Best Cryptocurrencies for Investment

Introduction

One of the main eternal questions in the world of digital assets was “What cryptocurrencies could be called the best?”. Some would say Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Binance Coin undoubtedly, while other representatives of the community will decide to vote for such projects as Solana, Polygon or Litecoin. Who is right and who is wrong? What cryptocurrencies are better or are not worth our attention? Let’s figure it out!

But let’s first say that our list of cryptocurrencies is a subjective standpoint that does not want to claim that it is the ultimate truth, so it is likely that your opinion may be different from ours.

Mastodon cryptocurrencies

We should start with clear favorites for the title of the best cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and similar digital assets have already conquered the hearts of many people, have a long history and have already been time tested. This category includes the main crypto asset Bitcoin, the main altcoin Ethereum, and Litecoin that got the liver status at one time.

Bitcoin

No doubt, the main cryptocurrency leader and its essential drive is BTC. Bitcoin was invented in Japan by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, and the first data unit was received on 3 January 2009. Then the cryptocurrency did not have any value per se as it could not be sold anywhere. Bitcoin was designed as an electronic peer-to-peer payment system that will be able to provide an alternative to the existing and conventional payment tools in the future.

Thanks to the fact that Slashdot and Hacker News told about this phenomenon, the digital asset was able to gain a lot of popularity and come out to the financial market, being able to reach the $1 mark shortly. The growth was unstoppable, so BTC started to go up year after year in arithmetic progression. Because of the worldwide quarantine in 2020 when many financial units were collapsing, BTC managed to attract massive funds from investors and carried on growing. In 2021 the price of the digital asset reached the mark of $69,000. The person who is known as Laszlo Hanyecz regretted buying two pizzas in 2010 for 10,000 BTC that were worth $0,0025 at that moment.

Considering the cosmic growth of the price, Bitcoin definitely deserves the title of the main cryptocurrency of all digital assets. Besides, most Bitcoin maximalists and crypto enthusiasts started to call Bitcoin digital gold. Millions of investors have started to appear far and wide lately, starting to seriously consider keeping their savings in cryptocurrency but not fiat money and proceeding to implementation of the plan.

The Bitcoin technology enables transfers of digital assets around the world even though transactions are not the fastest in the cryptocurrency world and their commission is not as low as it is in the cases with other assets, BTC still has enough benefits.

The main digital asset has counterparts that do not want to accept this development of technologies, however, BTC has a sufficient number of supporters. Opponents of the main digital asset are not only skeptics who do not believe in development of the financial structure but also supporters of a clean environment. BTC mining requires a lot of energy supply and emits numerous greenhouse gases.

Nevertheless, according to various crypto enthusiasts, Bitcoin is the future of finances. Decentralization technology enables money transfers beyond the country — now it does not take several days but several minutes or seconds.

Many people invest money not in a bank with an interest per annum but in Bitcoin as if every cycle allows us to buy the coin with the lowest price and sell it more expensively with a chance to multiply your investment by 10+ times which is over 1000% of your deposit. Meanwhile, banks will be able to offer up to 20% per annum which is in sharp contrast with the opportunities in cryptocurrency. That is why Bitcoin got the status of the main cryptocurrency and digital gold.

Ethereum

Ethereum is the main altcoin in the cryptocurrency world. Everybody knows that the next important coin after Bitcoin in the world of digital assets is Ethereum. It is proven by several reasons. The original project Ethereum was launched in 2015, and the first papers about the projects were available to the audience in 2013. A year later Vitalik Buterin founded his own version of Ethereum which is now the name that everyone uses while the original project is known as Ethereum Classic.

As for reasons of popularity of this blockchain, Buterin managed to bring a few innovative ideas to life in his startup. Along with the appearance of ETH, the idea of smart contracts emerged, enabling making transactions between two users without an intermediary. In other words, if cryptocurrencies used to be digital assets listed on exchanges while direct crypto transfers were not available or unknown to broad audiences it changed with the appearance of Ethereum. It entailed troubling implications later.

The second feature of ETH is the notion “virtual machine”, or to be precise, “Ethereum Virtual Machine”. This process enables automatic processing of smart contracts, and essentially without this virtual machine, it would be impossible to process smart contracts. However, the bad news of such updates is that use of direct transactions attracted not only new technologies that improve blockchain innovations but also new ways of deceiving people and engaging in scams. If we abstract away from this fact, we will have to admit that Ethereum Virtual Machine helped the cryptocurrency sphere level up with the help of smart contracts.

Smart contracts and Ethereum Virtual Machine are good of course but the main reason for gaining this much popularity and receiving the status of the main altcoin is the appearance of non-fungible tokens. The NFT culture has managed to reach broad audiences and was acknowledged by investors. The boom of NFTs occurred in 2021 at the peak of the bullish cycle in the world of cryptocurrencies.

Then users traded unique pictures that were valued at thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions and tens of millions dollars. Rich investors have always been chasing something special to stand out from regular people and to underline the status with the help from such NFT collections as Bored Ape Yacht Club, Crypto Punks and others. The auction house Christie’s sold a picture with record cost of $60,000,000 called Everydays: The First 5000 Days. But after all taxes and duties the investor gave away $69,000,000 which became a huge surprise for all people including the artist and the auction house.

NFTs gave birth to another narrow direction in the sphere of cryptography — Play2Earn. Simply put, these are games with smart contracts and their main feature lies in the name — “play to earn”. After Ethereum, smart contracts and NFTs were invented, the developers made up a way to combine the sphere of gaming and competitive process with cryptocurrencies. The result is interesting even if it is disputed to an extent. There are projects where developers make the earning process hard-to-reach and even impossible on purpose, but top titles like Axie Infinity have already gathered a base of users who play regularly, earn tokens and sell them afterwards.

Ethereum, among many things, spawned the sector of decentralized finances (DeFi). Technically, the author of this innovation is Andre Cronje who founded Fantom Foundation but it would not be technically feasible without Ethereum.

As we can understand, ETH really brought in a lot of upgrades and developed the industry to a new level, making Vitalik Buterin the youngest crypto billionaire. It happened thanks to the fact that at the peak Ethereum managed to surpass the mark of $4,000 in its value. At the moment of this article being written the price has dropped to $1,700, however it is likely to climb up to $4,000 again and even reach new heights.

Litecoin

Litecoin is one of the oldest digital assets that have ever existed in the sphere of crypto industry. The project is a Bitcoin fork that became the second after Namecoin. If Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto as a tool for making payments in digital assets and having an alternative for financial payments, the creator of Litecoin tried to improve the principle and bring the algorithm to perfection. The cryptocurrency emerged on 12 October 2011 thanks to Charles Lee’s painstaking efforts.

At the very beginning the token’s value was almost $3 and a short time later it was recognized as digital silver similar to digital gold also known as Bitcoin. Litecoin received recognition among people and many of them really started to use this cryptocurrency for transactions. It happened thanks to the speed of transfers. As Litecoin generated once in 2,5 minutes which is four times faster than BTC, processing this transaction took 75% less time. Besides, after the SegWit upgrade, transactions were processed much faster.

Before March 2017, Litecoin did not grow and at this moment the attention of majority of people was focused on Bitcoin. 2017 changed the situation and on 21 December that year the price of the cryptocurrency grew up to $314, and the the value of the token started to decline. The new record was broken on 8 May 2021 during the first peak of the bullish phase 2021. Then Litecoin was valued at $345, after which it declined again. At the moment of this article being written, 1 LTC cost $99 and when Ethereum came out to the market and popularization of Litecoin took a back seat. Nevertheless, it is acknowledged as “digital silver” giving ETH the title of the main altcoin. Litecoin deserves to be on the list of the best cryptocurrencies because of its history and potential further growth.

Binance Coin

Binance Coin could not be called an old coin as it could be used to describe Bitcoin that appeared in 2009, Ethereum whose papers were presented in 2013 or Litecoin that appeared in 2011. BNB was out in the middle of 2018 and this year the token is celebrating its 5th anniversary, however, our list would not be complete without it. Binance Coin is, as we coils guess from the name, a coin of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange.

At first the token was not popular enough but there were not too many token in emission. Nevertheless, BNB has been always used on the exchange as a way to pay the commission for transactions and other moments. Besides, the exchange has always encouraged investors to use the coins, offering different bonuses. A significant role was played by the chance to stake money with 40% interest rate per annum on the DeFi platform PancakeSwap. There users could stake BNB/CAKE.

After a while the positions of Binance were becoming stronger and stronger, and using BNB on the platform brought rewards, so at some point the token started to grow inordinately. Before 2021 the token had already brought hundreds of Xs to its early investors and reached the mark of $40, however in May 2021 BNB grew up to $661 and then went down. In November it tried to reach a new high but it did not work out. The coins stopped at $650 and started to decline.

Along with the appearance of BNB Binance, the developers worked on their blockchain called Binance Smart Chain that was later shortened to Binance Chain. This network became a real godsend for those who did not like Ethereum because of long transactions and prohibitive commissions. The developers of Binance Chain solved these problems, making the commission in their blockchain really low while the speed of transactions was rather high. Besides, smart contracts were implemented on Binance Chain that allowed users to swap tokens without cryptocurrency exchanges. Therefore, Binance Chain got NFTs and Play2Earn games and other features of smart contracts.

If you invest long-term, Binance Coin is a great choice to diversify your portfolio which already has Bitcoin and Ethereum. Considering the position of Binance on the market and the way how the cryptocurrency company expands throughout the world, BNB still can show what it is capable of.

Ripple

Many people know about XRP, heard about XRP, invested in XRP but not everyone is fully aware of the fact that Ripple refers to the category of cryptocurrencies aged 10+. The history of the emergence of XRP dates back in 2004 when Ryan Fugger decided to try to provide an opportunity for people to create their own money. During the next eight years the idea got more details and in 2012 a decision to create a cryptocurrency was made. XRP fulfilled this idea and since then they have been developing the blockchain that was designed to give users an alternative way of making payments.

At the start XRP tokens valued at $0,0059 and years later early investors managed to make a fortune. It peaked in July 2018 when the value of Ripple reached $3,09 per token which multiplied the initial deposit of early investors by 523,7 times. In December XRP decided to come out to the conventional financial market and offered the coin to the public (IPO). The American regulator U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was not pleased with their action and blamed the company for not preparing for it properly. According to the SEC, XRP did not go through the necessary procedures before the initial public offering, so this action was illegal.

Since then Ripple and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have been conducting legal proceedings even if the procedure is simplified. Day X in this situation will be 31 March. On this day the judge Analisa Torres of the case is going to reach her verdict. At the end of March the value of XRP will definitely change, however, it will not affect the fact that Ripple will remain a great payment method.

XRP got numerous fans around the globe that sometimes go beyond common sense and start building conspiracies. There are loads of henchmen among regular people who are not even related to the cryptocurrencies. For example, Australian financial exchanges stated that the predominant number of clients prefer making transfers abroad not in fiat currencies through regular banks but with the help of XRP through blockchain technologies. The reason lies in high speed of transactions and minimal commissions. In theory, if Ripple can win the court case against SEC, it can affect not only the development of XRP but of the whole cryptocurrency world as an entity.

As for the current figure, the coin from Top-6 has capitalization of $20,700,000,000, and the daily trading volume surpasses the mark of $950,000,000. Should we say that thanks to its history, technical features and recognition, this coin deserved to be called one of the best in the cryptography world?

Stablecoins

Stablecoins are tokens that are bound to the American dollar and are equivalent of the currency in the cryptography world. There are loads of stablecoins in the net, however they cannot show off enviable stability. We should only remember how last year Terraform Labs failed with their UST which affected the value of LUNA and the position of this token on the market. Briefly, the value of Terra’s stablecoin dropped to $0,10 at some point and due to the lack of liquidity it lost the bind to the dollar and started to decline. Right after it became clear that the company is going through financial difficulties, everybody started to withdraw the money from LUNA. It doomed the token to fall to zero and some conclude that it was a long-term project that was initially preparing for embezzlement of funds. To avoid such situations with money losses, you should pay attention to the best stablecoins and do not trust third party companies. We will talk about such top-notch coins later.

Tether

Tether is the best-known and most massively used stablecoin in the vast cryptography. It is located on the third place of the list of cryptocurrencies with the highest level of capitalization, leaving the first two positions to the leaders on the market — Bitcoin and Ethereum. Capitalization of USDT surpasses the mark of $68,000,000,000, and the daily trading volume is $41,800,000,000.

The development of Tether was done by Tether Limited. The developers claim that 80% of the stablecoin is secured by stock of US dollars on bank accounts. Bloomberg researched the question why USDT holds first place in volume among stablecoins on all cryptocurrency exchanges. It turned out that some platforms do not support fiat pairs in trading while USDT is a time-tested tool that appeals to many investors and traders.

Tether appeared in November 2015 and since then it has already cemented the status of the first and main stablecoin. To make it even more understandable how Чтобы было еще понятней насколько USDT is a leader in the world of stablecoins and what weight it has in the world of cryptocurrency, in the period from January 2017 till August 2018 the emission of Tether increased from $10,000,000 to $2,400,000,000. The volume of deals with the cryptocurrency grew from 10% to 80%. The nearest competitor stablecoin for Tether is USDC that are holding fifth place in the list of cryptocurrencies with the highest level of capitalization. The whole level of its capitalization is $42,600,000,000 against $68,000,000,000, and the trading volume is $4,000,000,000 against Tether’s $41,800,000,000.

We are unable to ignore the disadvantages of this stablecoin. The main disadvantage lies in the fact the the American regulators did not notice that Tether’s bookkeeping has a lot of room for improvement and the information they publish in their press releases are different from reality. Moreover, some whales of the cryptocurrency world debate whether Tether is going to fail or not and even short this stablecoin. In total, despite this USDT is a great choice for keeping money in this stablecoin, however, due to the mentioned risks your money should be diversified.

USD Coin

USDC is top-2 stablecoin that is circulated in all exchanges. The company Circle was in charge of creation of this digital asset and at the moment it is under management of Centre. The creators of USD Coin as well as Tether claim that their money is secured by the US dollar, however, in the case with USDC it refers to dollars that are reserved in American banks. Besides, USD Coin is ensured by approved investments.

USDC’s figures are much more humble in comparison to its main counterpart Tether. As we said earlier, the whole capitalization of USDC is $42,600,000,000, and the daily trading volume is $4,000,000,000. In total, the stablecoin is good enough for processing various operations but it has only one flaw that should not be overlooked. The wording on the website of Circle, which created this stablecoin, has been changed. The company used to call the digital asset a stablecoin as it was secured by the US dollar, but now USDC is called a currency that is secured by reserved assets. This term may include some dubious reserved sources. In total, as well as in the case of USDT, your funds should be diversified between these two stablecoins to be sure that if anything happens to one of them, a part of the money will be alright.

Binance USD

As it comes from the name, it is not hard to guess that BUSD is a stablecoin created by Binance. It is behind its main counterparts USDT and USDC. Nevertheless, it is one of the Top-3 stablecoins, and considering the fact that it is used only on Binance these figure are high enough. As for more accurate numbers, Binance USD’s capitalization is $16,000,000,000+, and the level of daily trades exceeds $11,600,000,000 which is almost three times higher in comparison to USD Coin.

If you are a Binance client, we could offer you to consider diversification of your money not between USDT and USDC but between USDT and BUSD. To be on the safe side, you can divide your savings into three different parts and keep 33% in each of the three advanced stablecoins. However, if you are not a long-term investor but a trader, you could face some difficulties while making deals in this case, especially if you like derivatives.

Blockchains

The list of interesting blockchains with their own cryptocurrencies will include Polygon and Solana. As well as in Ethereum, they gained popularity thanks to running operations with smart contracts and their engagement in the world of NFTs and DeFi platforms.

Polygon already has numerous marketplaces that offer their service in selling non-fungible items. The first month in 2023 became indicative due to the fact that Polygon has big prospects and it still attracts attention of investors. The value of the coin has increased by 60% which is above average in January for other cryptocurrency tokens.

The project was launched in 2017 and its main feature is the multichain system compatible with Ethereum. The main Polygon projects are various exchanges from the world of decentralized finances and also decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) and marketplaces with NFTs. Even if Polygon is unable to compete with Ethereum in the field of non-fungible tokens, the multichaim managed to find its customer. MATIC is also in Top-10 cryptocurrencies and has capitalization over $10,700,000,000, and the daily trading volume is higher than $700,000,000.

Meanwhile, Solana got to the list of cryptocurrencies with the highest level of capitalization right after Polygon and got to 11th place with $9,100,000,000 and $800,000,000 respectively. This blockchain could be called relatively young as it appeared in 2017. It also appealed to people thanks to its idea that was later implemented in reality. Solana is different from all its counterparts due to the highest capacity in blockchain. The blockchain always scales stably and has a very interesting algorithm of processing transactions. Solana uses the algorithm called Proof-of-History for making transfers which increases the speed of transactions significantly, making the blockchain one of the fastest in the world.

Even though now Solana is valued at $24,5, the token reached $258 once. When the world of cryptocurrencies restores and all tokens start growing, we are sure that Solana will be able to grow higher. All these circumstances make SOL one of the best cryptocurrencies that deserve to get new investments.

Conclusion

The world is filled with various cryptocurrencies that deserve our attention to an extent. This time we told you about the main categories and the boldest cryptocurrencies that have fundamental value. We will tell you about the best NFTs, meme tokens and metaverse coins in our next articles.