The new year is here. As every year, it brings about new hopes and expectations, which doesn’t mean we’re going to forget what happened in crypto during 2018. It was a disaster (or a huge opportunity, depending on your point of view). But even in the midst of such terrible times, some blockchain projects managed to keep growing and gaining value, at least relative to the market. Those were Ripple’s XRP and Tron’s TRX.
There’s a simple reason why those to projects kept growing: they have strong fundamentals. These are tokens that have real-life use cases which are driving them forward unlike so many other digital assets that are just subject to speculative market forces.
And the news is: they’re still moving forward. They’re making strategic moves that will ensure that, in the future, they will give Bitcoin a run for its money (fiat or virtual). Let’s start with XRP.
XRP is Ripple Labs’ native token. Ripple is a private company that works on blockchain solutions that eliminate the usual friction in settling international payments. It has a very solid use case among financial institutions and remittance services the world over, and it recently became the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
It’s managed to grow against the current by securing some vital strategic partnerships (like Banco Santander, the world’s best bank which is using Ripple’s technology already at the production level) and it keeps announcing new partnerships.
Ripple has done it again as the new year starts. Twelve new companies have announced they will adopt Ripple’s software (called xRapid) to settle international payments quickly, safely and cheaply. Among those companies are Bittox, which is one of the most important crypto exchanges in the world; Bitso, a Mexican crypto exchange that’s managed to gain the crypto community’s respect; Coins.ph, a crypto exchange based on the Philippines islands and Bitstamp.
While those new partnerships are not use cases, they still mean that XRP will have increased trade volumes and demand from users that were previously unable to get their hands on some XRP tokens. It’s good for the project, and it’s good for the token’s price because that increased demand will drive the coin’s value up.
Then there’s Tron
Tron bought BitTorrent a few months ago. That alone turned Tron into the world’s largest decentralized network.
And now, BitTorrent announced that it would issue its own cryptocurrency called BitTorrent Token (BTT). This will be a new digital asset that will incentivize BitTorrent users to keep seeding the files they have.
The longer you seed your files, the more tokens you will get as a reward. The tokens will be made effective by Binance (which is one of Tron’s most important strategic partners).
The BTT coin is based on TRC10 technology which means that it’s most easily tradable for Tron’s TRX cryptocurrency. Just imagine this: it means that, if you are a BitTorrent user, you’ll get paid in BTT just for sharing your favorite books, music, movies, or any other content you can think of.
There are about a hundred million BitTorrent users in the world, and they are all going to join the Tron community whether they know it, want it, or not.
Tron and Ripple are showing the way to go, keep an eye on them.
Image courtesy of PixaBay.