Welcome to Crypto Talk, a bimonthly newsletter where we explore the health, growth, and adoption of crypto projects. Each newsletter we will explore growing crypto projects based on the FCAS(Fundamental Crypto Asset Score) developed by Flipside Crypto.
Flipside Crypto provides analytics and business intelligence to crypto organizations. One of the tools they created is the FCAS, which is a benchmark score that tells you about the health of cryptocurrency communities. The generated score is based on a 1,000 point scale with associated ratings: 900-1,000 is Superb, 750-899 is Attractive, 650-749 is Basic, 500-649 is Caution, Below 500 is Fragile.
According to their site, the FCAS is “comprised of three major factors: user activity, developer behavior, and market maturity”. The image below, taken from their site, further breaks down these factors.
Using their Flipside Crypto’s Public API, I have aggregated the week-over-week percent change in FCAS for over 450 crypto projects with the goal to share the projects with the biggest positive change. A positive change in FCAS would indicate the crypto is experiencing positive growth.
This time, I will share the chart of the top 10 cryptos with the largest positive percent changes in FCAS and highlight 5 with a little more information. For sake of discussion, the chart does not include projects with a fragile FCAS rating. I removed these projects because these projects inherently have large changes in FCAS week over week.
As you can see, the crypto’s with lower FCAS are often more volatile which can cause a higher week-over-week change in FCAS. Let’s take a deeper look into the top 3, PolySwarm, Avalanche, and Orbs, as well as Verge and Streamr DATAcoin since they are both are above a Caution rating. The headings of the cryptos below will link you to their respective websites so you can learn more about the organizations.
PolySwarm is building a distributed network of anti-malware researchers and threat detection engines to better protect organizations from digital security threats. Today, anti-malware software is built by companies like McAfee. However, organizations like McAfee are forced to focus the development of their threat detection engines on the most common threats from their customer base for profitability. While this approach protects most computers against the majority of malware, this centralized approach produces anti-malware software that will often have holes.
PolySwarm’s decentralized platform develops a network of scanners and security researchers who retrieve and analyze customer’s files for bounties in near real-time. This allows PolySwarm’s network to recruit security talent from underserved markets with minimal investment while increasing the breadth of protection.
These bounties will be paid in Nectar(NCT) token which is built on Ethereum. Clients buy the Nectar when they submit files for analysis and the security teams receive the tokens when they determine the threat of the file which can later be redeemed for cash or resold to other organizations looking to submit files.
Avalanche is a platform for DeFi apps and decentralized assets. It’s a blockchain network that aims to fill the need of processing small, fast transactions that people previously thought Ethereum would cover and hope Ethereum 2.0 will cover.
The Avalanche network claims to solve the issues of low transaction fees and the need for sub-second transaction times by creating a network that utilizes multiple blockchains and uses a novel proof of stake consensus protocol.
According to their website: “Orbs network is a public blockchain infrastructure designed for businesses looking at trust as a competitive strategy”. Their goal is to help large consumer brands create decentralized applications. Rather than taking the approach of creating a new technology or algorithm and applying it to an industry, they are looking to large consumer businesses to find where they are missing infrastructure that can be solved with blockchain technology.
The Orbs platform ultimately aims to provide the infrastructure for these businesses to launch their own decentralized applications. Independent organizations that provide the nodes for the Orbs platform will be awarded subscription fees based on the services used by Orbs customers.
Verge is a dubbed privacy coin and aims “to bring tailored transactional applications and inherent privacy implementations to strengthen user obfuscation” while maintaining a decentralized payment system. An interesting thing to note about Verge is its wallet integrates Tor to hide the IP address of wallets ensuring the sender and receiver can maintain privacy.
Streamr aims to tokenize data and is built on Ethereum. Streamr’s ecosystem enables a decentralized marketplace where near real-time data can be bought and the users providing that data can be compensated. The goal is to ultimately allow people to regain control of the data they produce by providing an opportunity to offer their data to a Data Union which is an aggregation of individual data streams intended for easy sale.
What’s great about Streamr is instead of a centralized entity collecting the information, the data is distributed through the Streamr marketplace and can be bought and sold with DATAcoin. Streamr also offers a tech stack to allow easy integration of the data feeds. All of Streamr’s products are currently live and applications are currently in development.
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Each crypto above offers a different utility with some offering a more promising change in our landscape than others. While not all projects will reach a point of sustainable adoption, week over week growth in the FCAS is a quantifiable indicator of positive growth.
Next time, I will continue to explore cryptos that achieve positive week over week FCAS. If I notice considerable trends in certain cryptos we’ll take a deeper dive into the organization. I may also dive into some projects that are exhibiting a decrease in FCAS week over week and why that may be occurring if that’s of interest. Let me know your thoughts on the cryptos listed above and what you would like to hear about next time.
Note: I am not affiliated with Flipside Crypto and the development of the FCAS.