Top 5 cryptos to include in your Christmas wish list

• Cryptocurrencies offer a unique opportunity to diversify one’s portfolio.
• There are five altcoins that appear to have great potential.
• Speed, scalability, and low transaction costs make these digital assets stand out. 

Cryptocurrencies are here to make transactions easier and faster. But before you can jump right in and add any old cryptocurrency to your Christmas list, you need to understand what token you are investing in and the benefits they offer. There are five cryptocurrencies that appear to have a great future ahead.

Solana

Solana is an open-source project implementing a new, high-performance, permissionless blockchain that is all about speed.  

It has 400 millisecond block times and as hardware gets faster, so does the network. Solana's scalability ensures transactions remain less than $0.01 for both developers and users. 

Price-wise, Solana is currently selling at an average price of $200. 

Not only is Solana ultra-fast and low cost, but it is also censorship-resistant. This means that the network will remain open for applications to run freely, and transactions will never be stopped.

Solana’s crypto-economic system is designed to promote a healthy, long-term self-sustaining economy with participant incentives aligned to the security and decentralization of the network. The main participants in this economy are validation clients.

StakeMoon

Since launching in early November, StakeMoon has raised $1,200,000 and continues to climb. 

The new and innovative digital cryptocurrency project is still in its infancy but looks like a promising investment. Striving to reward long-term holders, StakeMoon’s token has a taxation policy that penalizes market speculators, resulting in regular dividend payments for existing token holders and flexible staking rewards. 

Transactions attract a taxation rate of 15%, where 10% is distributed to existing token holders, while the remaining 5% is allocated to the StakeMoon liquidity pool. Tokens are not locked into a minimum redemption period. Instead, stakers can withdraw their StakeMoon at any given time.

StakeMoon has launched on PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX), on November 20, creating a marketplace for users to buy, sell, and trade hundreds of decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens without third-party involvement.

StakeMoon has been heating up fast and keeping tight on its roadmap, with plans to list on BitMart in early 2022 with CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap listings coming soon.

Avalanche 

Avalanche is an open and programmable smart contracts platform for decentralized applications.

It claims to be the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol. The native token, AVAX, secures the network, pays for fees, and provides the basic unit of account between the multiple blockchains deployed on the larger network.

The resources spent by a validator for staking are proportional to that validator’s total stake. Avalanche has unique benefits including the rewards accumulated by a validator for validating are proportional to that validator’s total stake. 

Since Avalanche is leaderless, there are no “rich-get-richer” compounding effects. Validators that lock their stake for longer are rewarded more and are also incentivized to stay online and operate correctly as their rewards are based on proof-of-uptime and proof-of-correctness. 

AVAX is a capped-supply token, with a maximum cap of 720 million tokens. The rate at which the maximum cap is reached is subject to governance. Fees are not paid to any specific validator. Instead, they are burned, thus increasing the scarcity of AVAX.

DeFi Coin

DeFi Coin is the digital token that represents the DeFiCoins.io website and DeFi Swap exchange. 

By allowing buyers and sellers to exchange value directly with other market participants - the DeFi Swap exchange ensures that there is no requirement to go through a centralized third party. 

The DeFi Coin umbrella actively promotes three functions: static rewards, automatic liquidity pools, and manual burning strategy.

Users are encouraged to hold their DeFi Coin tokens on a long-term basis because transactions are taxed at a rate of 10% discouraging day trading. Perhaps most importantly, 5% of this figure is distributed to existing DeFi Coin token holders, which is not much different from conventional dividend payments. The other 5% is utilized to provide liquidity to decentralized exchange services.

A major benefit of holding DeFi Coin tokens is that users can earn dividends via a static reward system.

Radix 

Radix promises to put the fun back into DeFi with a focus on the community, security and scalability. 

It focuses on the community, recognizing each individual developer and allows them to contribute to the online DeFi component library in exchange for direct royalty fees when projects use their components to build the next billion-dollar DeFi application.   

Radix is the only decentralized network where developers will be able to build quickly without the constant threat of exploits and hacks, where every improvement will get rewarded, and where scale will never be a bottleneck.

The network’s unique benefits include 100% of all transaction fees being burned, 53.8% of the token supply being locked on average across POS networks, 300 million XRD tokens per year will go to stakers for securing the network, and eXRD/SRD bridge will allow users to move quickly between Ethereum and Radix.

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