Some ramblings to start with

I recollect my first time, when I went to vote for electing the government. I had just attained the minimum age to gain voting rights for elections. But I didn’t cast my vote in favour of any political party or independent election candidate. I was confused whom to vote for. I didn’t like any of those candidates standing in the election. In those times, there was no option to vote for NOTA (None Of The Above), so I intentionally cast an invalid vote.

Later, in an interaction with a wise man, he told me that I should have cast my vote to someone. I told him that all those candidates were illiterate and corrupt. “In the event of all evil options, you should choose for a lesser evil”, were his words. I liked his advice.

Since then, times have changed. Political leaders and governments have started to perform better. Once, I confronted a man, who told me that he doesn’t care for whom to vote. Everyone is performing these days. Country’s economic and infrastructural development can be seen under the regime of both the opposing parties, so how does it matter!

Then I answered him that these days, mere growth doesn’t matter. We need to see the rate of growth under both regimes. The one who delivers better growth rate should be voted.

Well, competition is everywhere and competition demands higher & higher efficiencies each passing day. We may be continually doing our best, yet if our competitors are doing better than us, we would be seen as a failure in that race.

Something similar is going on with Steem and other leading cryptocurrencies. Steem is making a slow and steady progress. But there are many innovative blockchains in development in the market and they are doing it in full steam. The one who starts late in a race, knows that he has to make an extra effort to cover the lost time and distance. Steem needs to take this fact into consideration if it wants to maintain its leadership.

The first independent crypto-rating list by Weiss Rating

This January, one of the prominent leaders in financial rating field in USA, namely, Weiss Ratings decided to do regular ratings for Cryptocurrencies. Crypto-currency market suffers from the lack of regulation, lax standards, murky business practices, regular market hypes, FUD & crashes. Millions of investors suffer from the lack of any reliable information in this intensly technical and niche field.

To help investors identify the reliable and promising crypto related businesses, Weiss Ratings decided to lend its years of expertise to this field. Working for last 46 years, Weiss Ratings today assigns letter grades to about 55,000 institutions and investments, including almost all of the USA’s insurance companies, banks, credit unions, stocks, ETFs and mutual funds. The US Government Accountability Office has often found Weiss’ ratings better than many leading rating agencies. Unlike Moody’s, S&P, Fitch & A.M. Best, Weiss Ratings are truly independent and unbiased as they don’t accept any compensation from the companies being rated.

According to Weiss, the ratings for cryptocurrencies are based on a groundbreaking model that analyzes thousands of data points on each coin’s trading patterns, technology, and usage.

Steem was ahead of Bitcoin in January, 2018

In last week of January, Weiss published its first ever list for 93 cryptocurrencies. Steem was rated among the top five cryptocurrencies. It was even rated better than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was rated as “C+” whereas Steem was assigned a “B-” rating. Since the launch of these ratings, no cryptocurrency has been assigned an “A” (Excellent) rating so far.

Steem has got the same rating as Bitcoin now

But just 4 months later, when I checked their recent list (published on 25th May, 2018); I found Steem maintaining its “B-” rating. Yeah, sounds like an achievement! But it’s no good at all. Steem is rated “B-” with 10 other currencies and 3 currencies are rated “B+” now. 4 months back there were only 2 currencies with a “B+” rating. Would you call it a progress for Steem?

I can understand that BItcoin has improved a lot on its transaction speed and has successfully lowered its transaction fee too. This may have definitely helped it. But why Steem couldn’t do anything significant during this time?

Do you think Steem can do better in future rankings or it will just maintain the “B-” status quo?

These Ratings can help you decide where to invest

For a noob like me, it’s difficult to analyze and figure out which coin is a solid project and a reliable investment. But ratings from a credible financial rating agency may help make this task easier. At least, by such intensive and rigorous evaluation process, we won’t be putting our hard-earned money into some scam coins.

I found the 3 coins rated as best with a “B” are EOS, ADA and DCR. Of these I had never heard about DCR (Decred). I do have some investment in the other two but never knew about this third one. So their list can also help us in discovering new coins 😊.

As mentioned, to provide unbiased ratings, they don’t charge businesses. So end-users like us need to subscribe their services by paying them fee …and it’s pretty good amount for me. If you want the current list of rating free, you can get access here until Monday, June 4th.

Thank you for reading!

_{Further Reference:
Rating List for January, 2018}