On the discussion of highly speculative trade positioning (because it's always fun to have one or two of those on your books as a minority holding), I would propose Koinos' $KOIN as a consideration. Beware however, it is presently only listed on one exchange and volume is extremely low. However, as you'll see below, that is indeed one of the reasons I like it as a potential mover.
The distinguishing feature of this Level 0 chain is its free-to-use architecture based on "MANA", which automatically regenerates on top of the native KOIN token. This means that holding KOIN will in turn grant perpetual access to a portion of network resources, and solutions such as MANA liquidity pools can be leveraged to allow people to interact with the network without having to hold any KOIN themselves. Ultimately, this could prove to be a boon with regard to real world integration utility.
The network currently runs on a three second block time, allowing for fairly low latency usage (which can be improved through the network's system of "fork-less upgrades"), and uses a unique "proof of burn" consensus algorithm that virtualizes hash power, allowing equitable competition for the current 2% annual inflation rewards paid to network miners.
Koinos offers universal language support so developers can work in their preferred language, as well as a team of experienced founders, two of whom helped launch the Steemit network ($STEEM), which saw quite a bit of interest for a time and still ranks amongst the top 300 assets by market cap.
Interestingly, the network was also "fair launched" on Ethereum before their mainnet went live, by allowing anyone to generate KOIN tokens for themselves equitably, and not "pre-mining" AKA reserving a chunk of assets for the founding Koinos Group. The fact that there isn't a large foundation treasury to incentivize active development has become a point of contention, but a recent third-party proposal to vastly inflate the network supply in order to create a foundation treasury was scrapped, in turn building confidence that the network will not pull away from its fair launch ethos, and instead find alternative grass-roots methods to incentivize development.
Will any of this allow Koinos to drive adoption and catch up to other major networks that already have large amounts of total value locked? Time will tell... but a free-to-use blockchain that can be infinitely upgraded through smart contract modules without requiring any hard forks would appear to be a fairly attractive feature set.
Although trade volume of the KOIN token remains pitiful, a cross-chain bridge was just launched which could aid in capital flow. In truth, it is this relative lack of access to the token presently, in conjunction with its low market cap ($18.6MM) and relatively low supply (~33M tokens), that indicate its potential to blast off IF or when the network begins to gain some real traction. The network remains supported by a fairly active community alongside some dedicated developers, and so it is my belief that KOIN offers a pretty good risk/reward for those looking for a speculative asset.
If we do see a big crypto cycle continue through next year's BTC halving, and especially if the Koinos community finds a way to push development and/or gets a more major exchange listing, I'd be looking for something along the lines of a "relatively easy" 10X return on this. Of course, this is all speculation... but I've laid my thoughts bare for your own consideration.
💸 Check 'em out:
https://koinos.io/ 🤘🏼
