The cryptocurrency market is filled with opportunities for savvy investors. With over 10,000 different cryptocurrencies to choose from in 2023, it can be challenging to determine which ones are worth investing in for the long run. We’ve analyzed the top contenders that have potential for major growth by 2024.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the 5 cryptocurrencies that show promise as strong long-term investments over the next year. We’ll look at what gives each crypto its value, real-world utility, community support, and growth projections. Let’s dive in!
What Drives Value For Cryptocurrencies?
Before highlighting the top 5 picks, let’s look briefly look at the key factors that tend to make a cryptocurrency gain and retain value over the long term:
- Real-world utility – The more useful and adopted a crypto is for payments, smart contracts, NFTs, decentralized services/apps, the higher the demand.
- Community support and development – An active open-source developer community consistently building out features and functionality keeps a cryptocurrency evolving and relevant.
- Limited supply – Cryptocurrencies that have a capped maximum supply tend to hold value well once the circulating supply hits critical mass.
- Institutional investment – Crypto that gains mainstream corporate and investor interest signals long term viability to the broader public.
Keeping these drivers of value in mind, below are our top 5 cryptocurrency picks for 2024 when taking technology, utility, community and growth trajectory into account:
Ethereum (ETH) Remains The Top Contender
Ethereum is the current leader in enabling decentralized apps, smart contract functionality, and utility like NFT minting and trading. It has the largest developer community working on expanding use cases and has major institutional interest with ETH futures trading and companies holding it in reserves.
With the recent Merge to proof-of-stake consensus, Ethereum has also become far more scalable, secure and sustainable. While increased scalability will still take time, the network effects and utility Ethereum has developed makes it hard for “ethereum killer” blockchains to catch up.
Going into 2024, Ethereum remains the top contender as the crypto with the strongest on-ramp for institutional investors and the most real-world utility for developers. As scalability and ease-of-use continue improving, mainstream adoption is set to grow exponentially.
Polkadot (DOT) Offers Interoperability Between Blockchains
Polkadot is a next generation blockchain protocol connecting private and consortium chains, public networks, and oracles. It allows these independent blockchains to securely share data and transactions through its relay chain.
This interoperability aims to sparks innovation by allowing specialized blockchains to communicate in a trustless ecosystem. Developer and users can leverage the strengths of different blockchain networks while retaining sovereignty over their own chain.
With robust community support, an active council guiding development, and over 350 projects connected and building on Polkadot, it aims to become a key crypto enabling the next generation multi-chain decentralized web.
As interoperability, customization and communication between blockchains increases in necessity, Polkadot is poised to see massive growth as its vision of an internet of blockchains comes to fruition over the next 2-3 years.
Chainlink (LINK) Brings Real-World Data To Blockchains
Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that connects smart contracts on its blockchain to external data sources, APIs and payment systems. It provides tamper-proof inputs and outputs for complex smart contracts on any blockchain.
With Chainlink, developers can build decentralized apps that securely access data feeds, web APIs, enterprise systems, cloud providers, IoT devices, payment systems, other blockchains and much more.
Chainlink helps solve one of the biggest challenges for smart contract adoption which is the inability to access real-world data and events to execute contractual agreements. As the importance of external data for DeFi, game and metaverse projects grows exponentially, so does the utility of Chainlink.
Already used extensively across DeFi and gaming ecosystems, Chainlink is cementing itself as one of the key crypto building blocks for enabling the next generation of smart apps across any blockchain.
Avalanche (AVAX) Offers Blazing Speed
Avalanche is a layer one blockchain that can sustain 4,500+ transactions per second with less than 3 second finality. This makes Avalanche one of the fastest and cheapest networks for payments, DeFi applications and enterprise use cases.
It’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility also makes it easy for developers to port apps and users to interact with Avalanche DApps with the MetaMask wallet they already use.
While still early stage in terms of DeFi and DApp adoption compared to Ethereum, Avalanche growth throughout 2022 has been impressive. It has billions in Total Value Locked (TVL), thriving NFT projects, and adoption from major institutions.
As demand grows for lower fees, higher transaction throughput, and cross-chain asset transfers, Avalanche’s blazing speed positions it attract developers looking for more scalability. Its existing pipeline of projects make AVAX a promising crypto investment for 2024 growth.
Solana (SOL) Offers Speed And Scalability Too
Lastly, Solana runs on a unique proof-of-history consensus that processes transactions in parallel, allowing it to handle 50,000+ TPS with 400 millisecond block times.
Like Avalanche, its combination of speed, low fees and EVM compatibility makes it viable for DeFi, NFT and gaming projects looking for more scalability.
Solana experienced incredible growth through 2021 and 2022 until instability issues arose. They’ve since addressed centralization concerns and continue work to improve stability at scale.
As these improvements roll out through 2023, Solana is still well positioned for further adoption from projects looking to harness its speed and growing on-chain offerings. Its developer community remains dedicated to overcoming Solana’s limitations to fulfill its potential as scalability leader.
Conclusion: Diversity Is Key For Crypto Investing
There you have our top 5 cryptocurrency picks if you’re looking to add some high upside potential tokens to your portfolio in 2024.
As always, only invest what you can afford to lose and do your own research before investing. Cryptocurrencies tend to be volatile, so don’t put in more than you’re willing to hold long term.
Diversifying across the top contenders in blockchain utility, interoperability, oracles, speed and scalability hedges your bets on who may come to dominate Web3.0 in the coming years.
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