Privacy coins. I have always been into coins that protect privacy online. With bitcoin (and most other coins), since the blockchain is public, it is relatively easy to figure out who’s got what. And if you send someone coins, they can look up your address and see how much more you have. If you wrote someone a check, would you want them to be able to look up how much you have in your account? I think not!
Zcash ($ZEC) is a prominent example and the zk-SNARKs used for privacy are quite clever, but privacy isn’t required by default, and a lot of their transactions aren’t kept private (well over 90% to the best of my understanding). In my opinion, Monero ($XMR) is much better. Monero uses ring signatures to scramble lots of transactions together, making it virtually impossible to figure out who is sending how much where. I’ve heard it explained as “you’ll never be able to figure out who farted in an elevator full of 30 people.”
XMR seems somewhat undervalued, as it was well over $350 back in 2017, but has only slowly crept back up to $225 or so after trading for years under $100. It is a good mining coin. They used to constantly try to avoid ASICs and stay a GPU coin by changing their algo every 6-12 months, but haven’t had too much trouble since switching to the CPU-favoring algorithm RandomX.
There are several minor players based on XMR’s protocol, like Wownero ($WOW), a funny privacy-focused meme project similar to Dogecoin in its branding. This is a smaller cap coin and is something of a test net for Monero. There are a few others like Bitcoin Private out there and PirateChain ($ARRR), but I’m not so informed about them.
Cardano ($ADA) — the new Coinbase Pro listing. This project has been on the books for years and has a substantial market cap, but really hasn’t done a whole lot. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it, but Coinbase Pro listings generally pump a bit in price and are often work buying elsewhere before Coinbase Pro starts trading (3/18 in this case).
Hydra — Don’t know a ton about it, but KuCoin is offering insane ~180% annual interest yields on this coin through their flexible “soft staking” “Pool-X.” 10 are required at a minimum (~$180 worth) but this is quite the interest rate!
Saving gas — Gas prices these days are no joke, often costing you $30 or even more for relatively simple transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. While long-term solutions are currently being discussed, these fees are killer right now! If you want to save on your Eth gas fees, check out GasNow.org to see what times of the day throughout the week have the lowest average prices.
Med School Beast 