Cryptocurrencies to Watch: December 2017 - Christmas Edition

As promised in my post from December 1st, which detailed the 50% profit I made on my investments in November, I'm writing today to reveal the cryptocurrencies that I will be investing in for the month of December 2017.

This is not financial advice, please ensure you research any investment thoroughly before you make your own investment decisions.

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Well, I was going to start by picking a cryptocurrency that I invested in last month — IOTA, that I invested in at $0.57.

Crazily, the price of this one went up by over 60% in the last 24 hours and is now at $2.36 at the time of writing, taking me to over a 300% ROI on that in less than a month.

I do believe in the long-term future of IOTA and I will be holding my investment, but out of fear for a price correction I will not be investing further today.

Last minute edit: Gulp! Before hitting publish, IOTA has now rocketed to almost $3! Look at this huge 7-day price increase:

My plan for this month is a little different:

Almost every cryptocurrency out there is flying right now. For this reason, it's a little harder to find those that are potentially underpriced.

I'll be making three selections this month, and I'll be investing to hold for the medium-to-long term. These are:

Verge (XVG)

Price whilst writing this: $0.0072

No, your eyes are not deceiving you — this coin costs less than a cent.

Verge has been a part of my portfolio for a few months now and it's not really gone anywhere in terms of price. In fact, I'm currently at just a 1.67% ROI on Verge at the time of writing this.

However, there are a few reasons that I believe XVG will increase in price.

Firstly, we're still awaiting word on the Wraith protocol that has been delayed a number of times previously. If this does finally get released (or partly released, as it's being released in stages) then we could be in for a nice run of support for the coin.

Privacy coins are in hot demand right now.

Monero, which is the largest privacy coin in the market, more than doubled in price throughout November.

ZCash, another large privacy coin, increased by almost 50% in the same timeframe.

The ability to be anonymous and untraceable is something that Verge has the potential to do — if planned releases do indeed see the light of day.

Secondly, the founder of Verge has been announced as an advisor of a coin called TokenPay.

TokenPay could potentially become a solution to allow people to spend Verge on debit cards, according to a Facebook post from the TP team. Image courtesy of Reddit.

Ark (ARK)

Price whilst writing this: $3.74

Ark has been in the $2-$4 price range for what feels like an eternity.

Even though it recently hit an all-time high of $4.20, this price was fleeting and it was back below $4 once again.

Ark shows a lot of promise and is perhaps going under-the-radar as a scalable blockchain solution due to the meteoric rise of IOTA.

Ark sits in 31st place in the overall cryptocurrency standings, based on market capitalisation, but there are undoubtedly coins with lower potential (and also outright scams) sitting above it inside the top 25.

This could be down to the fact you can 'stake' your Ark coins, so people are rewarded for holding instead of trading.

When you hold onto the currency (in specific wallets) you support the Ark blockchain.

For doing so, you will receive dividends that add up to around 7% yield per year.

Even if Ark didn't increase in price, we'd still make approximately a 7% return on our investment.

As the price of Ark increases, the value of our dividend increases.

As we can see from the Ark roadmap, we are expecting a new mobile wallet to be released soon and there are a variety of other performance-related updates due in the not-too-distant future.

If these updates release successfully, there could be exciting times ahead for the Ark ecosystem.

Civic (CVC)

Price whilst writing this: $0.33

If Ark owners thought their crypto had remained stagnant for too long, they'd feel overjoyed at their gains in comparison to that of Civic.

In the last four months, Civic hasn't moved. Well, it has been up to highs of $0.51 and to lows of $0.25, but four months ago today (September 4th) the price was exactly the same as it is today; $0.33.

Compared to the price of Bitcoin, this is a huge drop in price from around 8500 satoshis to under 3000. I now believe it is significantly undervalued compared to its potential upside.

Civic is a blockchain-based identity verification platform.

Companies often need to verify your personal information, but when doing so they will store your data. If the company gets hacked, your personal (and valuable) private information can be accessed, stolen and exploited.

Civic will alleviate this by verifying identities on behalf of other companies and storing their encrypted data in thousands of different places on the blockchain. No hacker would be able to piece together the stolen parts of the most complex identity puzzle.

We often talk about 'adoption' in crypto — ideas are great, the potential is huge, but who is actually going to use it?

Well, Civic already have a range of websites that use their service, notably including WikiHow; a site that generates 200-million visits a month.

Civic is also being used in ICOs to verify that investors are eligible to take part based on age and country restrictions, as well as ensuring KYC and AML laws are abided to.

I personally believe that Civic is one of the sleeping giants in the crypto world right now and that an explosion in popularity is just one big partner away.

If Civic can land one impressive partner — and they have a well-connected founder in Vinny Lingham to make this a real possibility — then it could get the ball rolling at an exciting pace for all involved.

As Always...

I will review my picks at the end of the month. Make sure you hit FOLLOW to follow the progress and to get my picks for next month.

Let's hope we can find another month of positivity and profitability in the crypto investment space.