With the cryptosphere as a whole still suffering from the so-called Long January, it seems surprising that several new coins on the block have gained such a hefty amount of market share in such a short time. We’re going to look at three of these newcomers – IOTA, Cardano, and EOS – to see what makes them special. More importantly, we’re going to try to figure out whether their meteoric rises are sustainable.
IOTA
IOTA aims to be the cryptocurrency face of the Internet of Things, a revolutionary concept centered around allowing machines to seamlessly interact with one another and their environments. Your smartwatch doesn’t just count your steps, it acts like a passport for your life, controlling your home security system, your home temperature, what ads you see as you walk down the street, and much, much more. In its full implementation, the Internet of Things is a smart heads-up display laid over reality, and that reality is constantly adjusting to the presence of your personal smart devices. As IOTA envisions the Internet of Things, it will be acting as fuel for the whole ecosystem of interconnected devices.
Cardano
Cardano is a platform coin, like Ethereum or NEO, but with a bit of a twist. Although Cardano’s code is open source, it is also peer-reviewed. Cardano hopes to knock Ethereum out of its almost-top spot with great code and a sturdy platform for building decentralized applications. Its rapid rise reflects a quality-over-quantity shift in the market. With over 1,600 coins currently listed on CoinMarketCap, the slush pile is deep and getting deeper. Cardano hopes to reverse this trend with airtight code and quality dApps, presenting a high-brow alternative to the oodles of Ethereum platform coins.
EOS
EOS is another platform coin and potential Ethereum slayer, but it’s approaching the problem a bit more tangentially than Cardano. EOS essentially is shooting to be Ethereum, but better. The development team has taken a back-to-basics view, working on the EOS speed and scalability relative to its more famous cousin. This approach appears to be paying dividends – quite literally, due to EOS’ innovative inflation-reward model – as the coin continues to rise against Ethereum’s market capitalization.
It’s always tricky to predict the future in the cryptocurrency arena. What we can say is that all three of these coins show immense promise, and that’s been confirmed by their relatively fast market cap rise so far this year. What’s more, none of these coins appear to have fallen victim to the usual scenario with young, upwardly mobile coins. Their respective rises have been the results of solid tech meeting eager investors, rather than hype or outright dishonest pumping. It’s virtually a guarantee that these three coins have a promising future. Is any of them an Ethereum killer? It’s still far too early to say.
