In a rapidly evolving crypto market, predicting the top cryptocurrencies in 2024 is inherently speculative. However, some coins have demonstrated strong fundamentals and potential for growth. Here are five cryptocurrencies to watch in 2024
1- Harmony – ONE
What Is Harmony (ONE)?
Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The network aims to innovate the way decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows creating blocks in seconds.
According to the project’s website, Harmony is expected to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 2021
Who Are the Founders of Harmony?
Stephen Tse is the founder and CEO of Harmony. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in cryptographic protocols and type theory.
While finishing his degree, Dr. Tse became a research intern at Microsoft. In 2006 he started working as a senior engineer at Google, spending four years in the company. In 2011 he founded Spotsetter, a successful search engine which Apple later acquired. In 2014, Dr. Tse became the principal engineer for Apple.
He founded Harmony in 2017. The Harmony founding team comprises twelve people, with seven of them being former employees at Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
2- VeChain VET
What Is VeChain (VET)?
VeChain (VET) is a versatile enterprise-grade L1 smart contract platform.
VeChain began in 2015 as a private consoritium chain, working with a host of enterprises to explore applications of blockchain. VeChain would begin their transition to public blockchain in 2017 with the ERC-20 token VEN, before launching a mainnet of their own in 2018 using the ticker VET.
VeChain aims to use distributed governance and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to create an ecosystem which solves major data hurdles for multiple global industries from medical to energy, food & beverage to sustainability and SDG goals. By leveraging the power of trustless data, VeChain is building the digital backbone that will underpin the fourth industrial revolution, which demands real-time and trustless data sharing between many participants.
The platform uses two tokens, VET and VTHO, to manage and create value based on its VeChainThor public blockchain. VET generates VTHO and acts as the store of value and value transfer medium. VTHO is used to pay for GAS costs, separating the need to expend VET when writing data. This has the additional benefit of ensuring costs of using the network can be kept stable by tweaking certain variables such as the amount of VTHO required to service a transaction, or by increasing the VTHO geneation rate. Such actions first require all-stakeholder community votes.
VeChain has been able to demonstrate massively boosted efficiency, traceability and transparency across data trails, supply chains and within novel kinds of ecosystems, such as those in San Marino targeting UN SDGs, among others.
Who Are the Founders of VeChain (VET)?
VeChain is the product of creator and co-founder Sunny Lu, an IT executive who was formerly CIO of Louis Vuitton China.
Lu has since become a well-known name within the cryptocurrency industry. He has drawn attention to the ability of blockchain technology to solve transparency in particular, arguing that it can create “trust-free” enterprise/business structures that do not suffer from information corruption thanks to close working collaborations with key auditing/certification consultants such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers and DNV who verify data quality and certify industrial processes.
Fellow co-founder Jay Zhang, who directs VeChain’s global corporate structure, governance, and financial management, previously worked for both Deloitte and PriceWaterhouseCoopers in the finance and risk management sphere.
Having originally begun life in 2015, VeChain is one of the oldest dedicated smart contract platforms on the market, with reflected prestige among enterprise clients
3- The Graph GRT
What Is The Graph (GRT)?
The Graph is an indexing protocol for querying data for networks like Ethereum and IPFS, powering many applications in both DeFi and the broader Web3 ecosystem. Anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL to retrieve blockchain data. There is a hosted service in production that makes it easy for developers to get started building on The Graph and the decentralized network will be launching later this year. The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, IPFS and POA, with more networks coming soon.
To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of The Graph.
To date, over 3,000 subgraphs have been deployed by thousands of developers, for DApps like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, AAVE, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, Decentraland and many others. The Graph usage has been growing at over 50% MoM and hit over 7 billion queries during the month of September 2020.
The Graph has a global community, including over 200 Indexer Nodes in the testnet and more than 2,000 Curators in the Curator Program as of October 2020. To fund network development, The Graph raised funds from community members, strategic VCs and influential individuals in the blockchain community including Coinbase Ventures, DCG, Framework, ParaFi Capital, CoinFund, DTC, Multicoin, Reciprocal Ventures, SPC, Tally Capital and others. The Graph Foundation also successfully completed a public GRT Sale with participation from 99 countries (not including the U.S.). To date as of November 2020, The Graph has raised ~$25M.
Who Are the Founders of The Graph?
The Graph team includes professionals from the Ethereum Foundation, OpenZeppelin, Decentraland, Orchid, MuleSoft leading up to the IPO and acquisition by Salesforce, Puppet, Redhat and Barclays.
The initial co-founding team includes Yaniv Tal (project lead), Brandon Ramirez (research lead) and Jannis Pohlmann (tech lead).
The founders have engineering backgrounds and have worked together for 5-8 years. Tal and Ramirez studied electrical engineering at USC and worked together at MuleSoft, an API developer tools company that underwent an IPO and sold to SalesForce.
They previously co-founded a developer tools startup together and have spent a significant portion of their careers working to optimize the API stack. At their last startup, the founders built a custom framework on an immutable database called Datomic. The Graph was born from this vision to create immutable APIs and data access, using the GraphQL query language.
4- Fantom FTM
What Is Fantom (FTM)?
Fantom is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) smart contract platform providing decentralized finance (DeFi) services to developers using its own bespoke consensus algorithm.
Together with its in-house token FTM, Fantom aims to solve problems associated with smart-contract platforms, specifically transaction speed, which developers say they have reduced to under two seconds.
The Fantom Foundation, which oversees the Fantom product offering, was originally created in 2018, with the launch of OPERA, Fantom’s mainnet, coming in December 2019.
Fantom is an open-source decentralized smart contract platform for DApps and digital assets that was created as an alternative to Ethereum. Fantom has the goal of overcoming the limitations of previous generation blockchains and balancing three components: scalability, security and decentralization. The project offers a set of tools to simplify the process of integrating existing DApps, as well as a detailed staking reward system and built-in DeFi instruments.
Fantom is a Layer-1 blockchain that uses a scratch-built consensus mechanism and independent consensus layer, Lachesis, to facilitate DeFi and related services on the basis of smart contracts. Lachesis provides security for other layers as well, including Opera, Fantom’s EVM-compatible smart contract chain. The long-playing mission of the project is to “grant compatibility between all transaction bodies around the world.”
One of Fantom’s key strengths is its performance and efficient transaction processing, namely thousands of transactions per second, where transactions are settled in 1-2 seconds, and the cost is fractions of a cent per transaction. As a result, Fantom provides higher scalability but at a lower cost.
The ecosystem is based on two main technologies: Lachesis protocol and Opera.
The Lachesis protocol is the core consensus layer that secures the Fantom network by providing both transaction speed and security.
Lachesis is an aBFT consensus engine that uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) algorithm. How it works: network data can be processed at different times, and the network filters the participants, allowing only one third, which are allocated due to erroneous or malicious behavior, without compromising network processes.
Fantom’s Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT) Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism maintains the efficiency of the entire network, its design provides security at maximum speed. Fantom developers emphasize that the PoS mechanism is a leaderless phenomenon — there are no leaders of blocks and participants, and anyone can join (or leave) the network of nodes at a convenient moment.
The key qualities of Lachesis are: asynchronous, leaderless, Byzantine fault-tolerant, and near-instant finality.
As for Opera, it’s an application development layer or Fantom’s mainnet deployment platform, permissionless and open-source hosting DApps. Thanks to EVM integration and support for the Solidity programming language, Fantom has a full set of smart contract capabilities, which allows users to seamlessly interact with Ethereum platforms while maintaining the advantage of Fantom’s transaction efficiency.
The Fantom Foundation concluded that removing block leaders improves network security, so Opera uses a PoS model and leaderless validators (validators do not determine which blocks are valid).
In addition to being a fast, secure and cheap payment platform that enables to make fast and secure payments at minimal cost, Fantom also features on-chain governance where users vote with FTM tokens (one token equals one vote). Of the features: users have the right to express the degree of agreement / disagreement on a scale from 0 to 4.
FTM is the native utility in-house PoS token of Fantom that powers the ecosystem and is applied for payments, network fees, staking, and governance. FTM forms the backbone of transactions, and allows fee collection and staking activities, along with the user rewards the latter represents.
Who Are the Founders of Fantom?
The Fantom Foundation was founded by South Korean computer scientist Dr. Ahn Byung Ik. Currently, the platform’s CEO is Michael Kong.
The team behind Fantom has extensive experience primarily in the field of full-stack blockchain development, and aimed to create a smart contract platform which privileges scalability, decentralization and security.
According to its official website, Fantom’s team also consists of specialist engineers, scientists, researchers, designers and entrepreneurs. Employees are located throughout the world, matching the ethos of a distributed platform.
5- Zilliqa ZIL
What Is Zilliqa (ZIL)?
Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform is home to many decentralized applications, and as of October 2020, it also allows for staking and yield farming.
Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet.
The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts.
Who Are the Founders of Zilliqa?
Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Saxena and several students in the School of Computing published a paper in 2016 that outlined how a sharding-focused blockchain could improve network efficiency and speed.
Around the same time, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital alongside Max Kantelia, a lifelong finance and tech entrepreneur, and Juzar Motiwalla, former president of the Singapore Computer Society. The company incorporated Zilliqa Research in June 2017 to develop the Zilliqa network, bringing on Dong Xinshu as its CEO, Yaoqi Jia as its chief technology officer and Amrit Kumar as its chief scientific officer. All three previously worked as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing.