Moonshots 2: Electric Boogaloo. Nine projects to keep an eye on

Inspired by the top post of all time on r/CryptoMoonShots, I wanted to write up a few projects that I believe have a lot of potential. This not being r/cryptomoonshots, not all of these are low cap projects, but all still have plenty of upside. I won't be talking about their market performance much, but suffice to say we're all invested in the space mentally and most of us financially, so these are things that I believe have as much financial promise as they do technological. I've annotated which coins/tokens I own with **.

LOW CAP ($0 - $50m)

• Aurora DAO [AURA] - IDEX's coin. If you've been dabbling in ICOs and new coins for a while, you remember how critical Etherdelta was to the lifecycle of new projects. Etherdelta is dead and Forkdelta hasn't quite replaced it. Volume wise, and the early phase at which coins are added, IDEX seems to be starting to carry that torch. Not every coin is going to get listed on Binance, nor is everyone content to wait for it. If IDEX utilization continues to rise it will likely cement itself as the go to intermediary exchange for burgeoning ERC20 tokens. I don't love that it's not as decentralized as etherdelta was, but I do love that it's actually functional.
• Crowd Machine [CMCT]** - CM is a few things. It's a dapp/smart contract engine and also a peer-to-peer network of Crowd Virtual Machines, where device owners are compensated for the use of their surplus processing power to run the CVM. Embedded in the Crowd Computer is the Crowd App Studio which enables anyone to create decentralized apps with no code. Think Square Space. Lastly, it's a GitHub-like repository that developers can use free of charge to help build their apps, though users who create code on the database can also be paid when it's used. I realize that it's pretty ambitious creating the app store and AWS of crypto, but so far things are looking bright. I've played with their app studio and it's legit. It's Charlie Shrem's largest investment, which like him or not, is a vote of confidence. They've also recently partnered with Polymath. 150m tokens sold in presale and the public sale starts in a few days.
• Electrify Asia [ELEC] - They made some headlined when they partnered with TEPCO, but there's still a lot of room for growth. They're tokenizing power and streamlining the books, bringing down costs for utilities and customers. The hope is to turn a dumb electrical grid into a robust and intelligent energy marketplace. Solid backing, and a lot of interest from other utility companies, depending on the success of their test beds. Bonus points for OMG backing and for being an actual profitable company (a crypto rarity) since March 2017.

MID CAP ($50m - $200m)

• Zebi [ZCO] - "The Ethereum of India." Which is kind of true, though their chain also interface with Ethereum. In an effort to curb crime and keep tourism dollars flowing, India has been cracking down on hospitality and their security and record keeping and as a result one state has ordered all hotels to run their data on the Zebi blockchain. Zebi is expecting to migrate to all hotels in India within the next few years and is on a hiring blitz, planning to grow by 900 employees in that time. India as a whole is growing in crypto and not so dissimilar to China, they like to support their home-grown projects.
• Simple Token [OST]** - Side chain scalability project and a way for any business to tokenize their assets without writing code. This is the easy way for regular companies to get their foot in the door with tokenized loyalty programs and customer data gathering. I was hesitant to include them, as some of their core devs don't have the best track record, but they seem to be making progress and are held in high regard by a lot of reputable folks, so it's something to keep an eye on.
• Enigma [ENG] - Enigma is a privacy and scalability protocol developed by some MIT data scientists. To borrow from someone who said it better: "Right now, all DAPP data on any platform is completely public. Smart contracts are all publicly readable, and data can't be on the blockchain without some forms of privacy for multiparty computations to be run, in short MPC. DAPPs under the Enigma protocol will be able to scale near infinitely later on down the road with Secret Contracts. Enigma has masternodes that will perform these computations for all the data on all the blockchains and no developer will be able to read the data inside these secret contracts. Once they are created, they will automatically execute for all the DAPPS that use it on the blockchain." Healthcare and HIPAA compliance and finance/lending/mortgages are big use cases. Engima is also building in the functionality so that user data can be sold by the users themselves and masternode holders are obviously paid as well.

LARGE CAP ($200m+)

• ICON [ICX]**- ICON is an interoperability play. The "network of networks." Most interestingly they are the single largest holding of Pantera Capital, who has backed some of the most successful projects out there. There's a lot of speculation on what ICON will be able to connect and how, but I like this page for some idea of that. They don't do marketing or community relationship nearly as well as they could, so rather than hype you just have to hope that the tech speaks for itself. Bonus ICX vote of confidence buried in this very informative post.
• Substratum [SUB] - One of many decentralized internets. Traffic to blocked websites is routed through their network as anonymous traffic, allowing for uncensored access without vpn or tor, which is becoming more and more of a global selling point. Their incentivization structure for hosts to run nodes and users to allocate processing power is one of the smartest I've seen. They just released a new roadmap and have simple local nodes available to everyone coming in their 0.3 release on May 11th. Coinbit has also announced that they will list SUB on 5/11. The team is incredibly professional and capable, with regular updates to their rabid community. Releases 0.4 will allow the nodes to find each other, creating a true network; 0.5 will then activate payments in SUB for running a node. With ever-looming bandwidth freedom issues, Substratum is likely to stay relevant.
• Nebulas [NAS]** - Nebulas is a 3rd generation blockchain with an integrated decentralized search framework. With their recent mainnet launch they announced a developer incentive program, valued at 5 million dollars for the quarter, which has led to a massive uptick in developer and corporate interest. Also the team has hinted that after the token swap, new exchanges would be added. Nebulas has one of the hardest working teams I've come across in crypto (NEO, Google, Alibaba), and they've done an amazing job on the development and communication end. Expect more announcements as they work to bring in more users, developers and partnerships in 2018.

Hope you enjoyed reading. This was fun to do and a good exercise for me, creating something I hope is of value, rather than my usual casual consumption.

Looking forward to hearing how my choices suck and that that this is all a clever ploy to offload my bags. That said, if anyone wants to PM me, I'll happily list every single shitcoin I own so that you can buy me out of some bad decisions.

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