5 High Growth Potential Altcoins for 2018: Part 1 - Ardor

I'm writing a series on 5 coins (in no particular order) that I believe have big growth potential in 2018 and beyond, along with my reasoning. Part 1 is all about Ardor!

What is it?

From Ardor's website:

"The Ardor Platform operates as a Blockchain-as-a-Service solution. Targeting businesses, Ardor offers individual blockchains, known as child chains, that are ready to install and implement. The most used and tested features are available out-of-the-box without coding or programming knowledge."

You may see the terms "NXT" or "Ignis" when referring to Ardor, and a simple description of each of these are:

NXT is a cryptocurrency created in 2013 by a company named Jelurida. Ardor is basically Jelurida's evolution of NXT, but despite the term "NXT 2.0" often being used, it is not replacing NXT and the two will co-exist peacefully (you can see a feature comparison here).
Ignis is the first child-chain of Ardor, providing several interesting features (see below).

Ok, but what does that actually mean in layman's terms? Use cases include:

Phasing - Create automatic conditional or unconditional transactions on the blockchain with deferred execution (like Ethereum's smart contracts)
Voting - Decentralized polling for secure and anonymous voting.
Marketplace - Have a blockchain marketplace where anyone can buy and sell physical and digital items.
Secure messaging - Send encrypted messages and files on the blockchain without a centralized system

Check out this great Reddit post from user segfaultsteve on some real-world applications using Ardor's first child-chain, Ignis:

Here are some examples of the things you'll be able to do with Ignis (most of which you can currently do with Nxt, too):

Suppose you and some friends own a rental property. You can create an asset on Ignis to represent shares of the property and distribute the shares among the co-owners. As the property earns money, you can pay dividends to the owners in proportion to the amount of the asset that they hold (this is a built-in feature). They can freely buy or sell their shares in it (another built-in feature), making it easy for them to take on as much or as little risk as they are comfortable with. If you need to make a collective decision, like whether to remodel it, you can conduct a poll of your asset holders (another built-in feature) where their votes are weighted by their share of the asset, or where each person gets an equal vote, your choice.

Suppose you want to conduct a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding campaign, where your supporters don't have to pay unless you meet your fundraising goal. The Monetary System on Ignis supports exactly this application, among many others. You can issue your own "currency" (token) to represent a receipt of payment from your backers, set a deadline for the fundraiser, and make the transfer of funds conditional on raising at least some minimum amount of money. All of this is built-in functionality. As your project progresses, you can send your supporters messages using the Messaging System with updates on important milestones. Finally, when your project turns out to be wildly successful, you can pay bonuses to your early backers proportional to their share of your tokens.

Suppose you own a video game store and Nintendo announces that they're selling a Nintendo64 Classic. You know that you'll only receive a limited quantity. To save your customers the hassle of lining up outside your store at 5 am to try to get their hands on one, you decide to offer them an opportunity to buy vouchers ahead of time, which they can exchange at their convenience for the game system. You're worried that scalpers will buy up all of your vouchers at MSRP and resell them for a huge markup, though. You decide to issue your voucher through the Ignis Monetary System as a controllable currency. This means that you can sell it at a fixed price and buyers can't resell it later to anybody but you. You offer to buy back the voucher for nothing (or next-to-nothing, I'm not sure if there's a minimum) and give the person a Nintendo64 Classic in return.

Suppose you want to start a hedge fund like Numerai. You want to issue a token that can only be held or traded by data scientists, whose models you want to evaluate. You first solicit applications from data scientists through your website and decide whether they're worthy to participate. The candidates you'd like to enroll send you their Ardor addresses, and you use your account to mark their accounts with a special property indicating that they are eligible to participate. You then issue an asset on Ignis using the new Asset Control feature, and specify that it can only be traded by accounts with the property you used to designate eligibility. You then make payments of your asset to each account proportional to how well the account holder's models perform, and you pay dividends to all asset holders in proportion to their holdings. The result is that people who submit the best models get the biggest shares of your dividends.

Suppose you want to start a crowdfunded venture capital firm. You want to sell shares of your firm to raise money, allow shareholders to vote on which projects to invest in, and pay them dividends in proportion to their holdings. You like the idea of making the investment decision somewhat decentralized, but you're nervous about using a strict decision-by-majority investment model. As a hedge, you'd like to allow a supermajority of your board members to veto investment decisions made by your investors. You can issue an asset on Ignis representing shares of your company, then make payments to the companies you invest in using composite phased transactions. You can set the phasing conditions to say that each payment succeeds if at least a majority of your asset holders approve of it and less than eight out of your ten board members try to veto it. If these conditions are met, the company gets funded. Otherwise, the transaction does not occur. And how do you elect your board members? Why, the built-in voting system, of course.

These examples barely scratch the surface, but hopefully they give you an idea of the kinds of things Nxt and Ignis can do.

Justification for investing

Features listed above clearly have potential to be useful, and are just the tip of the iceberg!
Ardor mainnet has just launched, so expect to see adoption rise from now on.
Speaking of adoption, Austrian city halls are trialling a prototype application using NXT blockchain technology. If successful, this could be adopted by any/all of the 28 EU nations.
Market is very healthy, with a huge 20x increase from $0.10 to $2 in the past 3 months (see CoinMarketCap logarithmic chart below).

Ardor chart

Possible risks

As one of the use-cases (Phasing) is similar to ETH's smart contracts, Ardor could be seen as a competitor to ETH that ends up losing out. However, as this is only one of many use-cases of Ardor, it's unlikely to have a big negative impact.

Current price

$1.90 (USD) as of January 3rd 2018.

Predicted Price by January 1st 2019

This greatly depends on the level of adoption and innovation regarding use-cases companies can develop. However, I think it would only take one good application to push the price above $10. As I'm optimistic that this will be the case given the recent interest in Ardor, I'm going to predict that Ardor will hit a high of $12 by January 1st 2019, which is over a 6x increase on today's prices. You could even say that is a conservative estimate, considering its "rival" Ethereum's price increased 80x in the year 2017!

Where to buy

The two biggest exchanges where Ardor is traded are:

Bittrex
Poloniex

I hope you found this post informative, and if so any upvotes/resteems/comments are greatly appreciated.

To see what my other 4 high-growth coin picks are for 2018, feel free to follow me, as I'll be aiming to deliver one write-up a week for the next 4 weeks :).

-- @acelad

Disclaimer: The above is simply my opinion and should not be taken as investment advice. Please do your own research before investing!