My Alt-Coins. Civic, Aventus, Stratis and OmiseGo

As Bitcoin still continues to boom, passing $15,000 on December 7, 2017, I look at my portfolio of alt-coins that I own and can’t help but type into the calculator and contemplate how much I would be up if I had just never traded in alt-currencies and kept it all as a bitcoin investment.   (sigh)

But the upside, and there is plenty of upside, is that my portfolio has still significantly increased, and trading in alt-coins has forced a learning of the technologies and tokens I am investing in that being a passive bitcoin investor probably wouldn’t have allowed for.

Here are the 4 alt-coins I currently own and why I think they have a potential long-term value in the super crowded alt-coin market:

Aventus mission is  to  disrupt the ticketing business and put the power of efficient event management back into the hands of individual promoters.   They are taking on Ticketmaster and have proposed a solution to use blockchain technology to completely revolutionize how ticketing is managed, tracked and paid for.  Aventus posits that this will give more power to people creating their own events and completely eradicate counterfeiting in ticketing.  Aventus’ info deck has a good explanation of their business.

Civic is another Ethereum based token with a lofty ambition.   Civic wants to use blockchain technology to create a low cost identity verification system.   I would try to explain it better but Gil Penchina does a pretty good job in this medium post, and to me  this is a fascinating use case for this new technology.    Watch the video:

OmiseGo is an Asia based payment solution leveraging blockchain.  Founded in Thailand, but with operations in Singapore, Japan, and Indonesia, OmiseGo has become one of the largest payment gateways in the region.  It is not a currency but a platform for payments – it connects to the Ethereum mainnet and allows for transactions across currencies and asset classes.   Many companies are early in their life cycle and don’t have actual usage of the technology, but OmiseGo has active users in Thailand and other countries using the platform.   They have raised a ton of money ($45M) from both an ICO and institutional investors.

OmiseGo also has a white-label wallet whereby it makes it very simple for people who have no access to bank accounts or fear of financial establishments to easily retain and transact their money.  It seems like they are highly focused on the financially disenfranchised people of the Southeast Asia region.

Stratis is a project development platform for applications that use blockchain.  The specific focus of Stratis is to enable developers that create applications or technology in C#, the Windows programming language.  This distinguishes it from it’s competitors.  Some of the use cases they have touted are in Medical Research, Identity Verification, Product Tracking and Data Verification.   They have also have a wallet for Stratis called the Breeze Wallet, which houses its Proof Of Stake coin.    More info about what Proof of Stake is in this post.