by Andreas Nicolaou

It’s been a devastating few months for altcoins.

Most of the tokens that performed well in April/May are 3-5x below all-time-high. Even EOS ($21 in May,) sits at under $5 after the launch of its much-hyped mainnet, NEO ($86 in May) now sits at the $17 mark, its lowest point since September. An absolute bloodbath.

The famous rave scene, from the 1998 movie Blade. "Bloodbath"

While everything looks like a scene from the 1998 movie Blade, it may be a good time to go shopping. Today, we are going to look at 10 Altcoins that have potential to make some big moves.

We will be analysing these projects based on:

• Performance of the team, according to GitHub commits
• Milestones reached according to their Roadmap
• Activity in their Telegram community (frequently updated, ongoing conversations, etc…)
• Up-and-coming major announcements
• Working product (if there’s any) and its performance

1. BINANCE COIN (BNB)

Binance has been one of the most stable (if there’s such a thing a stable nowadays) coins in the top 100, and is currently at just under $10, only 2x under all-time high.

Changpeng Zhao, AKA ‘CZ’ has managed to turn the exchange into a behemoth in just over a year since ICO, generating $1 billion in profit in his first year. A historic achievement for a company in its first year. CZ also recently presented a demo of their upcoming decentralised exchange two months ahead of schedule.

BNB is a juggernaut of a token, and holding so well over the past six months gives it a good chance of being a top 10 token in the future; so it’s safe to say that Binance is on track to disrupt the crypto exchange sector further.

2. STEEM (STEEM)

Steemit has a community of over 80,000 active users, one of the largest communities in the crypto world. Their blockchain has been running for over two years, changing thousands of lives through its innovative rewards system.

It's not surprising for a project that has such a strong fan-base and community to rank as high as Steem on this list; especially considering that Steem has empowered the crypto community like no project before. Nowadays, people are travelling around the world, getting paid to blog about their travels, and creating new sources of income in developing countries thanks to its blockchain, all of this while praising the name of Steemit.

Currently sitting at support at around $0.90, Steem could be an excellent addition to any portfolio in the upcoming semester.

3. KOMODO (KMD)

Last year, many people on the internet labelled 2018 as the year of the privacy coin.

With coins like Monero and Zcash currently dominating the privacy coin market cap, one of the privacy coins that has sat quietly in the shadows is Komodo. Being a decentralised platform that allows users to create private blockchains, Komodo has been sitting quietly in the shadows, waiting for its huge potential to be acknowledged.

Komodo also allows for atomic swaps, with over 100 thousand of them executed to date. Komodo also has the most commits on GitHub over any other project, giving it the potential to be the #1 privacy coin in the near future.

4. PUNDI X (NPXS)

Pundi X aims to roll out more than 100,000 blockchain-based PoS devices worldwide in a significant challenge to the status quo of the US$ 2.2-trillion global retail payments market.

Since the beginning of August, Pundi has sent its PoS devices to the UK, Switzerland, Brazil, Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Pundi X is trying to make buying cryptocurrency as easy as buying a drink and, if Pundi X manages to hit its milestones over the next six months, has the potential to become a top 10 token.

5. EFFECT.AI (EFX)

Effect.ai has been running its beta platform for about six weeks now. They have a large and active community on Telegram, and release weekly video updates their achievements, the events they have visited, or the improvements on their platform.

Chris Dawe, CEO of Effect, is continuously on Telegram answering questions and getting involved while travelling the world for conferences. Private beta testers have confirmed to work classifying images to train an AI for the Singapore Government, which constitutes a huge proof of adoption.

Effect plays as a huge competitor for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and it could potentially make a huge impact on its revenue. A much needed new player in the sector of micro-tasks, led by people who know and care about the crypto-community.

Disclaimer: The author of this article has at some point invested in the mentioned projects. This article does not constitute financial advice, and only reflects the personal convictions of its creator. The rest of the Universal Crypto team has no inference in the content of these articles.