Unfortunately for many of us, our dry powder reserves are low right now, myself included. You may have already bought your favorite project on the dip, but that was two, maybe three dips ago. We know how you feel, but it begs the question if you do have a little bit of spare change lying around, where would you put $1500 worth of investments into today’s market? We’ve come up with a diversified set of choices. We’re looking at eight projects in which we would put that one at $500. It’s a list that includes not only some of our old favorites, but also some new names that we haven’t talked about all that much just yet, but that we’re pretty excited about. So stick around. We’re allocating one $500 across eight projects in a new crypto portfolio for 2023. My name is Matty. This is Altcoin Buzz, as you already know. But as a friendly reminder, this is not financial or investment advice.
Polygon MATIC
All right, let’s get right into it with coin number one, we are looking here at Polygon, Ticker, and Maddock Matic. And when thinking of where we’d start to invest that $1,500, Matic really was the first coin to come to mind for many of us at Altcoin Buzz because many of us have put our own money into this project for a lot of different reasons. Being a top Ethereum layer two solution, for example, leading in zero knowledge tech in that sector, growing its presence in NFTs nonfungible tokens. And by the way, it’s huge web two partnerships, with companies like Instagram, Starbucks, and many others. We’ve covered that recently.
Right now it just seems like everything is coming up roses for Polygon. And at about eighty cents at the time of this recording, it’s still down over 70% from its all-time high. So you can still get this at a cheap unit price of below $1. And they continue to set personal bests as far as fundamentals. So in our opinion, it’s only a matter of time until the price catches up to the quality of this project.
Avalanche AVAX
For coin number two, we have another familiar favorite, AVAX. That is the Ticker of course for Avalanche, which has been quiet in recent weeks. As you can see, it’s up over 4% here on the day. But they do have a couple of big things coming up for themselves. There’s huge interest from NFTs and from GameFi in spinning out their own subnets to operate their own chains. And their new Core Wallet is a contender for the top web three MetaMask alternative wallets.
Don’t forget that they are the home along with Arbitration to GMX, which is one of our top two decentralized derivatives platforms. And Avalanche is also getting deeper into liquid sticking now as well, which is a pretty big deal. AVAX, as I record, sits at only $11.87. That is down over 90% from its all-time high. A little over a year ago of about $145. So, as we see it, AVAX and avalanche are making lots of moves, but their chain is declining like the rest of the market, unfortunately. And once again, the price doesn’t reflect what we view to be very solid fundamentals. So AVAX is definitely part of our $1500 portfolio.
GMX AND GLP
Coin number three is GMX and or GLP. Take your pick. This is our third coin in the list here, and you get the potential of two for one, or maybe even three for one. Let me explain that, because one of the few protocols to buck the price trend in this market has been GMX, which is one of the largest decentralized perpetual futures markets in crypto. It’s also the largest protocol on the Ethlayer two arbitrary. Here you have the opportunity to buy an existing leader and also an emerging D-Five protocol. And people do want decentralized choices for futures trading, so they aren’t stuck trading on Binance or maybe even the former FTX. It’s important, and it’s only going to become more important in 2023, to have defy options for futures, derivatives, and for other trading contracts and mechanisms. And GMX has two tokens there’s, GMX and GLP. Both could be worth buying because both earn fees from the GMX platform and pay you. GMX, for example, gets 30% and is the governance coin, whereas GLP is the liquidity coin for traders on the marketplace and they get 70% of the fees.
So the coins are going to grow in value if you believe in decentralized trading, which we do. And then, even better, arbitrary doesn’t have its own coin yet, although one is rumored for this year, 2023. And so buying GMX and or GLP is kind of like a proxy for buying arbitrary logic would suggest that if GMX grows, Arbitrarium will also grow. And also as a bonus, you may qualify for a potential arbitrary coin AirDrop if you use GMX to trade and hold or maybe even stake there. So, certainly a nice potential bonus here.
Cosmos ATOM
We have our fourth coin for this one $500 investment, and it’s another favorite. It is the cosmos. Ticker, atom, atom. We love interoperability in general as a theme, and even more than avalanche’s subnets, the Cosmos ecosystem is hands down the biggest and the most successful out there for those wanting to build their own chains. There are more than $8 billion in market value and ecosystem projects, and we only expect that to increase candidly in 2023.
And as the ecosystem grows, of course, so too will Adam’s value. Not to mention you can stake Adam with many Cosmos validators for a net return of 1819, maybe 20%, which is a great return on investment for what is already a top project. Cosmos is down, currently sitting at $10.25. That’s down over 75% from over $44.12 months ago. January of 2022. So, as we see it, it’s available now to scoop up at a bargain bin price.
NEAR Protocol
Near protocol, to be more specific. And near is doing now what Ethereum wants to do in the future effectively. So they want to have a fast-layer one chain that uses Shrouding to help scale for now and for later. Sharding, of course, lets nodes store part of the information from a block and not have to store every piece of data from every block. And that translates to a database that’s smaller, faster, and more scalable. This is very much Ethereum’s end goal, and near is already doing it. They have their own layer one and Aurora, which is their EVM. They’re up on the day 13.3%, and they’re adding more than 20,000 new accounts per day and over 320,000 transactions per day. This is an active ecosystem, and we expect it to keep growing from here. And assuming the growth does continue, they have a lot of room to grow. They are down over 92% from their all-time high of $20.44. That was January of 2022. The current price of near is only a dollar and $0.52. So it is not unrealistic to assume that one day they will reattain that all-time high and perhaps even surpass it.
Chainlink LINK
Coin number six here is very much a personal favorite of mine. It is Chainlink Ticker Link. And I have to ask the question here, have you noticed a theme yet in our choices? Well, in case you haven’t, many of these projects are leaders in their sector of the crypto economy. For example, we talked about Atom. They handle interoperability. Maddock is an Ethlayer too, and GMX is a defy trading platform in futures. And here we have another leader in their respective sector, Chainlink. Now, we haven’t mentioned Chainlink in a while, but as Web Three continues to grow, so too will Chainlink, because it is the leading Oracle in cryptocurrency. And that means they’re providing the valuable link for all Web Three apps between blockchain and real-world data, things like stock prices or the weather that apps need. Web Three doesn’t operate in some kind of vacuum, which is separated from Web Two or the rest of the real world.
And so Oracles like Chainlink bring them together. It’s a very important piece of infrastructure and an even more important function. And one more good reason to put some of that $500 into Chainlink now is that finally, you can stake the link token. And when you do, you can earn 4.75%, which is a nice return again for a top-quality project. Now, at its current price, $5.80. Your $1,000, assuming you wanted to allocate all of it into a link, would earn you another $71.25, meaning you could potentially be holding an additional 15 or so link at the end of the year just by buying, holding, and staking. And so this is one of the lowest risk-reward ratios in crypto right now. Personally, this is my favorite infrastructure play in the blockchain space as it relates to web three. If you have another one, guys, let us know what it is. Let us know also what projects we’re missing on this list in the comments below.
Secret Network SCRT
Coin number seven tackles the theme of privacy. And if there’s one good thing that came from all this centralized project implosion this year, the fiascos that seem to be unending, there’s one good thing that came out of it. It’s that privacy has made a huge comeback in popularity within crypto. Everyone should have at least one outlet for making private transactions where you can disclose only what you want to disclose.
