10 Top Cryptocurrency Investors Share Their Favorite Long Term Picks
There’s a lot of focus right now on short-term speculation in the cryptocurrency space. But at some undefined future point, a reversal from speculation to value is going to happen. And when it does, you’ll want to be in the right positions.
Investing exclusively in tokens with real world value creation is the philosophy that my crypto hedge fund, General Crypto, is predicated on. Unless you’re a skilled day trader and don’t mind incredible stress levels, it’s wise to buy-and-hold coins with game-changing value rather than just jumping to and from the flavor of the week.
Analyzing the validity of that value isn’t easy. So I thought it would be interesting to hear what some very smart people who dedicate themselves full-time to crypto are betting on in the long-term.
Here are each of their top three picks that they intend to hold (and not decrease position size) for at least the next two years, and why they believe in them so much.
Food for thought: there is estimated to be around 100 crypto hedge funds currently spinning up in Q3 and Q4 2017. 100! Our fund was featured on Forbes as one of 15. This means a massive on-ramp of institutional capital — the likes of which crypto has never seen before — is about to be opened. And smart money is going to pick the smart cryptos. Here is what myself and nine others think they are going to back.
Logan Kugler, Managing Partner at General Crypto
I’ll start with my three favorite.
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, other than by boarding a plane with a suitcase full of cash. XRP can transfer value (read: money) anywhere in the world in four seconds, at a cost of pennies. And unlike other coins, it doesn’t get bogged down when hit by huge volume.
Why am I bullish? The market size is as big as it gets (SWIFT moves $5 trillion USD per day), the technology is already built (Ripple has been working on it since 2012), their team is world-class, and nearly 100 banking partnerships are already in place with pilots running or about to start. The CEO of SBI Holdings believes XRP will become the global standard in digital currencies.
Bitcoin maximalists like saying that XRP is not a true crypto because it’s not decentralized. The reality is Ripple is working towards making XRP even more decentralized than Bitcoin. It could take a while, but they’re already off to a good start.
What some people miss about XRP is the timeline. 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. (And don’t get cold feet when it drops half.) The key difference is that XRP is predicated on an extremely strong use case, team, and technology. Be willing to buy now and hold this token for minimally the next five years and I think you’ll see an incredible return on investment. If you want a simple way to think about Ripple: XRP is going to let us move money across borders in the same way that we move information across them today. And that’s an astronomical upside.
Here’s a long article I wrote about XRP if you’re interested in knowing more.
Price when this published: $0.266
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’s competitors are currently bounded by only proving the positive (e.g. “can we show X has existed in the chain?”), which would pertain to proof of existence, integrity, ownership, etc. — which is limited for the overall problem they are trying to solve. Factom can prove both the positive and the negative and see if a piece of information didn’t exist at a certain period in time, or whether it’s the latest version. Factom could change how major record keepers keep records and ensure eternal existence of all records.
Price when this published: $25.61
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. While who owns a particular wallet address is unknown, the transactions can be easily followed. So if your identity gets associated with a wallet address, some analysis can essentially turn your transactions into public bank statements. Enter anonymous coins (or “anon coins”), of which XMR is leading the field in privacy. It scrambles your address automatically each time, so you don’t have to worry about leaving a trail. 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. Within hours of writing, XMR experienced a 50% price surge, which saw vastly extended transaction times.
Price when this published: $83.59
Spencer Bogart, Managing Director and Head of Research at Blockchain Capital
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.
Price when this published: $4,180
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.
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.
Price when this published: $51.63
Rafe Furst, Chief Investment Officer at The Crypto Company
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.
Price when this published: $296.56
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.
Price when this published: $324.99
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% 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.
Price when this published: $1.25
Brad Mills, Fund Strategist at Alphabit
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.
METAL (MTL) — Metal is one of Alphabit’s core positions that we will be holding long-term. Currently, it sits at only a $190 million market cap, which we think could grow to $1 billion 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 billion, and also focusing on mass user adoption.
Price when this published: $8.78
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 million, which has grown to a market cap of over $300 million.
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.
Price when this published: $4.64