The Bitcoin has made a mind-blowing rally from 11k to almost over 41k in just 2 months, and we have seen some good gains for altcoins like XLM and LRC during this time, but not all the outperformed like back in 2017. This left many wondering if the Alts will ever pump after all.  well for that we need to take a look at the last bull run.

In 2017 bitcoin dumped about -43% days in 5 Bitcoin from its All-time high at 17.12.17 and made way for the alts fly to the moon. Well now we are experiencing a similar situation, BTC has reached its All-time high of $41,941.56 on the 8. January 2021 and has dumped about 31% for 3 days. So if the history repeats it the time for Alts including ETH to mark new all-time highs.   

Last time, many Alts have outperformed the Bitcoin and Ethereum and made over 200% from the start of the cycle and left many others just to scratch the surface.  This leads us to the next question which one will explode in 2021. Don’t worry I will explain you my top pics for the Altcoin that I think would fly up in the sky. In my coin pick, I have considered the following factors into consideration to diversify the portfolio 1. low market cap coins 2. Area of operation and third use-case. Many coins which operate may not be that cool for a moon short others don't have that many use cases for a broad range of adoption. and for moon short coin it should have a very low market cap. To be honest, coins that are under the 100 Million will do an awesome job than the ones sitting on the top. As you know as further we go down the Altcoin forest the higher the risk it is, so I have also included some coins high in the coin market cap. Here are my top pics not in a particular order.

1. Polkadot (DOT)

Polkadot is a multi-chain interoperable blockchain developed by Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum, which aims to facilitate the transfer of assets and messages across different blockchains. If you need a brief introduction to the Polkadot, then here it is. Polkadot is founded back in 2016 by the former CTO and co-founder of the Ethereum, Gavin Wood. Mr Wood made the first functional version of the Ethereum, coded the Solidity programming language and wrote in the yellow paper of Ethereum, the same project which dot is competing.

Polkadot consists of many para chains which are linked to the Relay Chain. The para chains are independent blockchain which has their own identities and is maintained by different collector nodes. These application-specific chains can be linked to other blockchains outside the polka ecosystem, produce their own assets and choose their own consensus mechanism namely the PoW or PoS.

well, why do I think Polkadot will make some good gains in 2021, That's because 2021 is the year of smart contract blockchains, more and more developers want to make Dapps that are interoperable with other chains. So to eliminate the high fees from the ETH and give more exposure to different assets for the DeFi products they need to make use of projects like Polkadot. So the only limiting factor of the market cap of the Ethereum and Bitcoin. To be honest, I don't see a flipping of ETH with DOT any soon, indeed the market cap could fly to around 10 to 20 Billion very soon.   

Here is a quick update:  Polkadot has already hit its ATH and gained 20% increase in its market cap before publishing the post.

2. Kava.io

If you are obsessed with DeFi then there is a better one for you. The Kava chain is an interoperable cross-chain Defi lending protocol that issues stable coins for another crypto as collateral. in simpler words, Kava is a better version of Maker which can support almost any coin. Kava which currently supports the BNB as is collateral is working hard to launch Bitcoin and XRP as the underlying asset. I'm not sure how you are going to consider it but I can't imagine the possibility of a coin like bitcoin collateralised on a custom blockchain build using the cosmos SDK. As the Defi hype will going to stay here for a while and billions of Dollars locked on different projects the Kava chin will fly to the moon. The only limiting factor which I see is, of course, the Market cop of Maker,  Kava can fly more than 10x and capture some of the market shares of the Maker protocol, so its time to the moon. 

Learn more about Kava at CMC earn: coinmarketcap.com/earn/project/kava

3. Theta Network 

Theta is a platform which wants to decentralise and democratic video streaming and online content delivery. They have made a cool end to end infrastructure for decentralised video streaming. The cool part of them is that they even got a partnership from Samsung and Google to run their nodes. And moreover, Samsung has chosen THETA TV  as their exclusive partner for streaming VR content in order to reduce the costs. The Theta app will come preinstalled on the newest smartphone from Samsung.  I'm not sure how many eyeballs are going look at Samsung video streaming platform, but that going to be a hell lot of advantage for Theta network and its token. If you are still not sure about theta then take a look at other partners of this project that includes Pandora.tv, Gfuel, Fourth.media, MovieBloc, cos.tv and Play labs.  Now the sitting around 19th place 200M market cap so there is good space of development. 

4. Matic Network

You know as long as there isn't any fully functional version of the Ethereum till the end of 2021, all the layer 2 solutions of the current ecosystem will fly up in the sky to cut down the tx cost and take more numbers of transactions through the chain. Well, it true that there are many other L2 solutions at the movement but none of them can match with the potential of the Matic network. It’s because Matic is an interoperable multi-chain solution to run dapps. This Indian crypto project has more than 36 Dapps across different chains. So as more and more projects migrate to the network the higher it goes.  

5. TrustSwap

Have you considered the possibility of subscriptions paid using crypto, or an easy possibility for companies to pay salary using crypto? Well, trust swap is the only protocol available out there which successfully manages to solve the problem of the need to code crazy smart-contracts for recurring payments. is simpler words Trustswap can be compared with a payment processor like Stripe which helps you to set recoring payments from your credit card. Trust swap offers a plug and play tools to create and manage subscriptions. users can see all the supported subscribers on their wallet and manage them decently,  what more interesting about trustSwap the ability to offer trustless ICOs. They also run a platform for projects to run ICOs in a decentralised way. they have different ways to protect the investors from scammy ICO. One of the genius ways is the releasing of funds upon completion of different milestones and roadmaps. Projects have to deliver products in order to receive their funds. To add the trustworthiness of the project they have to lockup trust swap token in order to present their ideas, Upon failure of delivering the promised product or milestone a portion of their staked SWAP token will be burned or reallocated to the investors.  It small market capped token sitting below the 200 rankings can jump a lot during this bull run. 

6. Band protocol

Defi Defi Defi, I'm not sure how many projects in this list have something to do with the Defi sector. well, none of those projects on the Ethereum blockchain will be possible without the Chainlink oracle. Chainlink provides DeFi projects with the most valuable information for them to function properly. And what about the projects on other chains you might ask. There comes the cosmos SDK based Band protocol into play. and is a cross-chain data oracle that aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts. The band protocol has a highly improved oracle script which can provide reliable data faster and cheaper than chainlink.  band protocol offers ready to use APIs that could be connected to a DeFi project without problems. the use of the Cosmos SDK helps Band to independently operate and provide data to both Etherium and its L2 solutions. 

The limiting factor for a potential mooning the market cap of chainlink, but if Defi really takes a hit during the next few days I'm not sure what the price of I band potentially be.   

Some Extras: ETH, XLM, Cosmos (Atom)

First things first your obvious bet for a potential gain is of-course the Ethereum. As more and more ethereum gets locked up in Defi protocols and in ETH2.0 beacon chain, I personally see a potential of 20k for ethereum during this bull run. As Ethereum flies up many other coins will also follow it too. The next coin to consider is the coin which is going to dethrone the XRP and becomes the banker's coin. As the American SEC tries to take down XRP, Steller will be going to gain more in value. XLM has rallied a lot during this month after having a huge setback in the past. I personally see a price potential of 60¢ per XLM and sitting on a market cap of 13B around the end of January. If you have really gone there the list then you might notice that how many of the tokens mentioned are using the Cosmos SDK.  So a potential gain for those implies to a mooning of the Cosmos ecosystem. I haven’t included Atom in the main list because of its already huge market cap. A 10x gain will place it just below XRP in 4th position which is not very clear at the moment. But I do see a potential of 5 to 8% gain the market cap 

After reading this you might have an impression that I'm a big chap who knows something about crypto. Well, some of your assumptions might be correct but what not correct is the fact that I'm, not a financial advisor. I just a random dude around his 20s writing about crypto. Everything in this post should be considered as educational only, to add something  Cryptocurrencies are very volatile and can make huge changes in a matter of seconds. What's more interesting is many in traditional finance consider Bitcoin a scam. So DOWR before jumping after a 20-year-old. 

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