The director of research at Token Metrics shares his 3 favorite altcoins and explains why Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) are upside limited and no longer the best crypto investments.
“Bitcoin and Ethereum can be victims of their own success”
The two biggest cryptocurrencies have legitimated digital assets in the eyes of many over the past half year. But in doing so they laid the foundation for a new wave of competitors building superior networks. Mehdi Farooq, research director at Token Metrics, said in an interview that while neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum (ETH) predicts big gains anytime soon, they are not bears, as both have reached a scale large enough to allow them to survive in the long run. .
Cryptokoin.com has had a terrible year for the most part, as reported in the news. According to Farooq, concerns about runaway inflation and the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates rapidly in response have taken a toll on the cryptocurrency market.
What’s next for Bitcoin?
Unlike many of his contemporaries who predicted that Bitcoin will surpass $100,000 by 2021, Farooq did not get caught up in the price target for the token. In late November, he said that he thinks Bitcoin will only reach $70,000 in the next 18 months, and that level has almost been reached. Since then, it’s down about 30% from mid-$50,000 to $38,300 today.
Five months later, Farooq’s view of Bitcoin hasn’t changed much, with one major exception. It now sees inflation as a headwind for the token rather than a tailwind. But besides that, Token Metrics research director says he is still moderate on Bitcoin compared to his altcoin peers and expects it to stay between $40,000 and $65,000 over the next two years. I don’t see a futuristic catalyst unless we start pricing and we see a lot of confusion out there.
The only significant price driver Farooq sees for Bitcoin is the same reason he has a hunch that crypto will one day be treated as an inflation hedge: the next iteration of the halving cycle, which is not scheduled to occur until March 2024.
Bitcoin has a limited supply. That’s why some have called it ‘digital gold’ and the 50% reduction in new Bitcoin in circulation should theoretically make each token relatively scarce. Either way, Farooq states that the Bitcoin halving should trigger an increase in investment in crypto.
What’s next for Ethereum?
Ethereum, like Bitcoin, has done little in recent months to push Farooq further, despite the promise of significant technical change on the horizon. Farooq thinks that while the supply of ETH is not capped like that of Bitcoin, the upcoming ‘Merge’ could increase sentiment in the near term.
However, Farooq said that Ethereum still has ‘big headwinds’ in the medium term and therefore expects the token to trade between $3,500 and $5,000 indefinitely as he said in November. says. According to
Farooq, the main reason Ethereum’s fundamentals are not very strong is that upgrading to Ethereum 2.0 affects three important parts of its network: how it handles composability, execution, and placement.
3 promising investment altcoins for the future
In November, Farooq shared the potential Moonriver, Polymath and Efinity Token trio he sees. But now, three different cryptos are at the top of the Token Metrics research director’s list as we head into summer. Below are theses on three altcoins that Farooq says he is currently interested in. Coincidentally, all three were top picks by Ether Capital CEO Brian Mosoff seven months ago.
Solana (SOL)
A promising altcoin that does not compromise on composability. I feel this is a monolithic Blockchain while Ethereum will be a modular Blockchain. Because Solana is monolithic, execution and computation happen in a single chain. And that’s something we should watch out for because there aren’t many competitors out there that focus on composability. Ethereum will suffer in this composability, at least in the short-to-medium term.
Solana will be a serious competitor because from the start their focus was on relaunching their own native ecosystem similar to Ethereum. You have this advanced ecosystem and no fragmentation of developers or user experience. So this means that from 2017 to 2020, Ethereum will have the loyal developers it has. That makes them a great competitor in my opinion. The composability, local ecosystem, loyal developers and users means Solana will be a serious contender.’
Near Protocol (NEAR)
I am optimistic about NEAR Protocol, especially in the short term. They are launching USN, a stablecoin similar to terra luna. NEAR is basically, the architecture is such that whatever Ethereum 2.0 was trying to do, they implemented it at the time.
They have a shared structure. They’re also great for dynamic sharding, which is slightly superior to what Ethereum is trying to do. So you have another serious competitor in terms of NEAR. NEAR also has many investors who support it.
Avalanche (AVAX)
Avalanche is one of its serious competitors. I can say that Polkadot has done what it intended to do but accomplished faster, and now you have the entire ecosystem. The good thing about Avalanche is their subnet, which will allow people to create their own application-specific Blockchain.
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