Altcoins mania – The year of 2017 is the year of altcoins

Since the genesis block was mined on bitcoin’s blockchain, the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies has never witnessed the rate of growth we have been experiencing since the beginning of the year 2017. The gains were sometimes even astronomical e.g. Litecoin’s (LTC), Ethereum’s (ETH) as well as Ripple’s (XRP) price each increased by more than 1000% since the beginning of the year, STEEM rose by around 700% and GameCredits witnessed a 300% increase in market capitalization. Those were just a few examples (we will get into many more throughout this article) as the list of altcoins that witnessed massive growth this year is rather long.

This unprecedented growth of altcoins accompanied a bullish rally that has been taking bitcoin’s market by storm since the beginning of the year. For the first time ever, bitcoin price has touched the $1,900 mark a few days ago, which was not even predicted by the most optimistic observer. This definitely reflects increased trust of the public in the decentralized blockchain-based economy, especially that the fiat economy is failing, in many countries, to fulfill the dreams of the world citizens.

An Overview of the Altcoins With The Highest Gains So Far In 2017:

As we mentioned earlier, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, STEEM and GameCredits witnessed enormous gains. Ethereum price increased from $10 to record an all time high of $100 earlier this month. Monero (XMR) recorded a rise of around 133%, as it increased from $12 to $28. MaidSafeCoin’s price increased by more than 100% rising from around 9,200 satoshis to around 18,500 satoshis at the time of writing of this article.

Many of the altcoins that introduced new technologies began to get much appreciation this year. Gridcoin Research (GRC) is one of the most prominent examples of these coins, as it introduces a novel concept of blockchain based distributed computing. GRC’s price rose from around 700 satoshis, to score its all time high of 3,600 satoshis last week. Bitshares (BTS) also increased from 400 satoshis to 2,400 satoshis recording an astonishing 500% gain, which reflects appreciation of the market to Bitshares’ concept of decentralized exchanges.

Since the beginning of the year, the price of the following altcoins have witnessed massive increases; Ethereum Classic (ETC), Stellar (STR), Next (NXT), CLAMS (CLAM), Dogecoin (DOGE), BitcoinDark (BTCD), Golem (GNT), NEM (XEM), Lisk (LSK), Potcoin (POT), Huntercoin (HUC), BitCrystals (BCY), Namecoin (NMC) and others!

Which Altcoins To Hold On Towards The End of The Year:

If you have been trading altcoins lately, you most probably managed to make some good amounts of profits, yet during such bullish rallies, volatility skyrockets too. In my opinion, one should hold coins that present new ideas, new technologies or solve existing problems.

Ethereum is one of the coins that should remain a part of your portfolio towards the end of 2017. Ethereum is thought of as more valuable than bitcoin by many cryptocurrency experts. In my opinion, we can see it rise to around $200 by next December. Monero is also very promising, and its value has the potential to grow to $50 or even more this year.

GameCredits is one of the most promising coins to hold on to this year too. STEEM is also a keeper, especially that STEEM’s network is continuing to prove that it is the most successful blockchain based social network.

How To Protect Your Coins As The Markets Are Flourishing?

During such unprecedented bullish rates, volatility skyrockets as well. I would recommend, as usual, trading only the amounts you can afford to lose. Also, never put all your eggs in one basket; divide your portfolio into 4-5 parts and use each part to buy only one altcoin.

Also, don’t ever use your cryptocurrency exchange accounts as wallets to store your altcoins. Note that when you keep your coins on an exchange, you don’t own the private keys of your coins, so literally, you don’t have control over your coins. Use the exchange only for trading and move your coins to cold storage whenever possible. We have presented recently a detailed tutorial on how to use cold storage to secure your bitcoins; the same concepts apply to all other cryptocurrencies. Use multi-factor authentication to heighten the security of your accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges; never rely on passwords alone.