Top 10 Cryptos To Buy on Coinbase in July 2023 (plus a bonus)

The institutions are coming ( . . . sooner or later)!

This month’s narrative is familiar to anybody who’s been in this space for, well, more than a month: The Institutions Are Coming!

To be fair, that is a lot of friggin’ money.

But in the first thing I ever wrote about crypto, when I submitted a writing sample in order to snag a job creating content for The Motley Fool, I mentioned how the VanEck Bitcoin Futures ETF was bullish news for BTC . . . in November 2021.

And we all know what happened after that.

In fairness to me, my overall thesis was that we weren’t going to see BTC hit $100K, because “if everyone is on the bandwagon, who pushes?” So I’m not Cramering it out here.

(Also, I didn’t get the job, and they’re running boring, GIFless articles such as this.)

But I digress. The point is . . . I’ve heard “The Institutions Are Coming” before.

Irony: some authority figure will always say something like this in any piece re-telling this story.

Look, I’m not saying TIAC is not happening or never will happen. I’m banking on it happening, in fact.

But if these much-ballyhooed institutions were going to come flying in now, they wouldn’t have — they would have done it several months ago before the entire crypto market jumped more than 50%.

BlackRock wants to create a spot Bitcoin exchange traded fund because they only manage $9 trillion of assets and are looking to be the first to break into the 14-figure range. Digital assets are about the only thing they haven’t dipped their beaks in. And while the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission has rejected spot Bitcoin ETF applications before, BlackRock has something those other companies don’t: namely, that $9 trillion. That’s kingmaking kind of power.

Some say they already are, at least in the private sector.

If TIAC to buy everything up, they’re going to do it on the cheap. They’re not managing trillions of dollars because they FOMO’d. In fact, they’re probably going to leg into the crypto market using the same method Walt Disney used to hoover up half of Orlando’s outskirts: through front companies and shell games.

In fact, it’s entirely possible they already have been; many whales are doxxed, but not all. If you want to strap that tinfoil hat even tighter, maybe the SEC suing Binance and Coinbase was to cause the very buying opportunity they were waiting for.

But . . . does it, though?

Either way, the FOMO will come after it’s revealed that they’ve been buying, not before. But trying to time entry into the market to front-run the institutions is like trying to jump on and ride a cannonball.

And even still, there’s no guarantee you won’t get nuked.

Yes, I know that Michael Saylor said this:

A rare tweet in which he says something straightforward and not like “#Bitcoin is an electric fence made out of bumblebees harvesting the nectar of digital efficiency to create the honey of financial security.”

. . . and one of the Winklevosses said this:

Don’t know if Cameron is the smarter twin or the better-looking one.

. . . but both of them have a vested interest in you FOMOing.

The best move, as always, is time in the market rather than timing the market. Make a regular buy, as we do whenever the market is up or down for that stretch of time. If you had waited for TIAC, you would have missed all the gains of 2023 thus far.

And besides, I’m quite sure The Institutions will still be Coming come August.

Judge Smails wants to ape in.

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

⌚🕰️⏲️⏱️⏰

1. Bitcoin (BTC) — $40
June: ⬆️ 11.9%

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink singlehandedly caused the price of BTC to rise by saying it would “revolutionize finance.” But, because the Internet is forever, Crypto Twitter wouldn’t let him forget his previous opinion of Bitcoin:

Because money was never laundered before 2009.

And it’s easy to note that the BlackRock CEO is suddenly bullish on Bitcoin just when they’re on the verge of offering BTC as an investable vehicle.

I don’t want to spray ice-cold nopium all over the idea that the Institutions will be bad for BTC (although some are). For my money, anything that gets more people into the pool is great, due to simple supply and demand. If the Institutions command $27 trillion, and BTC demands even 1% of that, that’s $270 billion added to Bitcoin’s coffers. When compared to the current BTC market cap of just under $600 billion, though, that implies only a 50% upside.

But perhaps a better comparison to digital gold is . . . gold. The first spot gold ETF was offered in Australia in March 2003, with the U.S., unsurprisingly, lagging behind all the way until mid-November 2004. Since then, the spot price of gold has increased 5x in dollar terms. Which is . . . rather lame by growth standards:

At this scale, depending on your elevation to mean sea level, Bitcoin’s line would be approximately at the moon.

The institutions are bullish for BTC, but the FOMO will really show up when fiat begins to fail.

2. Ethereum (ETH) — $17
June: ⬆️ 3.2%

It’s been a month, and the SEC hasn’t sued Vitalik Buterin or anybody else, so it looks like ether is still a safe investment for the time being. Meanwhile, many blue-chip altcoins, like ETH, took the punch from the Night of Gensler Misery and have fought all the way back.

Point being, Bitcoin had a great month of news and Ethereum had a mediocre one, leading to this:

As of this writing, Bitcoin is almost in the green on its rainbow chart.

If the SEC either rejects the spot Bitcoin ETFs or just drags their feet (and heaven forbid that any entity of the U.S. government would ever do such a thing), momentum may swing back to altcoins, with Ethereum as the primary beneficiary.

Of course, if the BTC ETF is approved, odds are certainly that ETH is next in line.

3. Litecoin (LTC) — $12
June: ⬆️ 20.2%

It feels I’ve been pimping LTC’s halving since about three days after the last halving, but there’s a reason:

Past performance does not guarantee future results of 142x or 15x.

Yeah, it’s tough to be bearish on LTC in the face of that event and the value that being proof-of-work adds in the new age of regulation. But even without those, Litecoin is stacking its own accomplishments. According to a writer named (and I’m certain this is his real name) Ser Suzuki Shillsalot, Litecoin has recently set all-time highs in both active addresses and hash rate.

And — even though it may be more due to people HODLing Bitcoin than anything else — last month Litecoin flippened Bitcoin in one way:

Not sure why a coin brags that people keep getting rid of it, but being spendable is kind of Litecoin’s thing.

4. Chainlink (LINK) — $10
June: ⬇️ 2.6%

In May I introduced Blur to my monthly buy list, and thus far it’s . . . well . . .

It’s not going well.

Blur is a leading proponent of what’s now being called “NFTFi,” because crypto bros like slapping the suffix “-Fi” on the end of things almost as much as scandal-sniffing politicos swing around “-gate.”

NFTFi is a mashup of “NFT” and “DeFi,” which gives a clue as to its purpose: allowing NFT holders to use their jpegs as collateral for loans or even partially sell them through tokenization.

And Chainlink has a piece of it, but for this one they have a familiar partner:

How Chainlink NFT Floor Price Fe . . . is there an echo in here?

The Chainlink x Coinbase collabo just proves that whenever anything becomes The Newest Thing in the web3 world, the LINK Marines probably already have a beachhead.

5. Stellar Lumens (XLM) — $6
June: ⬆️ 19.55%

Tick-tock.

Does anybody care that Moody’s says the increased velocity of financial transactions may lead to more bank failures? No?

6. Quant (QNT) — $5
June: ⬇️ 7.4%

Last month Quant unveiled their Overledger Platform software-as-a-service to allow businesses to scale into blockchain. Overledger was the same tech that Quant used in Project Rosalind.

Speaking of which . . . tick-tock:

Another weird thing for a coin to brag about.

7. Injective Protocol (INJ) — $4
June: ⬆️ 10%

Injective sparked last month after the Avalon Mainnet upgrade, which, among other things, lowered their block time to under one second. Then they launched DeFi dapp Mito Finance and exclusive NFT collections.

It also burned about $48,000 worth of INJ tokens, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Pictured: INJ/USD since the first of the year.

8. Stacks (STX) — $3
June: ⬆️ 15.3%

Credit where this is due: I got this from The Motley Fool, which my phone still sends me alerts for because I read so many of its crypto articles in order to grok their style. This particular Fool, RJ Fulton, has been shilling Stacks hard over the last month, so I figure I’d listen.

Stacks is designed to assist Bitcoin the way Polygon (MATIC, June: ⬇️ 25.9%) and other layer-2 blockchains ride on top of Ethereum. But Stacks is especially useful because ETH’s layer-2s just make the network faster and cheaper; Bitcoin already has one of these in the Lightning Network. However, Stacks fundamentally transforms Bitcoin from a distributed ledger to a full-fledged smart-contract platform.

This means that Bitcoin could eventually host programmable NFTs (which Ordinals are not) or DeFi, or — hell, let’s go crazy — NFTFi!

Damn, my references this month have been all over the map.

In the event the SEC goes after Ethereum, Stacks would absolutely go vertical.

Speaking of which . . .

9. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) — $2
June: ⬆️ 168.5%

Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that developed as a sort of political disagreement over the king crypto’s future.

Much like political disagreements, I don’t really want to get into the reason why the split happened.

Similar to Litecoin, BCH prides itself on being a more spendable version of Bitcoin. It detonated in June thanks to the SEC dropping the hammer on proof-of-stake tokens while sparing proof-of-work. Then, in more good news, BCH joined only BTC, ETH and LTC as the first offerings from EDX, the new-kid crypto exchange backed by TradFi titans Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities (whom you may remember from their role in the #Gamestonks saga).

Once upon a time, BCH was worth $4,300. If Bitcoin Cash regains just 10% of its cache, that’s a gain of over 40%.

10. Compound (COMP) — $1
June: ⬆️ 56%

Another coin left for dead after the last bull run. Compound’s been around so long they were Coinbase’s first investment. COMP was worth $900 in the ancient past of May 2021; however, it dwindled all the way down to $29.20 a little more than two years later.

But then . . .

Compounding interest.

And here’s the thing . . . I can’t find any reason why COMP is mooning like this. I really like having investable theses, but seriously, I’m dry here. The last notable news on Coinbase’s page concerning COMP is from November of last year. Messari hasn’t bothered publishing a quarterly “State of Compound” update in a year. Compound’s Twitter is as mum about the pump as a pitcher’s teammates are during a perfect game.

Actual copy from Coinbase’s COMP page. If there’s a 🌕 and nobody talks about it, did it really 🚀 ?

Despite its run, COMP remains undervalued by the traditional metric of MC/TVL, or market cap divided by total value locked. But it’s not like the other DeFi names are overbought:

Anything < 1 is undervalued, according to the metric. I think more than anything, this proves that LDO and MKR are crazy-undervalued. (Data from DeFiLlama)

In fact, near as I can figure, the only real reason why COMP is blowing up is a regression to the mean after bleeding out 97% in 25 months.

Each token’s decrease from all-time highs as of now, and remember that was after a giant move for COMP. LDO was fortunate that it debuted in goblin town. (Data from Messari.)

If COMP only makes it back to the mean of its kin (excluding LDO), that suggests more than 50% upside.

I’m sure Compound Labs will be thrilled that I’m comparing them to a crazy man who played a slightly less crazy man in a movie.

BONUS. Cosmos (ATOM)
June: ⬇️ 11.2%

Yes, I know I said I was staying away from the coins on Gensler’s naughty list.

But, um . . .

yo.

If you want to take some profits (or cut your losses on some real losers [looking at you, GMT]) and sock some away for this ridiculous rate, I’ll bless it.

If you’re going to be holding something dangerous, might as well have it pay you.

💣🪙💵🤑💣

As I write this, it’s the waning hours of my birthday. I’m glad to be a tiny tiny little part of this space, even though I didn’t get the job at The Motley Fool.

Oh, did I mention my salary demand was 1 BTC/year? At the time it was probably overshooting it, but they could have had me at a bargain this year.

Those Fools.

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

I’m a wiseass and a smartass, and I always have been.