Finding crypto gems is no easy task, as it requires patience, lots of reading and trying to decipher technical concepts. However, In this article, we will explore three ways to identify crypto gems anyone can do if they are willing to put in the time.

It’s February the 9th, 2010, and the price of one bitcoin is $1. It would have been the best time to get bitcoin. Though, of course, asking anyone to buy a digital currency, no one had even heard off, let alone seen, would be way too much of a request for anyone. Only a few months later, Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer, sold 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. The most expensive pizza in history. Did he know bitcoin was a crypto gem? Certainly not. But the point isn’t to look back at this moment and think what if, but rather, understand how and why specific cryptocurrencies are rockets just waiting to lift off.

“This is not financial advice and should not be taken as such always do your own…

Research

Has anyone ever told you to google something when you don’t know the answer? Depending on the tone and context, it’s generally beneficial. I frequently find myself learning and researching new things daily, especially technologies and specifically new cryptocurrencies.

Whenever I invest in any cryptocurrency, I think of them as startups. And as such, I have to do proper due diligence on the project’s aims, team and, more importantly, the product. My website of choice for finding this sort of information is coingecko.com. It’s user-friendly with many direct links to find out more about the project, such as their Twitter, white papers and even recent news stories. Even Youtubers can be a good source, I watch crypto Omega , Hardc0re crypt0 and a few others.

Screenshot of a project I think is a crypto gem.

To find these crypto gems, the first thing to look out for is the coin’s market cap. The market cap is short for market capitalisation and basically means how much it is currently valued at.

How much is worth now and how much in the future?

Here are my definitions of market cap values:

** High Market Cap — Over 1 billion dollars

** Mid-range — 300 -600 million dollars

** Low market cap — under 200 million

** Super-low market cap — Under 100 million

Check where it’s listed.

Crypto gems tend not to be listed on the major exchanges like Binance & Conibase when they first come out. Instead, they are found early on smaller ones. One thing to mention is that crypto gems can be on bigger exchanges, but they might not have the volume people buy and sell them at first. Though they won’t have the vast amount of money flowing into them like the larger exchanges, entry barriers are lower, and it gets a foot in the door for most projects.

My exchanges for gems are Kucoin, MXC and Gate.io.

An example is Trust Wallet Token $TWT. Listed on MXC around late April 2020 and trading for around $0.003 for months, then on Binance early 2021, and it reached an all-time high of over $1. That’s over a 100 times ROI (return on investment). Crazy, but it’s crypto.

Does it solve a problem?

If it solves a problem is an important question that enables you to decide if coin x is the next big thing. Issues are abundant in the crypto world. To name but a few are transaction speeds, ease of crypto wallet use and the arguably most famous of them all…

The secret to finding any hidden gem is finding out how well they solve a problem. For example, etherum, a great project, has issues with transaction fees costing a fortune. To solve this, Binance created a blockchain token and network to perform transactions at only a fraction of the costs on etherum. As a result, the Binance token $BNB went from around $30 to over $500 in 2020.

Conclusion

A valuable lesson I’ve learnt in crypto is the best projects sometimes don’t even get the recognition they deserve, and a massive factor at a play is down to marketing and adoption. Certain coins which have zero fundamentals have risen to stardom solely from influencers and hype. As we slowly make our way through the mass adoption of crypto, life-changing opportunities will present themselves, and our job is only to be ready and vigilant to book our ticket to the moon.