Top 10 Cryptos to Buy on Coinbase in October 2022
Winter is coming (ask Europe).
We are at an odd point in human history where everyone knows things are bad except the people who, in a bit of dark irony, we trusted to prevent things from going bad.
Everybody has a personal reason why things are, to understate it just a bit, completely FUBAR, but the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”
‘Kay. Here’s some data:
The S&P 500 finished September on a brutal stretch where it slipped more than 12% in two weeks. The NASDAQ shed almost 10%.
“Okay,” you may be saying, “but this is a very Americacentric view of the financial data.” Fine. The Nikkei 225 and FTSE are also south about 6% for the month, and in Europe the most likely thing they’re going to do with the ticker tape is burn it for heat. The second most likely thing they’re going to do is eat it.
We have taken an almost inconceivable amount of the future’s money and spent it now. Sooner or later (as anybody with any kind of understanding of rock-obvious economic reality long ago grasped) there will be a reckoning. The sensible thing to do would be a slow, grinding unwinding of that debt. Unfortunately, that will be painful and — in what’s ultimately a damning indictment of the voters of every Western democracy — politically fatal.
Option B is hyperinflation and confiscation.
Either way, holding fiat is ridiculous. Your dollars, euros, pounds and yen would be far better served buying almost literally anything else. That includes crypto which, while it still sank in September, did so by only 5%.
The breaking point is coming. The longer it lasts until then, the more time we have to accumulate.
Don’t blow it.
⏳🗺️💣🚫🌬️
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. Also, I have probably 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.
1. Bitcoin (BTC) — $35
September: ⬇️ 3.1%
Wait, Boomercoin? Wasn’t Ethereum supposed to lay waste to it after the #ETHMerge?
Well, the Ethereans tilted, yet the windmill is still there. ETH lost 15% of its value against Bitcoin post-Merge.
In crypto, out of crypto, micro-level, macro-level: Bitcoin is an atomic clock. It ain’t going anywhere. Its dominance, or share of the total crypto market, grew by about 6% from the zenith of the pre-Merge hype to the end of the month. On a broader scale, and compared to USD: since the LUNAcy that happened this summer, BTC has continued to bounce off $18K and consolidate.
Just keep stackin’.
2. Chainlink (LINK) — $22
September: ⬆️ 14.4%
Chainlink has also been in a sine-wave groove between $5 and $10 since the late spring: a red candle in June, green in July, then down in August and up in September. That would suggest a slump in October, but just a couple of days ago the oracle network came out with massive news that, honestly, puts #TheMerge to shame. But it’s kind of boring and unappreciated.
SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is an entity that makes the modern world work that virtually nobody knows about (until they cancel Russian banks). SWIFT enables cross-border transactions for major financial institutions.
Despite the fact that what we think of as paper and coin “money” is actually every bit as digital as Bitcoin is and basically has been for more than a half-century, facilitating international transactions is still time-consuming and expensive. There are reasons for this, and I could explain them, but luckily this video hit YouTube about three weeks ago:
But if you don’t have 20 minutes, here’s the ending (SPOILER ALERT):
If a bank messes up and gives the recipient $1,000 without the sender being debited, $1,000 just appeared out of nowhere. So that can’t happen — it just simply can’t. If it does, money breaks. Our trust breaks. The system breaks. If money erroneously appears, outside of the contexts in which we allow it to appear, then it’s not functioning like its physical counterpart would. Money really is just a means of accounting.
Bitcoin solves this by making transactions open-source, validated by proof of work. But it also takes ten whole minutes and requires miner fees. Other cryptos have since sprung up aiming to improve on the experience, most notably Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM).
But now with all of the fiat and cryptocurrencies flying around the world, how do traditional financial institutions move and exchange them? I’ve beat the interoperability drum nearly every single month as a long-term investable theme, and Chainlink may have just permanently cracked the code.
At SmartCon 2022, SWIFT announced a partnership with LINK for an initial proof of concept using Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol to facilitate communication and movement between member banks and participating blockchains.
If they pull this off, it will be huge. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the price of LINK will 100x (at least not immediately, nor in a straight line), but it means LINK will be made.
What I mean by that is that even if there’s an extinction-level event in crypto or even TradFi, LINK is all but guaranteed to survive. As of right now, that’s a club that has — at most — two members.
3. Cosmos (ATOM) — $15
September: ⬆️ 10.2%
Well, hell, let’s beat that drum some more.
There will be multiple chains, and there will be interoperable chains that can effectively speak multiple languages. But one of the biggest bugs in the system thus far has been security: several of the largest and highest-profile hacks in crypto history have been on “bridges” between networks.
Polkadot (DOT), which also thrives on interoperability, extends security to its parachains like spokes to a wheel. But Cosmos wants the whole damn thing: cross-chain connection that does not revolve around its hub and, as recently announced, a universal security protocol for everyone in its ecosystem.
Add that to USDC joining the chain and big web3 swinger Delphi Digital choosing it as home for its Labs after abandoning Terra, and it’s no wonder ATOM detonated from its June doldrums:
It’s retraced down about 25% after hitting that high point seen above, at just over $17 on September 9. I think it’ll get all that back and then some.
4. Ethereum (ETH) — $7
September: ⬇️ 14.5%
I mean, c’mon, you didn’t think I was going to leave it off completely, did you?
For Ethereum, as in the network, the #Merge was a brilliant technological achievement. For ETH, the coin, it’s business as usual. And after the hype died down, version 2.0 didn’t turn out to be the Holy Grail.
And so, everybody just kind of . . . left. ETH shed 10% on the actual Merge day of September 15 and a total of 26% peak-to-trough over the next week.
The worst may not yet be over, as former ETH miners can still dump their earnings, others are wondering if this whole thing was really such a good idea, and oh yeah, this guy is sniffing around:
But that being said, investing in ETH is like playing cricket — the darts variant, not the flat-bat game that takes seven days. To use the vernacular I’m most familiar with, ETH was a total point whore, racking up numbers of users and transactions. Meanwhile, so-called “Ethereum-killer” projects like Solana (SOL) and Cardano (ADA) raced to close out innovations like proof-of-stake and sharding.
At this point, it seems far likelier that ETH catches up to them on tech before they catch up to ETH in numbers. In cricket, that’s game over.
5. Algorand (ALGO) — $6
September: ⬆️ 22.6%
Some people are going to see a lot more of Algorand over the next few months. The 2022 World Cup is ramping up, being played in the latter part of the calendar year for the first time to avoid the insane heat of the Qatari summer.
On-field and on TV, FIFA signed a sponsorship deal with crypto.com as part of CRO’s continued effort to flood the sports world with advertising. But on-chain, FIFA turned to Algorand to be the Cup’s “official blockchain-supported wallet solution.” For those people more used to equating football with “Dallas Cowboys” and not “Manchester City,” international soccer is way out in front of U.S.-based sports in terms of web3 integration. (I don’t snark about “football” in a condescending way. It was only in the last few months that I learned “Borussia Dortmund” is actually from Germany.)
And the FIFA x ALGO collabo is already pumping out NFTs of the Cup’s greatest moments:
“But wait,” you might say, “I’m an American between the ages of 40 and 50 who doesn’t really care about soccer!” I would ask if you’re also the same person who accosted me about taking a U.S.-centric vision of the financial markets earlier, but instead I’ll just tell you that a new partner of Algorand is . . . Napster.
Yeah. That Napster. (If you were part of millennial internet culture, click that for a golden oldie. If not, you still can click, but you will have so many questions.)
6. Chiliz (CHZ) — $5
September: ⬆️ 7.9%
Well, hell, let’s kick that ball some more.
Most of the top-level soccer teams who have fan tokens, including Man City, FC Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain (which I recently learned is NOT in Germany) have partnered with Socios.com, which exclusively uses the Chiliz blockchain.
But — more germane to the current season — the national team from perennial powerhouse Italy has also teamed up with CHZ.
The World Cup seems like a buy-the-hype/sell-the-hump type of event, but tokenization of sports teams could be a long-term win, and that’s only just begun. The Green Bay Packers are one of the NFL’s blue-blood franchises, and they’re famously publicly-owned. Someday soon we may see teams or even entire leagues operated via decentralized autonomous organization, and CHZ is on the ground floor.
Hey, buying a professional sports franchise makes more sense (and probably more money) than trying to buy the Constitution.
7. COTI (COTI) — $4
September: ⬆️ 20.1%
All of us degens and punters are waiting for institutional investment, where the corporate whales come in and buy tokens up. But another crucial tipping point is when businesses begin to adopt web3 tech. Finance is just the beginning.
For companies that do logistical transactions in the millions, even blockchain may not be fast enough. The next mathematical innovation may be directed acrylic graphs, which create chains on the transactional level rather than amassing them into blocks before verification. Without getting too high-end nerdy (mostly because I only barely understand it), DAGs work by having every transaction validate two that came before, creating a ledger tree of mutual verification. Powered by that tech, COTI joined the 100,000 transactions/second club.
COTI upgraded in August to MultiDAG 2.0, which allows tokens to be minted and issued on its system. They want to be the layer-1 for enterprise, especially the small-to-medium unicorns of the future.
8. Voyager Token (VGX) — $3
September: ⬆️ 15.9%
“Wait,” you interject insistently, “aren’t these guys bankrupt?” Well, yes, but first, really, stop interrupting me; that’s rude. Secondly, FTX just scooped up what’s left of ’em for a bargain-basement $1.4 billion.
9. Polymath Network (POLY) — $2
September: ⬆️ 26%
As the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission takes its sweet ol’ time trying to draw the line between “security” and “not a security,” Polymath is working on creating a network where investors can tokenize certified securities into digital assets.
Assets that weren’t tokenized and/or liquid before, like real estate, gain access to an entirely new market. But even for assets that trade hands frequently, like bonds, Polymath expects that its tech will reduce issuance costs by 90% and compliance costs by 30–50%.
10. MXC (MXC) — $1
September: ⬇️ 18.2%
MXC — who’ve rebranded themselves Meta x Connect, I can only surmise because they’re hoping for the publicity of being sued by Mark Zuckerberg — is bringing web3 tech to the Internet of Things. You may recognize IoT as being the same niche being operated in by crypto top-50 coin Helium. But (to my nigh-eternal frustration), HNT is not on Coinbase.
But also, they’re working two different sides of the street. Helium is an IoT network that, rather than erecting hotspots around the world, crowdsourced its array and rewards contributors with HNT tokens.
MXC, on the other hand, has created a functional web3/IoT crossover ecosystem. How much have their worlds merged? You can take the MXC tokens you earn from hotspots, then mint NFTs and mine even more MXC tokens in their gamified metaverse.
MXC is down overall last month, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The token made its Coinbase debut on August 31 and immediately shot up 63%, because the “Coinbase effect” is not dead, apparently. From that peak it then fell over 60% to its trough before rising 37% to close the month. I like this coin, but not enough to put more than a Susan B. Anthony on it until it smooths out the bumps.
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