcoin Network. Think Uniswap but on Bitcoin. It is the pioneer in bringing decentralized exchange functionalities directly to the Bitcoin Network, which of course gives it a first-mover advantage. It allows users to easily swap various BRC2 tokens built on Bitcoin, but in a decentralized and simple manner. Ory Swap's native token plays an important role in governance. Ory token holders can actually vote on proposals that shape the future development of the Ory Swap protocol. Its partnerships include DWF Labs and Thorchain, among others. As for tokenomics, it has a market cap of around $13 million and a total supply of 1 billion tokens. But that's just for the Ory token. I want to bring it up today because they're actually launching a BRC2 token soon, which is a native Bitcoin asset. Very interesting. It's called Rios. That's going to be via an ape terminal sale pretty soon. So watch out for Bitcoin DeFi. Definitely not a narrative to fade, and this could be a major early mover in the space. But super early, consider it that it is a risk and it may not succeed. 7. Dop Next up is another blockchain project that promises data privacy protection on the Ethereum network. This is Dop, or the Data Ownership Protocol, and it functions as a privacy-preserving layer for users. It uses zero-knowledge proof technology to allow users to decide what crypto assets and what transactions they actually wish to make public. For example, your Dop-enabled crypto wallet has just received your salary, and this transaction will remain private instead of being public for everybody to see forever thereafter. For the rest of history, it remains encrypted and visible only to people that you want to disclose it to. Now, imagine applying for a loan, and instead of exposing all of your details to strangers, you can simply select the bits that you want to share and share it with just the right people, like the bank, of course, that will give you the loan. Now, as for funding, the project has already raised $162 million in its pre-launch token sales. The mainnet is going to be launched very, very soon. So keep an eye out for that. 8. AIT Protocol Let's talk AI. Massive narrative today and in the foreseeable future for the next decade. And it's estimated that AI will contribute $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030. Kind of a big deal. So don't be surprised if a lot of new crypto projects put AI in their names just to ride that hype. However, there will also always be projects that aim to add real value to the industry. And one of those is AIT Protocol. Now, let's just backtrack a bit here. All AI models need powerful GPUs and powerful processors. But do you know what else they need? They need big data sets to train on. And accessing a huge amount of data was not cheap, of course. AI companies with deep pockets like Amazon or Google, obviously they can afford it. But how about those smaller players wanting to get an edge, wanting to get started up? Well, this is where AIT Protocol can help. AIT Protocol makes it cheaper by eliminating intermediaries and connecting users directly out to a large pool of experts willing to help with their AI projects. Those who help with analyzing and contributing different computational resources are then incentivized with AIT tokens. The project's backers and strategic partnerships include Maven Capital, Magala Ventures, and BMB Chain. Now, its current market cap is below $50 million. Now, obviously, if it ever goes up to a billion dollars, which AI hype could drive it there, that would be a 20x. Not saying that's definitely going to happen, but it's got a lot of potential being a low-cap coin. 9. Edge Matrix Computing (EMC) Last one on our list, we talked about EMC, which stands for Edge Matrix Computing. Now, what's cool about this, for one, it's a multi-narrative token. It's an AI token, it's a DeFi project as well, which are both narratives that are expected to do very well in the current bull run cycle. A report says that Edge Matrix is the leading multi-chain AI DeFi protocol, powering AI apps with decentralized edge computing infrastructure. Sounds pretty nerdy, I know, but the idea kind of low-key genius. The network simply harvests idle computing power from contributors, which is not a brand new idea, but it's a very good idea. So imagine having a high-end computer that you don't use often. Instead of just letting it go idle, especially while you're sleeping, for example, you can actually share out your computing resources with the network and get compensated with tokens in the process, which is pretty damn cool. Now, that's the same concept behind Render and Golem and others. And Render, of course, is currently one of the largest AI crypto projects with a $3.8 billion market cap at the time of recording. Now, does this type of cloud computing service have a lot of room to grow? Yeah. According to market intelligence and advisory firm Mordor, what a name, guys, research analyst Nam is Sauron, anyway, the cloud computing market size will grow to $1.3 trillion by 2029. And besides, EMC does not need a lot to get a 10 or 20x since the current market cap is roughly $60 million. So if we get to a billion, that's like a 20x, something. Again, high potential. And as the mainnet starts rolling out, we'll see a lot of hype, I think, build around this. Conclusion Is there a guarantee that any of the coins mentioned here are going to moon? Of course not. This is crypto, guys. There's no such thing as 100% sure. Okay, any of them could go to zero very quickly. However, if we look closely, then certain ingredients, you will see, can contribute to making a project successful. It's having a combination of the right partnerships, the right community support, the right utility, the right idea at the right time. And a lot of these, I think, have it. So, hope you get those big gains this cycle. And if any of these are a spark for you that leads to something interesting, then fantastic. But, of course, as always, do your own research, guys. Investing in crypto is risky. You can lose all your money. Just because I mentioned something here, doesn't mean you go blindly ape into it. Okay? Keep that in mind. Thanks for reading!