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None of the below is to be construed as financial advice. The content is intended for educational purposes only. Please carefully do your own due diligence when forming the basis of investment decisions.
2022 is upon us and time is passing just as quickly as it always is. The month of January is already behind us, leaving us with no more than 11 months to capitalize on what can be a great year in the cryptocurrency field.
The caveat here is that it doesn’t necessarily need to be a year of explosive growth. Stagnant or bear markets are a gift for every investor who understands how to capitalize on opportunities and I like to think of them as the time when we lay the foundations for our future gains.
Now, I don’t want to go in details on whether or not we’re already in a bear market – I don’t know and I don’t really care. All I know is that we’re not going up only and this creates opportunities. What I also know is that the market moves in cycles and we’re halfway into the next Bitcoin halving. Being a cryptocurrency proponent and someone who believes that the market will continue expanding in the coming years and even decades, I believe the halving to be a major catalyst for growth.
With this in mind, I’m handpicking some cryptocurrencies that will, in my own opinion, perform well in the years to come and 2022 might be an excellent year to accumulate at a massive discount.
I would also like to point out that the exchange that I use – MEXC, presents an excellent opportunity. It supports, by far, the largest number of altcoins on the market, which is a big deal. It’s one of the biggest exchanges by means of daily volumes according to CoinMarketCap, it has never been hacked and it’s being constantly improved.
Last but not least, if you sign up using this link, you will receive 20% of your trading fees paid back to you daily as a bonus that you can then either reinvest or withdraw – whatever you feel like. It also supports me as a content creator and keeps all of my content free of charge.
Without any further ado, here’s what I’m eyeing as a balanced portfolio to stack during 2022 and beyond. Also, another caveat is that these are not ranked in any particular way.
A TLDR of the article would be:
- NFT Platforms
- Metaverse tokens
- Perspective layer 1s
LooksRare ($LOOKS) and Other NFT Marketplace Tokens
Regardless of whatever you think of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), these are the hottest trend in the market for quite some time and there’s absolutely zero signs of this changing anytime soon.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has a floor price of over 100 ETH, at the time of this writing. This is how the Google Trends chart looks like for the past year on a worldwide scale:
There is, however, a problem. Participating in blue-chip NFT projects like the BAYC, CryptoPunks, clones, cats, penguins, mutant apes, the kennel club, and whatnot – all of these have a tremendously high barrier to entry. After all, not everyone can chip away a spare 10 ETH (at best).
On the other hand, playing the whitelisting game or hoping that the NFT project you participate in will be the next blue-chip is like playing the lottery.
LOOKS provides an alternative for those who are patient enough, believe the NFT market will grow, and want some direct skin in the game. For those of you who want context and an in-depth of LOOKS, we’ve written a long-form on it here:
What is LooksRare (LOOKS)? The NFT Phenomenon That Challenges OpenSea
To summarize the above really quickly: LooksRare is a relatively new NFT marketplace that already does hundreds of millions in daily traded volume. Most recently, the platform made some headlines when Bored Ape #232 sold for 1,000 ETH on LooksRare. It was a landmark milestone because it’s the first ape to sell for over 1,000 ETH and this happened on LooksRare.
Here’s the fun part – 2% of that was paid as fees which equals 20 ETH. This went to those who hold and stake their LOOKS – the native token of the platform.
That’s right – 100% of the trading fees on LooksRare are redistributed proportionally to those who hold and stake LOOKS.
To my knowledge, there’s no other blue-chip NFT marketplace that uses this model and this seems like the most obvious play for 2022 if you believe that the NFT market will continue growing and LooksRare will capture some of this market share.
With everything that’s going on with OPENSEA – the front-end UI bug, the lack of support, the complete disconnection between team and community, LooksRare seems to be in a prime position to capitalize on the growing hype.
Metaverse Tokens
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Samsung, Australia Open, Adidas, Nike – what do all of these brands have in common? All of them have, in some way, shape, or form, expressed interest or are actively building in the field of the metaverse.
Now, the way you define this mysterious digital place is up to you, but one thing is for sure – it’s here to stay. Billions are being spent in this sub-market and it’s bound to continue growing. Therefore, investing in metaverse blue-chips as we have them right now, might be a +EV move. So which ones are worth looking into? Well, anyone can have their pick, but I’m personally interested in those with solid infrastructure, institutional backing, and a proven track record. Therefore, I’d limit my choice to only two tokens:
- Decentraland’s MANA
- The Sandbox’s SAND
The reason for which I think both of these will perform really well in the long-term is simple – they have been established as authorities in the field, they’ve garnered serious recognition, and they have some of the best backers in the field of fintech, not just crypto. For context:
- Someone $2.4 million for real estate in Decentraland, where most of the land is long sold-out.
- Snoop Dogg (and many other celebrities) have serious exposure to The Sandbox.
- Highly liquid tokens spread out through the majority of markets.
In any case, another thing to consider of both MANA and SAND is that these are the “currencies” of both metaverse projects. The more they grow and the more users start dabbling into this concept, the more they will be in demand.
Perspective Layer 1s
Layer ones have been a massive hit in 2021 and I don’t expect this to change anytime soon. People will keep wanting to spend money on various DeFi protocols and the layer ones that manage to deliver scalability, security, and affordability will prevail. This is why we saw protocols such as the BINANCE Smart Chain, Solana, Avalanche, and Terra chip in so much of Ethereum’s market.
So, why Fantom?
Well, there are a few reasons for which I believe Fantom will be one of the next big things in terms of layer one developments and Andre Cronje is undoubtedly a massive part of it. However, from a native perspective, Fantom allows developers to construct dApps and is EVM-compatible, making it very easy for those who are used to building on Ethereum and are familiar with Solidity. Fantom is also fast, cheap, and supports cross-chain bridging:
- Lachesis parallelizes the processing of transactions which minimizes the communication overhead, achieving very high throughput almost instantly.
- The transactions really do cost a fraction of a cent
- The network is secured through the PoS consensus, providing Byzantine Fault Tolerance.
This is how Fantom currently ranks in terms of total value locked in the procotol:
It’s already ahead of protocols such as Avalanche, Solana, Polygon, and so forth, and is still undervalued in terms of total market cap. I believe this to be a market inefficiency and as soon as the narrative changes (and if one thing crypto is good at it’s at quick narrative shifts), then the inefficiency might be corrected and the price might pick up.
No portfolio is good enough if it doesn’t have ETH in it. Regardless of how slow, inefficient, and expensive the network might have become – that’s all a function of the demand for it. Regardless of all of the above, the majority of users prefer Ethereum as a go-to network for DeFi, NFTs, and whatnot.
All the blue-chip DeFi protocols and NFT projects are built on Ethereum and are spun-off or bridged later on. In the two short years of DeFi catalysts, there hasn’t been a major innovation happening on any other network other than Ethereum.
I don’t want to cause a stir and spark a debate of different aficionados and I’m not necessarily a .eth support but facts are facts.
Ethereum 2.0 is coming and even though we don’t know when it will happen – it should. Multiple billions, thousands of developers, and some of the brightest minds in the industry and outside of it are working on Ethereum and there’s no reason for ETH not to be in any well-balanced investment portfolio.
I started the article by saying that I still believe in the market cycles and the Bitcoin halving being the major catalyst for this narrative.
Of course, Bitcoin needs to be in any crypto portfolio for this reason alone. It might not provide the best returns but at least we know that despite of how bad the bear market is, Bitcoin always comes back. And while some might argue that this will keep happening until it doesn’t, this doesn’t mean that we should overlook BTC as a value investment.
There’s currently 6.25 BTC being emitted every 10 minutes (on average) when a new block is being minted, giving a total daily emission of 900 BTC. That’s all. In about two years, this will slash to 450 BTC per day. Keep in mind that miners don’t necessarily sell everything so the amount that will reach the market is also guaranteed to be less than that.
If the past years showed us something is that Bitcoin will always be the go-to digital asset for institutions, high net-worth individuals, hedge funds, and whatnot. It has also become a legal tender in one country and many believe that other developing nations will follow. There’s simply not enough supply and it won’t get any higher.
This alone makes Bitcoin a contender in any crypto portfolio, and some would argue that it needs to be the predominant asset. This, of course, is entirely up to you.
Conclusion
All in all, I believe that all of the above would comprise a well-devised portfolio of assets that should position investors well coming into the next few years. 2022, by the looks of it, is shaping up as one where the prices might go even lower or at least consolidate at the current rates. In any case, this provides an excellent opportunity for acquisition and accumulation.
A proper dollar-cost-average (DCA) strategy where capital is allocated regularly at certain intervals (every day, every week, every month, or however you devise it) will undoubtedly provide an optimal entry and allow for the construction of a proper portfolio. And there’s no better time to get a nice entry than a bear market.
With this said, a dollar-cost-average (DCA) strategy can become even stronger if you receive 20% of your trading fees paid back to you on a daily basis. To take advantage, simply register an account with MEXC – one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges, using this link. It will also help us in keeping this up.
We’re already working on a long-form breaking down the benefits of investing with a dollar-cost-average strategy, so stay tuned for it!
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