Welcome Avatar!
There are over 10,000 coins listed on CoinGecko alone.
Spinning up a coin or NFT is easier than ever. Anyone can do it.
Crypto tokens have no barriers to entry.
Creating a successful coin on the other hand is not as easy. People have to become aware of the coin’s existence, buy into the vision, and buy and hold for a coin to see success. For coins to stand the time, they actually have to deliver on the vision over time.
While some useless and worthless coins do well, long-term value generally remains with projects that people actually use like Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Last year we sent a few reminders that people should clean house and get out of alts that have underperformed. Those of you reading this are in the elite minority — most people did not make it to the other side. That includes many teams behind projects that never quite delivered on the promises made at token launch. That’s neither here nor there — crypto is a risky endeavor.
The purpose of today’s post is to explore whether seasoned coins outperform fresh launches broadly, or if you truly are better off focusing exclusively on new launches in bullish conditions.
Coin Segmentation
Coins can be segmented in a few different ways.
One way is to consider their “vintage.” You can cut it however you like but for the purpose of this post we loosely define the vintages as the following:
Born in or prior to the 2017 bull market
Born in the bear market (2018-2020)
Born in the 2021 bull market
2022 bear market — present day
Positioning for the next bull
Generally speaking, it’s fair to assume that old coins won’t make it. Projects fail or get “hacked”, teams give up, and/or investors get bored.
But there are a handful of outliers that not only survived through the 2017 bear, they went on to make new highs.
The biggest benefit you have right now compared to the bull market is time. In a bull market, coins do 5-10x very quickly and you constantly feel FOMO. Right now, there’s time to diligence coins using the questions we outline today while still having the potential to get the same returns you might be FOMOing for in a bull market.
The key differentiator is that you’d have to find tokens that you are willing to hold onto while they stagnate or even bleed out for months before your very eyes. You need discipline and a stomach for risk. You might deploy capital into an alt that never recovers — many did not bounce YTD 2023. But you may just be lucky enough to stumble onto the next LINK or SNX.