The fun coins are mooning

I’ve been known to dabble in an altcoin or five. And with MATIC reaching for the moon, I thought I’d share my altcoin wins, as well as the one that got away. DOGECOIN. All of these coins have brought me at least a 5X return, which is dismal for an altcoin portfolio, I know! First and foremost, I have to say that my portfolio is predominantly on BTC, ETH and LTC. So these altcoin plays are really minority, pure speculative plays for the lulz.

So.. with that said, let’s go to my biggest winner thus far, from a timeframe perspective.

MATIC

Matic (or Polygon, as it’s been rebranded) is an Ethereum layer 2 scaling technology that uses the proof of stake blockchain architecture. Polygon can support up to 65,000 transactions per second, with a confirmation time of less than 2 seconds, providing a huge scalability factor for Ethereum.

I first took notice of Polygon and bought into it in February of this year.

Looking at congestion issues and high fees on the main ETH chain, it’s a no brainer that layer 2 scaling solutions across all blockchains will be a major force over the coming years.

With that said, I bought into MATIC early Feb, and in less than 3 months, I have effectively 6X-ed my holdings. Excellent. Layer 2 solutions are growing in popularity, and I think there’s a pretty good chance that we can see a $2 MATIC before the end of 2021.

ADA

Cardano has been around for a while now, and I first got into it in 2018, right after the bull market of 2017. It was released in September of 2017 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. It was funded by an ICO (which was the preferred way to launch during that time) and uses proof of stake technology, which Ethereum is currently trying to move toward.

As with Ethereum, it is designed for smart contracts, and is thus seen as competition to Ethereum.

I got a 5X return hodling ADA for 3 years. I see ADA growing in strength this year, so I will still be keeping it, and looking to it giving ETH a run for its money.

ADA has also been gaining a fair bit of traction this year, so I think it definitely has more legs.

DOGE

Yes, THAT Dogecoin. I actually got in a lot earlier than you folks, though. So the pain of missing out is even worse.

I bought into Doge in 2018!!!! It was meant to be a joke buy, hence I only put in $50 odd dollars into it, not thinking it would amount to anything at all. In fact, I was fully prepared for the $50 to disappear forever.

However, 3 years later, it turned into an 8.5X return for me, so I took the $464, said “thank you doge” and plonked it into CRO.

If I’d only held on to it for another 2 months, I would have been sitting on a 50X return on my original investment… Dammit Elon!

DOT

Next up, we have Polkadot, another Ethereum competitor that has been gaining some great traction lately. I got into DOT late last year, and am happy to report a 5X return since then.

HOT

Last but not least, we have HOT, or Holochain. I got into this after their initial pump, but I think this peer to peer cloudhosting network has some potential, especially as they have just had a patent approved.

They are also considered a post-blockchain technology, as they don’t require staking or mining, and instead the transactions are validated by individual nodes sitting on personal devices. This makes Holochain a sustainable green solution that doesn’t require much energy consumption.

I’m currently taking a loss on this one, but given my original investment is about $377 for 10,000 HOT, I’m fine for now. Let’s see where this one goes in a couple of months.

In sharing this, I’m not asking you to go out and buy any cheap altcoins. In fact, with the results above, I am probably one of the shittiest altcoin players of all time (when you hear about people randomly doing 100X, or become dogecoin millionaires…). I missed out by selling doge 2 months early, and also missed out on dozens of DeFI coins like UniSwap and PancakeSwap, and even BinanceCoin.

My point is, altcoins are for fun and games, they can go boom or bust just like that. Make sure your focus is squarely on accumulating as much bitcoin (and maybe ETH) as you can. My thesis for ADA and DOT is that they may pose a threat to ETH down the line, and so I’m holding a little as an insurance against ETH, while my MATIC play is that it helps scale ETH transactions and will grow bigger as ETH usage grows. These are all long term holdings for me, while I’m obviously happy they are moving in the right direction at this point in time.

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Nexon buys 1,717 Bitcoin

In other news, Nexon has announced that they have bought $100M worth of Bitcoin, totaling 1,717 BTC, which represents about 2% of their cash and cash equivalents on hand. Nexon is a South Korean – Japanese gaming company, best known for the game MapleStory.