Top 10 Cryptos on Coinbase to Buy in April 2024 — and Ethereum Isn’t One

No foolin’

seriously, whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat

This will either be the smartest call I’ve ever made or the stupidest.

Saying Ethereum (ETH, March: 🔼 9.1%) ranks no better than the 11th best coin of April 2024 definitely puts me at odds with those people predicting an imminent altseason:

crypto.news, March 6

CoinTelegraph, March 18

The Daily HODL, March 31

Ah yes, “analyst,” which sounds better than “influencer” but means basically the same thing. Speaking of influencers, let’s check in on them:

YouTube, March 13

That video was posted just before Ethereum’s Dencun hard fork, and afterwards ether flew out of the gate like a dead fish:

hitting the ground flopping

What reason is there to buy ETH when Bitcoin is about to hit its halving and other coins are mooning? That a spot Ethereum ETF will be approved in May? Well, I hate to say I told you so:

[T]he Biden Administration is in, politically speaking, a real pickle. Many polls have him in a hotly-contested race with, or even losing to, an opponent facing possible prison time. He can ill afford to lose any more voters . . . The safest course of action would be a Solomonic splitting of the baby: allow BTC, which is definitely not a security, to have its ETF, while allowing the [U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission]’s red tape to act as a pocket veto when Ethereum comes calling.

— me, in this year’s annual top 10

The Block, March 15

Fortune, March 20

SEC chairman Gary Gensler has drawn a line in the sand. It doesn’t matter that the line has been drawn in, like, seven different directions already. Or that his agency approved ETFs for Ethereum futures trading. Or that a district judge slammed them in a different court case for “gross abuse of power.” Or that they got their ass handed to them on the Bitcoin ETPs including multiple personal humiliations.

pictured: Gary Gensler running home to mama after getting hacked on 𝕏 and then having to allow the Bitcoin ETP anway, all while Hester Peirce personally took him behind the woodshed

Bloomberg’s ETF news hounds Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart peg the odds of a spot approval in May at 25%. It’s currently hovering around 20% on prediction platform Polymarket. I say they’re all being too generous. There will be no Ethereum ETF in May, and probably not at all in 2024. Gensler will drag the decision out until the 11th hour and then serve the Ethereum Foundation legal papers at about 11:57 and then, after they lose, still attempt to extort them for a multi-billion-dollar fine the same way they’re doing with Ripple (which I also totally called).

Ether’s day will come, and it will likely be awesome. It, however, just won’t be soon.

I would say it’s as rare as a solar eclipse, but, well.

Here are ten cryptos I happen to like more this month. All of these tokens are available for purchase on the primary Coinbase app, in addition to its Wallet. As always: next to each coin is how much I’d allocate out of a $100 position. However, I Am Not A Financial Advisor™, and I don’t know your specific investment needs. Assume that I have owned all of these coins at some point, own most of them now, and will likely own several of them whenever you’re reading this. Not enough to matter. #DYOR

It matters as much as the SEC’s sense of fair play.

1. Bitcoin (BTC) — $40
March: 🔼 16.5%

No other way to say it: Bitcoin was Ethereum’s daddy in March.

Of the last 19 months, the score is Bitcoin 13, Ethereum 6.

I don’t do technical analysis, but people who do are getting a load of the chart of ETH priced in BTC and it is . . . not good.

Like a skiier falling down the mountain.

We touched upon Bitcoin’s halving before, but it’s important to note, as stock-to-flow guru PlanB discovered, that BTC’s bull markets are centered on the halving events:

Clockwork.

A lot of Bitcoin’s inner plumbing is difficult to wrap one’s head around, but this trick comes down to simple supply and demand. Right now 6.25 bitcoins enter the system every ten minutes, or about 900 BTC every day. This is why it blew up over the last couple of months: demand, especially from Wall Street, was sucking corns out of the stream faster than they were being produced.

What do you think will happen after that already skinny supply gets further chopped in half on t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶m̶e̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶d̶a̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶4̶/̶2̶0 April 19?

Trying to figure out if this or Conan O’Brien is the most viewed toke in history

If history is any guide, everything will go banana-shaped:

I think they look more like fishhooks, but this isn’t a Rorshach test.

It’s never a good idea to go all-in based on what has happened before, of course. But there’s another factor at play tilting expectations toward banana time: as ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood noticed, Bitcoin’s next halving will bring its rate of inflation down to below how much new gold is mined every year. Put another way, less bitcoin will be introduced to its system than gold will be to its.

Probably a good time to mention that I own shares of the ARK Innovation Fund, which also gives me long exposure to Coinbase. (Alotta Money/CoinDesk)

You don’t own enough Bitcoin. (Again, if you want to go all-in, you have my blessing.)

2. Chainlink (LINK) — $20
March: 🔻 0.6%

Arguably the most powerful person in finance right now, either in or web3 or in TradFi, is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. Actually, I’m wrong: it’s probably not even that much of an argument.

pictured: PIMP

Sure, there may be some U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell diehards out there, and Arthur Hayes has a crush on U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, but for my money, nobody wields the pimp hand any stronger than the Fink-meister.

pictured: Gary Gensler offering his credentials for this discussion

Earlier this year, he sent both Ethereum and Chainlink flying just by announcing plans on TV. But in March, that bad mother Finker also set off another earthquake when BlackRock launched a tokenized fund on Ethereum’s blockchain. But this is less about the current fund (even though it raked in a blistering $245 million in its first week) and more about what comes after.

Remember when a dozen companies made filing after filing after filing for a Bitcoin ETF for more than a decade with no success, but then Larry Fink opened his mouth and moved mountains?

The water is $10 trillion. Jim Carrey is Fink. (Fink is Carrey?)

When Larry Fink speaks, sh*t gets done. Not only is this the reason why the ETH ETF will get approved someday, but it’s also the reason why LINK will blow up. Chainlink (you remember them, the token I’m supposedly talking about here) may not have been name-checked in BlackRock’s press release, but this is their turf:

Spoiler alert: you’ll see a couple of those later.

BlackRock has dipped their $10 trillion toe into tokenizing real-world assets. Where they go others will follow, if for no other reason than everyone else on Wall Street has to compete with them.

And we’re not done talking about RWA this month.

3. Stacks (STX) — $10
March: 🔼 26.1%

I’m an absolute Bitcoin believer, and as a corollary I’m also willing to bet on projects like Stacks, which turn the O.G. cryptocurrency into a full-fledged smart contract platform like Ethereum. Or at least it does now, after their recent upgrade was approved with numbers resembling Third World dictators.

Putin only got 87% of his last vote. Amateur.

The Nakamoto upgrade, named after Bitcoin’s anonymous founder, has even caught the eye of TradFi titan Franklin Templeton:

Among the upgrades is making Stacks faster, which accords perfectly with ol’ Ben’s philosophy about stitches in time.

In January I pegged Stacks to double by the end of the year, and it turned out I wasn’t bullish enough.

This is the way I like to be wrong.

It touched a new all-time high this month, same as Bitcoin, and I don’t figure either are done.

Might maybe should revisit my $100K BTC 2024 call while I’m at it.

4. Render Network (RENDER) — $9
March: 🔼 38.6%

Yup, I’m probably going to be on this for as long as AI is a thing.

hopefully it ends well

5. Fetch.ai (FET) — $6
March: 🔼 107.2%

Speaking of which.

I’ve been on Fetch for more than a year and called for it to triple in 2024, and again I’ve been proven way pessimistic:

If that steep climb were any more prominent, it would have HOLLYWOOD on it.

Some of that spike, especially recently, has come from an announced merger plan —

did we mention the BREAKING NEWS

— make that an approved merger plan — that would see Fetch.ai join forces with the not-available-on-Coinbase SingularityNET and the always-on-the-shortlist-but-never-quite-made-it-to-this-list Ocean Protocol (OCEAN, March: 🔼 53.1%).

All three of them are all over the red-hot AI sector, but they each bring something different to the table in what they’re calling the Superintelligence Alliance:

Hey, I could have picked the Stooges.

I meant more like this:

If they had someone who brings Heart, they can summon Captain Planet.

FET will eventually become ASI as part of this trifecta, exhangeable 1-to-1 for the new token.

6. Maker (MKR) — $5
March: 🔼 87.4%

The O.G. DeFi also detonated in March thanks to its association with tokenizing real-world assets and the finger of the Finkmeister. As David Emmett recently summarized it in a Coinmonks article:

By providing stability and liquidity to the RWA market, MakerDAO facilitates the creation of asset-backed tokens that represent fractional ownership in tangible assets. With its decentralized governance model and robust infrastructure, MakerDAO offers a reliable platform for investors to tokenize and trade real-world assets on the blockchain.

March also saw a rollout of its schedule for its ambitious suite of upgrades called “Endgame.”

this is the face I make when I put on muscle cream

MKR has been on an absolute tear for the better part of a year now, ripping for a 6x in the last nine months and hitting heights it hasn’t seen since 2021.

I don’t like getting in now, but it can still easily run 2–3x from here.

7. Internet Computer (ICP) — $4
March: 🔼 48.8%

I’m as stunned as you are.

Until very recently, ICP was known for two things, and the first one has nothing to do with crypto:

Two types of people in the world: those who know who these two humans are, and people who have never had a Faygo.

The other was this utter faceplant following its launch on Coinbase:

I suppose I could have made it look better if I used logarithmic scale.

But it’s earning a second look as an AI darling after they deployed a large language model as a smart contract on its blockchain. ICP envisions a future where people interact with smart contracts like they do ChatGPT. Which is great if, like me, you have no idea how to code but enjoy making AI do silly things.

“SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, dressed as a clown” (PicFinder.ai)

If you zoom into that hideous chart above, you see it’s hiding a 6x over the last six months:

You can see the spike on March 21 after the announcement.

Look, I’m not saying ICP will make it back to $600-plus . . . but I’m not not saying it.

Whoop whoop.

8. Propy (PRO) — $3
March: 🔼 344.4%

Three hundred forty-four percent?!

Propy has been on FIRE! FIRE!

Guess the secret’s out: RWA is blowing up. Propy is tokenizing the real-world asset of real estate, and we’re not talking about no metaverse digital land, either. Propy brokered the now-famous home sold as an NFT in 2022, and hopes to further upend the world’s property market.

Fun fact: the global value of real estate was $217 trillion . . . in 2016. It’s probably worth a little bit more now.

9. Ondo Finance (ONDO) — $2
March: 🔼 126.6%

Ondo has been getting a lot of attention from crypto VCs, and it’s not hard to see why:

OUSG is Ondo’s token backed by U.S. Treasury bills, so they’re now in cahoots with BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund.

10. Velodrome Finance (VELO) — $1
March: 🔼 270.2%

I know several things about Velodrome:

• they brag that they are “a next-generation AMM [automated market maker] that combines the best of” Curve DAO Token (CRV, March: 🔼 15.3%), Convex Finance (CVX, March: 🔻 15.9%) and Uniswap (UNI, March: 🔼 16.3%)
• as MWC noted for Coinmonks, it’s the #1 decentralized exchange on the Optimism network, by a lot
• they blew the hell up in March
• they have a cool name

I’m also, thanks to quests from Coinbase Wallet, starting to dip into DeFi on Velodrome. If I ever figure out what I’m doing, maybe I’ll introduce you to things I’ve learned.

More interesting news: I made my first non-Coinbase transaction and bought a memecoin! Stay tuned for the trip report.

🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠

Follow me on 𝕏. Get in the game. And as always,

You don’t hear the word “cahoots” much.