Top 10 Coins to Invest in for 2023-2024

1. Bitcoin — $50 (2023: 🔼 155.8%) Obviously nailed it, and while I tabbed it as the safu play, it outgained most of the rest of my list. So those times I blessed anyone who just wanted to shove all-in and spend their entire monthly allocation in BTC was the right call. Hell, doing a “top-1 list” those months would have saved me a lot of time and effort.

2. Uniswap (UNI) — $10 (2023: 🔼 40.0%) As the world’s predominant decentralized exchange and automated market maker, Uniswap was in primo position to take advantage of the extra traffic that came their way when the SEC sued Binance and Coinbase in June. Binance made a $4 billion payoff to the U.S. Department of Justice, but the SEC is still squawking. For political reasons as outlined above, I don’t think much will come of it in 2024, but I’m down for investing in UNI on a multi-year timeframe, as bureaucrats tend to bless what they’re told to and ban everything else.

3. Chainlink — $9 (2023: 🔼 168.2%) LINK actually did outgain BTC on the year, so while I left money on the table, I’m still counting this as a W.

4. Ethereum — $8 (2023:🔼 90.8%) I was wary of ETH because of regulation. Turns out I should have been on performance.

5. Polygon — $7 (2023:🔼 28.0%) I wasn’t wary of Polygon because of regulation, which was silly because it’s an Ethereum layer-2, so in the end it goes where ETH goes. While it finished up for the year, it got clobbered on the Night of Gensler Misery, and only made it back to black in December. If all goes well with Ethereum’s proto-danksharding, layer-2s will benefit, but I’m comfortable holding off until we get regulatory clarity, especially with MATIC, which the SEC named again when it took another swing at Kraken.

6. Litecoin (LTC) — $6 (2023: 🔼 3.9%) A lesson on how past performance doesn’t guarantee future results: Litecoin was supposed to blow up when it had its halving, yet it collapsed 47% peak-to-trough in July and August. It’s been dragged up by the broader market increase in the autumn, but (as past performance suggests) from here on out I want BTC, not LTC:
Litecoin in Bitcoin terms, showing that after the halvings (smiley faces), LTC slumps against BTC. Believe it or not, this was in a piece written by the Litecoin Foundation. (TradingView/nasdaq.com)
7. Stellar Lumens (XLM) — $4 (2023: 🔼 81.65%) I still think I’m early buying into XLM and Ripple’s token XRP (XRP, since Coinbase relisting July 13: 🔻 30.85%) as a long-term play into central bank digital currencies. But as they say on Wall Street and in “Silicon Valley,” being early is the same as being wrong. I should have just bought Bitcoin.

8. Curve DAO Token (CRV) — $3 (2023: 🔼 15.2%) This was another attempt to play a DeFi/DEX, and really it’s another miss, as I might as well have just bought more Uniswap.

9. Cardano — $2 (2023: 🔼 141.7%) This did do well, and it did beat its benchmark ETH on the year, and I still think it’s long-term a great play (stake it and you get an extra 2% APY). But in the short term it’s on the same SEC sh*tlist as Polygon and . . .

10. Solana (SOL) — $1 (2023: 🔼 921.0%) Yes, I obviously left a lot of meat on the bone by only betting a buck, but you have to remember Solana was left for dead following FTX’s collapse, having fallen 56% in November 2022 after tumbling 69% from the November ’21 top and after plummeting 81% more following the collapse of LUNA in spring ’22. So while an aggressive investor could have seen trending hashtags like #deadcoin as a sign to start gobbling up SOL left and right, I wasn’t comfortable doing it with more than 1% of my portfolio . . . or yours.

Show me the person who was all-in on SOL a year ago, and I’ll show you someone who’s on the way to getting 𝘳𝘦𝘬𝘵.
That said . . . I think we missed the biggest part of the move. SOL is starting to feel, as Messari’s Ryan Selkis wrote about the whole cryptosphere just after the peak of 2021, “a little toppy.” If absolute sh*tcoins mooning are the sign of the end, the Solana chain has generated more than 72 thousand in the last month.
So with that in mind, here comes my $1 lottery-ticket play for 2024: