Amp Token: Is It a Good Investment?
Amp is a digital collateral token that was first introduced in September 2020. Its price has seen significant volatility since then. At its price of $0.004801 as of Sept. 29, it sells for 60% less than its debut price. However, price alone doesn’t determine whether a token is a good investment or a bad one. Also consider whether it solves a problem or performs a function better than competing coins.
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What Is Amp?
As a digital collateral token, amp can secure any type of asset users want to transfer, such as digital payments, fiat currency, loan distributions and proceeds from property sales, according to the Amp website. Transactions are guaranteed through a process called staking. Staking uses smart contracts to freeze assets until the transaction has been verified. It then releases the funds to the receiving party. Because amp is open source, developers can create their own apps that use amp to secure transfers.
Amp’s parent company also created Flexa, which is an open-source digital payment processing network. Flexa guarantees transactions made using U.S. and Canadian digital dollars as well as a number of loyalty tokens and digital currencies. Amp is the preferred token on the Flexa network.
What Are Smart Contracts?
Smart contracts are programs on a blockchain that execute automatically when certain conditions are met. A smart contract’s placement on a blockchain makes it impossible to modify after the fact, according to the Freeman Law firm, and it also ensures compliance — if a party to the contract fails to follow through on their obligation, the smart contract can automatically impose a penalty.
Smart contracts are a turning point for cryptocurrency because they speed up transaction times. For example, the Ethereum network only processes about 30 transactions a second. That means transactions can be quite slow when there’s a lot of traffic on the network. Smart contracts cut transaction times down significantly.
Is Amp a Good Investment?
Simply put: maybe.
Amp has a bona fide use — securing asset transfers, thereby ensuring against fraud and default, without the need for a third party to verify or enforce the contract. And anyone can use the Amp network, according to Securities.io. All that’s needed is a compatible digital wallet.
Another benefit to amp is that it has fairly widespread use. Over 41,000 U.S. and Canadian merchants now use the Flexa platform to process digital transactions — transactions potentially collateralized by amp.
Working against amp is the fact that it’s a “penny” cryptocurrency. Extremely inexpensive coins are like penny stocks in that they’re highly speculative and could eventually prove worthless.
Why Amp Tokens Are Unique
Amp tokens are unique for their ability to secure transactions, thereby making the transactions faster and safer to execute.
Good To Know
Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency, second only to bitcoin. This offers some security to the amp token since it is based on the Ethereum network.
Amp’s Price Prediction
As the wild cryptocurrency price swings of the last two years — and investor losses resulting from steady declines over the past 10 months — show, it’s impossible to predict future prices with any degree of accuracy. However, that doesn’t stop some analysts from weighing in. Recent forecasts call for everything from a drop to $0.0043 to an increase to $0.03 this year, according to Capital.com.
With listings on major exchanges and cryptocurrency influencers like the Winklevoss twins investing in Flexa and amp, there may be enough credibility for amp to continue growing. However, all cryptocurrency investments are speculative in nature, and while the potential exists to make money, you could also lose some or all of your investment.
Final Take
As with all cryptocurrencies, investors should have a long-term strategy in mind. Amp is creating enough buzz that it might be worth taking a chance on. Perhaps the most impressive thing about amp is that it is entering the market on the ground floor of smart contracts, helping to lay the foundation for the future of cryptocurrency.
Daria Uhlig contributed to the reporting for this article.
Information is accurate as of Sept. 29, 2022.
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- The Motley Fool. 2021. "Is Amp a Buy?"
- Blockchain Council. 2022. "What Is the Amp Token and How to Stake Amp Token (AMP)?"
- CoinMarketCap. "Amp."
- Freeman Law. "Blockchain Smart Contracts."
- InvestorPlace. 2022. "Why Amp Could Become a Universal Collateral Token."
- Decrypt. 2022. "What Is Ethereum 2.0? Ethereum's Consensus Layer and Merge Explained."
- Capital.com. 2022. "AMP crypto price prediction: A promising but struggling coin."
