Recovery is hard, especially when your biz model is hamstrung, not appealing.

If your technology is plain broken or poorly designed, well that is another story.

If your tech team is missing a few key players, it's hard to find a new player that fits.

Then throw in the Cryptocurrency and Distributed Ledger complexities,

and lack of a sound biz plan with decent marketing.

What you end up with in the Cryptosphere with such a convergence of all three factors you get a perfect storm into which, the unworthy will most certainly perish, at some point.

The question is, now that everything in the Cryptosphere has summarily bottomed out and, the upward mini bounce is in play, which of the alt-coins, and tokens large and small will rebound all the way as nice investment plays?

Frankly many good projects have been lumped into a pile and broadly painted with the "Shitcoin" brush by the ETH and BTC crowd.

In this post, I extract a few of what I see as 'potential' rebound gems with unique utility and also four players with much needed privacy functions, some of which I have been following on and off the past 5 plus years.

I am pulling them "out of that pile", so as to take a quick health checkup look at the utility, market need, team, the biz model, the tech and the competitive landscape to help the investor gauge if they have the 'right stuff' to rebound all the way and also send a "shot across their bow" as a wake up call. As such, I also added recent privacy 'emergent' coins to the pile, ARRR and DERO into the mix, as pumped/touted by Berwick of $ Vigilante every once and a while, as his investment team is pretty street smart in hindsight.

My 'spidey feel' list scoring is relative between those listed and considers UPSIDE GENERAL PROSPECTS relative to current market leaders.

If you are looking for my views on DEFI, well move on.

Here is a quick snap shot of my scores, with the key highlights below, as always interested in everyone's feedback.

Bottom line is 'Giddyup' to become or stay relevant, otherwise perish. My Heath Check Scores below...

Ok, let's now 'pigeon hole' their value in one sentence and do the highlight health checkups for each: 

#83 BAT- How  Permission Advertising should work on the Web via the Brave Browser- Report Card: B+

I said in an earlier post way back in  May of 2020 that looked like BAT was breaking away to "Go it's own way", which has turned out to be only partly true, largely because the logic driving Hi-Frequency Trdaing these days in the crypto sphere all echo BTC and ETH curves, as these automated traders "run the tables"  minute by minute, 24*7*365. No question Brave is the early leader in Permissioned Advertising on the Desktop. that said Mobile adoption of their browser has been middling because they were late to the mobile game and, that is where the 'big numbers' are in terms of device count. The EU has regulated Permissioned Advertising as law, while Google has pushed their compliance to these EU laws back to 2024, saying they need more time to get such functionality to market, which is total BS and, an anti-trust action for the EU to pursue, that is IF the EU survives a predicted bust up, triggered most likely by Germany leaving that sinking ship. So the Market Need  for Permissioned Ad control on Browsers (Spam busters) driven by regulation is a bit wobbly these days.

The Team at Brave behind BAT, led by Brendan Eich, is a first rate mix of top 'Valley' techies, so no questioning the brainpower.  Strategy wise, Brave's BAT biz model is 'milk toast' imo, as Brave are operating as a Unicorn right now. Imo, Eich needs to figure out how to get other browser platforms to adopt the permissioned UI/UX of Brave and latch that back into their  buy/look advertising machinery powered by BAT, where these other browsers operator as wholesale partners with Brave.

BAT sits on top of ETH 1.0 at the moment as an #ERC20 utility Smart Contract. Brave is betting the ETH 2.0 merge will give them the TPS they need, if  that paid  browser view placement ad growth in TPS ever materializes, given Brave's #BAT current biz model, which frankly imo has a competitive up hill battle against other browsers, Chrome being the big one, which is also based on Chromium like Brave.

BAT is imo a Medium Risk, Moderate Return, Accumulate buy with a long term outlook. Please also balance your BAT buy vs. other  Medium Risk opportunities functioning in other markets where the upside could be better than the Advertising buy market which sucks right now, but will comeback. The ETH 2.0 merge impact is the BIG IF with BAT being ERC20,  if ETH community and core developers delay or mis-step, then Brave would do well to migrate their ERC20 Smart Contract to some other platform like SOL which has the ERC20 EVM SC & TPS "Transaction per second" performance at scale. 

#29 Stellar- How Asset backed crypto must work on the Web for Main Street Biz. Report Card: B

Despite the fact Stellar Foundation has #WEF "crony capitalist'  toilet paper stuck to its foot and the CBs and their CDBCs drooling all over it in some cases, the #Stellar #XLM code base community is distributed and smart enough to see through that set of relationships. As such, each application project is free to fashion the Stellar FOSS on public #Github any old way they like. Stellar's design to facilitate atomic peer 2 peer dissimilar alt-coins together with decent price discovery via their built-in distributed DEX capability is just what is required to make the cryptosphere widely accessible to main street B2B and B2C  business. 

That said, Stellar's business model and ready to use capability is 'middling' and needs work to attract enough developers to the party, a lot of their material is stale accessible online is stale and the kiddish "Lumenaut" branding of developers needs a re-work. Jed McCaleb, the founder of Stellar, who some view as the "Willy Wonka" of Crypto, has certainly created value in the past,  so imo, he needs to 'snap to attention' on this one big marketing M-I-A, and wither get his CMO going or get a new one with better focus and strategy,  as the game has change out there in the Cryptosphere and a pretty website is not enough. 

The Stellar consensus tech derived largely from the thinking efforts of Phd Dr. David Mazières out of Stanford, is imo a seminal break thru in that as an asset backed crypto project , you pick how you connect your asset anchor to other anchor slices via trust lines, ie- if you don't like WEF and #BIS or other banks then don't use them to provide consensus or liquidity and trust, go form your own  trusted settlement alliances.

Competitively is where XLM and Stellar have the biggest challenge, in that their current biz marketing model is well, dated. Time for Stellar to freshen up, bring in some fresh thinking to re-create their awareness among a broader audience of developers and investors and main street business, via multi-pronged education campaigns and,  Stellar imo are in need some top ranked product management and marketing associations to  help them create a better adoption/ready to use and even turnkey/out of box experience with ready to use patterns for different vertical markets on Main street and not just Wall Street.   

XLM is therefore imo a Medium Risk, potential high return buy. So Accumulate with a long term outlook but also balance your XLM buy vs. the release of ETH 2.0 to determined the pace and size of upside adoption of Stellar. The ETH 2.0 merge impact is the BIG IF with #XLM, if #ETH core and community get the merge wrong, the other alt-coins ERC20 and other (even CARDANO)  SC types might well consider adopting the XLM 'glue settlement' model. That said #Chainlink and #Cosmos are also Stellar's competition in some respects for non asset backed crypto SCs. 

#330 Maidsafe- How C2C privacy should work on the Web as Internet 2.0. Report Card: C

The SAFEnetwork crew in #Scotland and also #India have been toiling away at various rates for years. The saving grace of this small cap play is their transparency of updates and openness and the fact MaidSafecoin has recently emerged in #ERC20 form as eMAID. David Irvine the initial mastermind behind MaidSafe and the release of what is soon, a private distributed  Storage #DAO at its foundation and, a new way of deploying private distributed 'Internet 2.0' or "web 4.0" or what ever you want to call it, is indeed innovative. Is there a latent need building up for SAFEnetwork? That said, the SAFEnetwork test network is the only way to try out the  earn rewards for lending out storage capabilities of the #SAFEnetwork, which is due online likely end of this year, so its really hard to gauge the real  secure private utility in terms of performance. Let's face it if the SAFEnetwork ends up dog slow, no one will use it for storage sharing, so the dynamic zoning aspect of their design and how quickly it converges as things change needs to be validate at scale. 

The core paid team at SAFEnetwork is quite small and the developer community is also small, yet both are very effective. Not much has been spent on marketing and their current marketing model is restricted to online forum and website updates, as #Maidsafe arrived really early in the crypto space as one of the first back in 2015 and their ICO did not net much  US $15M, versus the gaudy amounts of say EOS  fueled by NYC money and others like them.

That said their tech is polishing up nicely, based on many years of Irvine and a few of his early compatriots really understanding network plumbing and traffic flows in the distributed sense. Competitively Maidsafe has little or no competition when viewed as an Internet 2.0 reboot. When looked at purely as a storage play where that market segment according to Coingecko is US $3.8B  with 31 competitors. 

eMAID is imo a high Risk, with potentially a very high return buy,  IF Maidsafe's SAFEnetwork distributed storage DAO releases with a good user experience for sharing storage to earn useful  utility crypto rewards which  then can be spent on other useful SAFEnetwork ecosystem valu,  such as web-hosting and music streaming et al, which right now as a set of service offers on which to spend the utility tokens is embryonic as an offering created by just a few third party developers in the community. So imo a Selective Accumulate strategy buying eMAID at the 'bottom' in small amounts, with a longer term outlook is likely a way forward for the small investor. eMAID is so lightly traded, you have to pick your spots to get good value with small amounts, so buyer beware. Maybe just maybe Maidsafe can figure out how to attract more  developers once their vault storage sharing feature is released in the wild and proves to work well. We will see for sure by early 2023 imo.

#398 Electroneum-  How Mobile Mining should work? Maybe... Report Card: C-

Richard Ells, the CEO master of marketing spin at  ETN  launched with many biz relationships in play in the fall of 2017, celebrated with much fanfare and pumped 'big time' in the alt crypto media online, only to have technical problems cause the whole project to reboot, much to the chagrin of early investors. Then ETN developed a case of  flatline fever, which lasted for 18 months  before a small coat tail bump happening in March of 2021. As an idea mobile phone mining makes sense, executing it properly so the smartphone does not burn a PoW mark into your fingertips and still your Apps work in a performant manner is another story. The Team is marketing and relationship heavy focused on secondary markets in many respects. 

The biz model makes sense and from the relationship perspective ETN has done a reasonable job. The ETN tech however is another story, after a couple of attempts to get the mining right, ETN seems to be now ok, however most crypt investors who got burned in the early part of the market and are no longer  sitting on their ETN stash imo, which is likely being hoarded by the executive there, as none of the big crypto investors are tracking  and trading ETN which is focused on the world of Faster Payments and Lower fees, a micro payment market were there is plenty of competition and not much retail/service market segment buy in. OK enabling the Gig Economy is one thing, but freelancers still need to buy groceries and pay rent.

As such, imo, #ETN is really high risk and not a buy at the moment. Frankly ETN might want to look at Stellar and providing their own liquidity to get buy in into ETN. Sorry to say, but in my view ETN stays "in the pile" for now. Listed in the Finance/Banking category in Coingecko, ETN would do well imo,  to carve out their own  unique niche around Mobile fast payment value add.  Perhaps linking ETN into existing mobile gaming app platform developers to buy an sell NFT assets with a back door to ERC20 might be the obvious play and upside? 

#94 DASH- Fast C2C and C2B Micro Transactions proved on the Mobile  Web - Report Card: B

#DASH  didn't get the really BIG bump in March of 2021 which many others in the top 100 Mark Cap space did get and well fell down the table as a result, despite news in the alt media that DASH has previously rescued a lot of commerce in Venezuela during that crash according to their CEO Patrick Quinn(USA). That lack of a really big bump was largely due to the race (over the cliff) to DEFI for many BIG and also small  investors looking to stake, loan and earn on the basis of some fance Smart Contract pinned up on Ethereum or where ever. Everybody in crypto at that stage of the market started TLV Total locked in Value, and the rest is history. Personally DASH is really useful day to day with desktop, IOS an Android support of both public and private payments with decent settlement speed.

"Instant transactions and micro-fees. Any amount, anytime, anywhere." is the DASH buy line and they deliver. That said the cost of running a Masternode is high, where only a few well capitalised companies can afford  to run DASH and actually earn rewards in that mode. Does DASH have a market niche? Not really. It's the everything coin, which is the problem imo, titles which belong to BTC for hard store of value and ETH at the moment for Smart Contracts. Technology wise DASH is quite good on security and performance. Marketing wise in a very competitive " we do everything coin fast payment , micro payment" market segment, well my eyes glaze over looking at DASH. Find a niche DASH or get lost in the hoard of crypto projects doing the same.

DASH is a solid medium risk investment with modest upside, at the moment. Again, like ETN, DASH might want to look at Stellar and also at providing their own liquidity to get subscribers of their app and wallet to buy in into DASH and use it more. DASH is a worth project  which delivers a good customer experience which needs to carve out their own  unique niche around Mobile fast payment value add.  Again Perhaps linking DASH into existing mobile gaming app platform developers to buy and sell #NFT assets with a back door to ERC20 might be the obvious play and upside?  Accumulate at bottom cycles of the market in small amounts and wait and see if DASH can really find their niche.  Worthy of note, some Payment FIAT firms  are holding DASH, the reasons why are here.

#68 ZCASH- Zero Knowledge Proofs are a big part of the way forward for C2B on the  MobileWeb. Report Card: B+

Thank you #ZCASH and Bryce Wilcox  " Zooko Wilcox-OHearn" at Electric Coin Co. for figuring out Zero Knowledge Proofs. According to Wikipedia " Development work on Zcash began in 2013 by Johns Hopkins professor Matthew Green and some of his graduate students.[5] The development was completed by the for-profit Zcash Company (Electric Coin Co.)".  Now What?  There is no question the Utility, Team and Tech are strong at ZCASH, but seriously sitting on your laurels ZCASH,  and expecting everyone to bow down to you like Wally does to Dilbert to acknowledge your technical superiority only gets you so far imo. So Gen "I" ,so yesterday. 

Seriously, KUDOs to Zcash which  has moved up the tables during the Meltdown as the greater cryptosphere investor horde learns how important Zero Knowledge Proofs are to preserving privacy of your business online everywhere. But Marketing "Zcash is a digital currency - fast and confidential with low fees. It's perfect for mobile payments." is a big uphill battle among MANY in the space, some of which who have added Zero Knowledge Proofs into their feature list. And let's not forget  4X larger cap player and leader in the space #30 #MONERO who is not standing still with feature improvements.

#255 ARRR-  How next gen privacy C2B Cryptosphere EcoSysem businesses should work. Report Card: B

Really good ideas sometimes show up as a result of the inventor undergoing hard circumstances, like dying for instance and coming back to life. About as hard as it gets according to Lootz at their PorcFest in Maine in 2021. Pirate Chain is exactly that instance, leveraging really innovative and less known tech from other projects to brew up the next best thing in privacy coins, this time  with a big attempt to include a main st. payment ecosystem attached. #ARRR has really wacky Priate marketing which does grab your attention, you can't ignore it and it makes you laugh and feel good. Dig deeper though and investors with an eye will see the real "meat on the bone" of the ARRR project whitepaper which does make use of Zero Knowledge Proofs.

The ARRR Solutions Architecture inventor from what I can tell, watching recorded live video interviews, is a solid NYC IT Guy who slaved it in the trenches for years learning the hard way, having earned his MS and Cisco certifications necessary to serve the money movers on Wall St.,  creating ARRR which is website billeted as "The most anonymous cryptocurrency,
a truly private, decentralized blockchain."

ARRR came to my attention watching Berwick on $ Viglante a year or so ago.  So I started to see what was behind Berwick's 'Cheshire Cat' grin, because 'like him or lump him', Berwick and his team have been right in the past more often than not. Witness Berwick's forecast about Monero, predicting a big move upward in value,  driven by greater investor adoption and use of Monero in the face of govt "money printing" shenanigans around the world,  where we all witnessed Monero's real privacy value moving up the Market Cap tables during the DEFI induced meltdown,  swiftly moving through that "DEFI schlopp" to number #30. The under the hood tech  at Pirate Chain  according to their V3 Whitepaper uses  Komodo & Litecoin tech as follows to make PoW energy conserving:

"Delayed Proof-of-Work is a native feature of the Komodo platform that notarizes a“snapshot” into other PoW blockchains. It provides a unique and innovative form of security which is as strong as the network it attaches to, yet does not require the cost to run that network. Delayed Proof-of-Work is a solution that utilizes multiple existing methods into a single hybrid consensus system that is as energy efficient as Proof-ofStake (PoS), while being secured by Litecoin’s Proof-of-Work"

ARRR's  practical utility to the investor is (at the moment) somewhat limited/hampered in that you have to jump through market exchange  liquidity pair and fee hoops to get your hands on ARRR and the  Pirate Chain ecosystem is a  vision and plan and not  yet a reality.  ARRR daily trading Volume is a light as a result and, moves day to day plus/minus value moves can be be large in relative terms. That said the ARRR tech team is solid as is the biz plan.  The real challenge looking forward for Pirate Chain is to get their 'privacy+ ecosystem' value add word out. Marketing wise, the current Pirate Marketing gig has 'run a ground',  so it's now time for the core team there to 'buy a  bigger ship'  and get 'Jack Sparrow" on board,  so as to drive a "Pirates of the Caribbean"  style awareness campaign in the greater cryptosphere market, in order for ARRR to join the big time and, attract useful ecosystem partners for main stream business enablement and use of ARRR cryptocurrency. :)

Of all the projects on this page, ARRR imo has the biggest high risk/high reward upside. The ARR team is technically ok, likely can add some more tchnical brain and muscle given their location. Pirate Chain  marketing does requires some polish however to really create awareness on a global scale, and their education material is really middling. The ARRR Ecosystem vision is actually quite practical and very good in my books. So with patience and learning to jump through the liquidity pair & fee hoops economically, the small investor can over time,  accumulate ARRR in small amounts and in the process, give this team a shout out, to help them along, as they deserve some support given their vision is really strong. 

#411 DERO-  The Future of Privacy C2C and C2B Mainstream w/ Fairly Distributed PoW Mining. Report Card: B-

The DERO project reputedly led by anonymous developers who were early developers of Bitcoin, is currently  cutting edge cryptocurrency tech shrouded in mystery. Again 'DERO' slipped out of the lips of Berwick, on one of his podcasts a few months back (normally the insights reserved for his paid newsletter) which means in typical  what appears to most  people to be a dodgy Jeff  'grifter like' fashion, there is for sure something to his mention of this  DERO project. So I dug in again to see what was up with DERO and sure enough you can go from Zero to Hero with DERO per one of my earlier posts. 

DERO is positioned as a smart contract platform with its on EVM which runs "Turing Complete EVM-BASIC"  which means any programmer no matter how junior can script up a Smart Contract in basic.  That in itself is a huge  potential technical advantage as most all programmers are capable of writing a program, no matter how complex, expressed in BASIC,  which is the ultimate recursive interpretive programming language capable of  the "spaghetti like" loop back complexity financial wizards love.(which drives QA people testing it totally crazy some days).

The documentation on Github for DERO is tight, which hints at the tech competence of the anonymous team per their DERO whitepaper per Github circa October 2nd 2018

As for the DERO buy line "DERO is a general purpose, private, and scalable decentralized application platform that allows developers to deploy powerful and unstoppable applications, while users retain total control over their assets with complete privacy." its like many out there, a total 'yawner', likely drawn up by some techno-geek pizza party at 2am in the morning.

As for their biz model, imo the DERO project still smells like early days, ie- there is no real business model in place.

Like ARRR, imo DERO is a high risk/high reward  project with potentially HUGE upside. The  'smuggly anonymous' DERO team located on Github  (Dank and Slixe)  combine with Berwick 'leaking out' whispers about their BTC heritage, ok I will take that at face value, but I'm from Missouri, so I like most investors, would demand they show me somebody really using DERO Smart Contracts, using mathematical proofs to secure blocks PoW style at low energy. DERO all sounds too good to be true to the non-technical investor, however DERO's team is re-purposing proven  math-proof cryptography to be re-applied to PoW which is new, has low power consumption and  quite "hack proof" unique.

The DERO mining model als ensures no custom ASIC mining so anybody with crap hardware can run a DERO mining rig anywhere on anything and have as good a chance of earning a reward as anyone, which means DERO cannot be centralized into mining pools the way BTC has been centralized under the control of a few for the benefit for a few.  Imo. investors should consider accumulating DERO at the bottom as often as they can and, take a long view on DERO,  as the chemistry of this project's value add mix is really hard to ignore and, DERO could  indeed explode onto the crypto scene ad the next big "to the moon" investment for the obvious reasons state above (Despite the way many feel about Berwick's  'super smug bastard' shit eating grin delivery style on $ Vigilante .  ;)  )

There you go, not so quick and not so dirty!

TK over and out (imo)