While there are a few ways in which to work cryptocurrencies, from day-trading to holding, it is still widely recognised that a long-term investment is best. However, making the right call on one of the many coins out there is difficult.
Below, some well known cryptocurrency investors share their tips and secrets, and give a top three pick of the coins they are holding onto for a big payday down the line.
Logan Kugler, Managing Partner at General Crypto
1 - Ripple (XRP)
“Ripple is going after SWIFT, and their token XRP could entirely change the way we send money internationally. Why? Currently money takes days to move internationally, and the fees are enormous. There’s literally no way today to send money from one country to another same-day.”
“Ripple stands to revolutionize the entire banking industry. That’s not going to happen overnight. It will have its rallies and its steep corrections, but I expect it to consistently go up. Don’t buy this one expecting big things to happen as fast as other coins.“
2 - Factom (FCT)
“ Factom offers the promise of immutable records. This could be huge for the (trillion-dollar) mortgage industry, banks and audit records, retail with huge databases like Target, studios with enormous catalogs of movies like Warner Bros., and governments for historical documents.”
“Factom could change how major record keepers keep records and ensure eternal existence of all records.”
3 - Monero (XMR)
“One of the original promises of Bitcoin was anonymity. It turns out it’s not quite as anonymous as a lot of people initially think. Enter anonymous coins, of which XMR is leading the field in privacy.”
“I can see XMR becoming very popular among those seeking anonymous transactions. What’s still up in the air is whether or not it can scale.”
Spencer Bogart, Managing Director and Head of Research at Blockchain Capital
1 - Bitcoin (BTC)
“Bitcoin has proven its ability to efficiently serve a few use cases that represent giant market opportunities. Amazon first proved it could efficiently sell things online and it focused on this ability before growing into other opportunities. I think the same will be true of Bitcoin.”
2 - Monero (XMR)
“If I were forced to pick one thing that I was most concerned about for Bitcoin, it would be a lack of privacy. Each Bitcoin should be worth as much as any other Bitcoin, regardless of who owned it before you or what they did with it. For now, this isn’t a big problem. But Monero is a good hedge against this risk, since it’s more private than Bitcoin and therefore doesn’t have the same degree of fungibility risk.”
3 - Litecoin (LTC)
“Silver to Bitcoin’s gold. The code is so similar to Bitcoin that Litecoin is able to leverage Bitcoin’s developer network and improvements. This is a big advantage over other coins that try to build a developer community from the ground up. If anything catastrophic happened to Bitcoin, a decent portion of the capital would likely flow to Litecoin.”
Rafe Furst, Chief Investment Officer at The Crypto Company
1 - Dash (DASH)
“Bitcoin’s reign as the gateway cryptocurrency is coming to an end. The question is, what will replace it? Arguments can be made for Litecoin, Zcash, Ripple, or Monero. I like Dash because of its focus on consumer-friendliness and its flexible, decentralized governance protocol. For example, it took just 24 hours for the Dash community to approve a proposed blocksize increase back in 2016, while the Bitcoin community took three years to address its scalability problems, and the debate ended in a hard fork.”
2 - Ethereum (ETH)
“While Ethereum won’t replace the function of Bitcoin, it will continue to play the important role it currently does as a smart-contract engine, and as a master Blockchain to spawn new application tokens.”
3 - Steem (STEEM)
“Imagine if your social media posts could earn you money based on how popular they were. Imagine if you could get paid as tastemaker and curator of content published by others. Now what if the content creators kept 100 percent of the ownership rights to their content, and there were no advertisers or special interests getting between creators and fans? Steem is the first utility token that is truly being used for this function. Platforms like Reddit, Medium, and even Facebook should be nervous.”
Brad Mills, Fund Strategist at Alphabit
1 - Bitcoin (BTC)
“I’ve been holding Bitcoin since 2011 when I started mining in my basement, and I will keep holding until it’s at least $100,000 per coin, which I expect in three to five years. Fundamentally strong, this is the original Blockchain that is and was designed to be money.”
“I get excited when I see Bitcoin becoming legal tender in countries like Japan, South Korea, and India. It’s only a matter of time before a Bitcoin ETF is approved, and we see sovereign wealth and endowment funds allocating money into Bitcoin as a new asset class.”
2 - Metal (MTL)
“Metal is one of Alphabit’s core positions that we will be holding long-term. Currently, it sits at only a $190 mln market cap, which we think could grow to $1 bln or greater over the next year. Metal has the dual-use case of being not only a crypto-rewards token and peer-to-peer payments app like Venmo, but also an FDIC-insured fiat on-ramp bank in your pocket for the average person to make it easy to use cryptocurrency. For a competitor in market cap, I look at Dash which is currently at $2.3 bln, and also focusing on mass user adoption.”
3 - Waves (WAVES)
“Waves is Russia’s largest Blockchain project. At it’s core, it’s a decentralized exchange and user-created token fundraising platform, forked from the NXT codebase. An ICO was held in 2016 that raised $16 mln, which has grown to a market cap of over $300 mln.”
“This month, a partnership was announced between Gazprombank and Waves. The partnership focuses on holding ICOs for Russian mining and metals companies, bringing a lot of legitimacy to the platform.”
CryptoYoda, well-respected cryptocurrency trader on Twitter
1 - Litecoin (LTC)
“It’s the second oldest and most trusted Blockchain to date, and in addition to being about four times faster than Bitcoin, it has successfully managed to activate Segwit well before any blocksize debate, which to me is a sign of positive adaptability. For being a fork of Bitcoin with only minor differences in algorithm, trading at about 1.5 percent of Bitcoin’s value is utterly insane, given it’s a more convenient payment coin. Bitcoin will primarily be a store-of-value, just as silver versus gold.”
2 - Ethereum Classic (ETC)
“The reason ETC’s price is so low compared to Ethereum (ETH) is the confusion about what happened during the hardfork a year ago. In July 2016, the community decided to hard fork the Ethereum Blockchain in order to restore lost funds of DAO investors by rolling back the blockchain to a point in time before the hack.”
“There was huge resistance in the Ethereum community because of their devotion to the immutability of Blockchains. Part of the community decided to violate that “law” to bail out those affected by the DAO hack, creating ETH. ETC is currently trading at 14.3 percent of ETH’s value, which is a severe undervaluation in my eyes, given it’s loyalty towards the core principle of cryptocurrency.”
3 - ZCash (ZEC)
“There are many undervalued coins offering anonymity to users, with Zcash and Monero being the most prominent. I think Zcash is positioned to be one of the biggest winners. It has huge interest, is elaborately designed, and has a high-security creation process and very limited supply. Its lack of recent price advancement indicates to me that traders are accumulating it.”