I wrote an article a bit ago about 7 different altcoins I was buying. And while I obviously think those projects have room to grow (especially Cardano), most already have a large market cap.

The tokens in this article have very small market caps. And with those low market caps, there’s extreme room for growth. However, along with that sweet growth potential comes extreme potential losses and headaches. Before we jump into the recommendations, there are a few things I should note:

1. High Risk 💣
   Investing in low-cap altcoins can be very risky. There’s a high chance that the project never makes it or you could even get rug pulled. What makes them worth it, however, is the potential gains. If you buy $100 worth of 4 high-risk altcoins and one of them does an x100 gain (which isn’t that rare) then you can afford to see those other 3 go to $0 and still be in profit.
2. Finding Altcoins 🔎
   I’m writing a whole separate article that goes over how to find your own altcoin gems and everything else you need to know about investing in them (so be sure to follow me for that).
3. All on the Binance Smart Chain ⛓
   All of these tokens can be found on Pancake Swap so you won’t need to worry about paying outrageous gas fees. I’m extremely bullish for the midterm on the BSC network since Ethereum is struggling with gas fees and other issues right now. Because of this, fresh projects are popping up everywhere with tons of potential.
4. Do Your Own Research! 🤔
   While I am personally pretty confident in the projects I’m sharing in this article, you should still do your analysis. Every listing will have a further research section in it. Do not ever throw money at anything just because one person (or multiple even) said it was a good idea. Only you can decide that.
5. Setting Up Metamask 🦊
   To use Pancake Swap and other Binance Smart Chain utilities, you’ll need to set up Metamask (or a different wallet) to connect to the BSC network. I wrote a super-quick guide on how to do it here.
6. Withdrawing to the Binance Smart Chain ⚠️
   For people in the US, getting funds to the BSC can be tricky. Binance.US for some reason doesn’t support withdrawing to the BSC. So you’ll need to use one of these two workarounds instead.
   The rest of you who live outside the US can just use Binance.com to withdraw funds directly to your BSC wallet or use the Binance Bridge to convert it. Binance has a great tutorial for using the bridge if you’re confused.
7. Outdated Numbers 🗓
   The market caps I right in here are approximate and based on the price at the time of me writing this. Since some of these are so small, they can change drastically by the time you’re reading this. Who knows how long into the future the Medium algorithm will continue recommending this.
8. Get the Right Addresses 📬
   Last thing, most of these altcoins won’t be in Pancake Swap’s list of altcoins by default. To add them, you must copy the token address and paste it into Pancake Swap. Make sure you get the address from CoinGecko (or another trusted website). Don’t get it from some random Google search. While you’re at it, you can click on the Metamask logo and add the token to your Metamask so it’ll show up.

Screenshot from Coingecko

Ok, now we’re ready to jump in:

1. Venus 🏦

Market Cap ≈ $500 Million

Image from Venus

First up, we have Venus. While it’s not an “ultra-low” market cap, I still wanted to start this article with it since it’s got tons of room to grow. Similar to Maker and Compound on the Ethereum blockchain, Venus is a decentralized stable coin platform for the Binance Smart Chain. As the Binance Smart Chain grows in usage due to Ethereum’s stupidly high gas fees, I expect that Venus will start to chip into the Maker and Compound market share. Retail traders like you and me aren’t throwing around millions of dollars per transaction.

Purpose and Functionality

Venus lets users deposit a variety of different assets, earn interest on those assets, and take out loans while using those assets as collateral.

To take out a loan, users can mint stablecoins called VAI tokens. Users can mint the total amount of coins their collateral is worth at that moment. If a user’s collateral falls in value below the amount of VAI tokens they’ve minted, they will get liquidated. It is recommended to only mint 40% of your collateral to give plenty of room for prices to fluctuate.

Team, Partnerships, and Community

Venus is created by the reputable team behind Swipe. Swipe is a crypto card platform recently acquired by Binance. Therefore, Venus is indirectly a Binance project. While this isn’t great from a decentralization point of view, it is good to know the project is backed by multiple levels of reputable companies.

Tokenomics

The Venus token, XVS, is a governance token. By holding XVS, anyone can vote on proposals for the Venus project. The more XVS they hold, the more their vote counts. Users can also delegate their XVS to allow someone else to vote for them. Alternatively, you can deposit XVS into Venus and earn interest on it (about 10% APY at the time of writing).

As outlined in the Venus whitepaper, the initial supply was 20% XVS and 1% of XVS tokens are set aside for grants. The other 79% is used for different parts of the platform’s systems.

One downside with Venus, however, is the downwards pressure put on the price of XVS. Because it pays users rewards in XVS for both staking as well as taking loans (yes you get paid to take out a loan), there’s constantly more XVS being introduced into circulation (literally every second). On the other hand, you can stake your Venus and earn more Venus on top of it. This would help fight against the lower potential growth but it’s still not something to ignore.

If you want to learn more about how the Venus platform works and pays out, I recommend watching this very well-done video.

Further Research

Website: https://venus.io/
Medium: https://medium.com/VenusProtocol
Whitepaper: https://venus.io/Whitepaper.pdf
Coingecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/venus

2. KickPad 🚀

Market Cap ≈ 50 Million (could change a lot)

Image from KickPad

The basic premise of KickPad is to offer a platform for tokens to do their official launches while giving users transparency and better confidence they won’t get scammed. The KickPad token (KPAD) launched very recently and is on a steady rise up to its proper valuation. I see a lot of potential in this project and am planning on HODLing (plus staking) my KPAD for a while. Plus I’ll get exposure to fresh launches right as they happen through it.

KickPad offers two different ways for projects to get funding: IDO (initial DEX offering) and pre-sales. IDOs are a safer alternative to ICOs (initial coin offerings) because the token distribution is being handled by a more reputable platform (like KickPad). Right now, KickPad requires users to be staking at least 1,000 KPAD (over $3,000 worth right now) to participate in an IDO. It’s a higher barrier to entry, but it’ll also expose you to lots of new altcoins as soon as they’re available.

Pre-sales, on the other hand, are not vetted by KickPad and don’t require users to be staking at least 1,000 KPAD to participate. This is where KPAD really shines since it uses smart contracts to lock up liquidity and fight against rug pulls (more on that later).

To be fair, KickPad isn’t the first of its kind. There are many similar projects, like Polkastarter, that are hoping to accomplish the same functionality. However, there are fewer projects that support Binance Chain projects and KickPad is very fresh, meaning it has tons of room to grow. Polkastarter already has a market cap of $250 million(ish) and Polkadot hasn’t even launched Parachains or Parathreads yet. So imagine what a project on a fully operational chain can reach.

Purpose and Functionality

KickPad is hoping to fix a variety of problems that DeFi tokens currently face when launching. Firstly, KickPad hopes to give a chance for the little guys like us to get in right at the start of a token listing:

A genuine problem with how presales work in crypto is that influencers, venture capitalists, and well-connected people receive allocations for private/presales. This often makes normal users miss out on early investments. KickPAD will give holders and stakers of the token priority by using “Pool Weight Score,” allowing retail investors to partake.

— KickPad Whitepaper

The next issue KickPad hopes to solve is liquidity rug pulls. For those not familiar, a rug pull is when a project goes live, has its initial launch supply sold out to the world, and then the team behind it pulls the plug by removing liquidity from decentralized exchanges like Uniswap or Pancake Swap. In other words, they make it impossible to trade it anymore. If you want to learn more, I go into much more detail on how liquidity works with decentralized exchanges in my Uniswap V3 article:

KickPad hopes to solve this potential threat by requiring listings to add liquidity through the KickPad platform. That liquidity is then put on Pancake Swap, but can’t be pulled since it is controlled by a KickPad smart contract, not a human. By locking the liquidity in a smart contract, the scammer can’t pull it out.

Image from KickPad

To be clear, while KickPad mitigates scammers from doing a rug pull through pulling liquidity but doesn’t mitigate alternative methods. Other methods can include dumping the supply on an exchange or doing some fancy trickery with a smart contract to only allow certain wallets to sell the token. Their whitepaper sounds optimistic that they can find solutions to these issues in the future, but I’m skeptical there’s really a valid solution.

Team, Partnerships, and Community

While KickPad is pretty fresh (as in less than 14 days old when writing this), they have started to make some partnerships. And their first listing is coming up very soon (it’s the next token in this article). KickPad has also already put together quite the community with almost 50k Twitter followers (this will probably go out of date pretty fast). The fact that they’ve grown a community so fast makes me incredibly bullish on what they will pull off long term.

Tokenomics

The KickPad tokenomics seem pretty solid as far as I can tell. The current (as of writing this article) circulating supply of KPAD tokens is 16,294,187 with a total supply of 203,768,315 tokens.

This graph from the KickPad whitepaper shows the full distribution of tokens:

Image from KickPad

As for staking, KickPad lets users stake their KPAD tokens to earn new tokens that launch through the platform. When a user stakes their KPAD, it is locked up for 3 days. I personally don’t think there’s much of a point to a 3-day lockup. It’s too short to make any real difference on the price (like compared to Pokadot’s 28-day lockup) and yet is still a lockup period, making it inconvenient for just casually storing (like Cardano’s no lockup). KickPad V2 will increase this lockup period to 7 days for the additional 3rd round it'll then support.

Further Research

Website: https://thekickpad.com/
Whitepaper: https://thekickpad.com/assets/images/kickpad-whitepaper.pdf
Medium: https://kickpad.medium.com/
Coingecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/kickpad

I also recommend checking out this CoinMarketCap article on KickPad:

3. Orakuru 🔮

Market Cap ≈ ?

Image from Orakuru

The first project to launch through KickPad was Orakuru. It just launched on April 8th and is now publicly available on Pancake Swap (details below).

Purpose and Functionality

Orakuru is an oracle project. That means it supplies information to other projects (such as price data, weather, etc) almost like an API (if you’re not a developer you may not know what an API is either). The biggest oracle project is Chainlink right now.

Orakuru aims to be more decentralized than Chainlink, throwing out the elements of the project being run by a central company. Ironically Orakuru is also launching on the more centralized Binance Smart Chain. So… yeah. (To be fair, their Whitepaper makes a good case for launching on the BSC network and they claim they hope to expand to other chains in the future).

Unlike Band and Chainlink and other large oracles, open-source but centrally controlled, our mission is to move the governance to completely community owned and controlled.

— Orakuru Whitepaper

Team, Partnerships, and Community

Similar to KickPad, Orakuru has put together a decent following considering they haven’t even launched yet. Obviously, being that they’re the first IDO on KickPad, they have some sort of partnership there. I’m not as bullish on Orakuru as KickPad since it’s just another Oracle project. But I’ll still probably pick some up and HODL it for a while.

It also seems they’re going to make lots of partnerships. The project is very new and they’ve already got a few. That’s a very good sign.

Tokenomics

Since Orakuru uses delegated nodes to supply its data streams, it also has staking functionality. That way, if a node supplies bad data, it can be slashed and punished for its sins. Staking (according to the roadmap in the Whitepaper) will come in Q2 2021. All operator nodes (the people who supply the info) will need to stake their ORK tokens for a minimum of 6 months.

When this article first was published, the token was not yet publicly available. However, the IDO was successful and Orakuru’s ORK token is now publicly available on Pancake Swap.

Further Research

Website: https://orakuru.io/
Whitepaper: https://orakuru.io/whitepaper.pdf
Medium: https://orakuru.medium.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Orakuru_ork
CoinGecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/orakuru

Bonus: Lightning ⚡

I’ll be honest, I’ve just come across this project but it looks promising in the 5 minutes of research. I’ll probably talk more about it in a future article if I like it. But here are some resources to look into the project yourself in the meantime. Just a little tip-off for you all.

Lightning Medium: https://lightningprotocol.medium.com/
Website: https://lightningprotocol.finance/
Coingecko Page: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/lightning-protocol

Stay in the Loop ➰

Alright, that’s it for this article. One thing I should note is that if you want my “tip-offs” as early as possible, follow me on Twitter (@henrygruett). I first started tweeting about KPAD and Orakuru much earlier than I am releasing this article (writing an article takes much more time than a simple quote tweet). I’m also planning on starting to tweet about hidden gems much more often.

Not everything that comes out on April 1st is a joke

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have more altcoins to research.