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ENS

So You’ve Made A Little Money…

We check in on the 2024 Growth Portfolio as we get ready to wind down the year.

One of the fun things about crypto is having a Ron Popeil “set it and forget it” attitude. If you want, you can drop a little money here and there and not worry about it.

Dollar Cost Averaging — remember that? — has made some people some money; especially those who decided that a hundred bucks every month can get dropped into Bitcoin at a dirt-cheap price.

And That Brings Us to the Growth Portfolio

The idea behind our 2024 Growth Portfolio — and previous iterations, which you can read about here: 2023 Growth Portfolio and here: 2022 Growth Portfolio — was a mutual-fund-like approach to crypto investing. (It’s also hypothetical, so YMMV, DYOR, and don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.) Put simply, we took $10,000 and divided it equally between 10 different coins or tokens. Then, at the end of the year we can see whether we did okay, or not.

In order to actually achieve these numbers, you would have invested on exactly January 1, 2024 and you would have held all year. While it’s not the NVDA stock everyone loves, it is still not a bad sight at all.

First, ENS…

$ENS is Ethereum Name Service. It has done quite well in 2024, up 153%. Here’s a screener of its 2024 high.

However, ENS is known for a little craziness…here’s what its 2023 looked like..

And bear in mind its all time high was $83.40 in November 2021.

Next, SHIB…

Viral meme coin sensation, that $SHIB. Ups and downs. Same old song.

Some time in early 2024, it was at a low of a bunch of zeroes before the number 9, then it tripled. Like this.

Nice work if you can get it. $1000 is now nearly $2400.

The Big NARRATIVE Winner? Bitcoin. The Corn. BTC.

Your $1000 stake would have a little more than doubled, but the narrative win goes to BTC. Could be part the economy — no one knows (really) what’s (really) going on — could be a little of the election, could just be a general sense that now might be the time.

And it could be that psychological barrier of $100,000.

So close. So close and yet…so far.

Now, The Losers

We’re not going to focus too much on these; we’re trying to stay positive. However, after two years bringing up the rear, it’s probably time to ditch $JEWEL (DeFi Kingdoms) and $MAGIC (Treasure).

$SUSHI was the only other coin in the portfolio that was down; it remains a pretty good project and itself is a Top 400 coin.

What’s Next?

Well, we’ll keep an eye on these developments and will post again on the 2024 results in January. But, suffice it to say, some of the losers might get tossed out; there’s probably room for a couple of new entrants from near the bottom and near the top of the rankings.

As they say, stay tuned.

Up Only In 2024?

So far so good for the 2024 Growth Portfolio.

Here we are, on the way to another wacky crypto year. And things are looking…up.

If you’re new here, welcome! We write about crypto and trends and investments and the attempt to make sense of it all. We’ve been at it, off and on, for (checks notes) NEARLY SEVEN YEARS! (Here’s our very first post: 5 Things to Watch During the Tournament.)

And one of the things we do here is create hypothetical portfolios that you can use to hedge your bets. (DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE.) We’ve done so for a few years now and we have had some fun with it; our Growth Portfolios have been the most interesting to follow. 2022 was the first one and, after a few tweaks here and there, we’ve settled on a decent mix of Traditional Crypto (BTC, ETH), Platforms (AVAX), DeFi (SUSHI) and some others (see below). 2023 did pretty, pretty well.

How Bout 2024?

Some thoughts on what’s here…

Bitcoin Is Very Much Alive

Story time: Back in my high school speech team days, there was a competitor who was talking about the “Peace Corps” but pronouncing it “Peace Corpse.” When she yielded to questions, one smarty pants in the audience asked “Is the ‘Peace Corpse’ alive or dead?” Her response: “Oh it’s very much alive!”

Bitcoin, too, having been declared dead more often than…well, insert whatever thing here…is on a tear so far in 2024. Up 23.69%. We’ll take it.

If You Bought ENS, You’re Enjoying a Ride

Ethereum Name Service is rocking AND rolling, but last year it…didn’t really rock. Or roll. Unless rolling downhill is a thing.

Timing is everything, though: quite a few folks, we would surmise, just didn’t sell after it imploded, hoping for a return to glory. And, with an all-time high north of $83, it’s going to take a while to get back there.

What is $MAGIC and Why Is it the Leader?

We’ve written about MAGIC before. MAGIC could be part meme coin, part…something else. Honestly, it’s a gaming coin and that’s where we’re kinda…huh? So we don’t know enough about it and the Treasure.lol website — YES IT HAS A DOT-LOL DOMAIN — but we will admit the game looks cool and it was fun a couple years ago to watch it go from next to nothing to 6 bucks.

(Then we watched it go back down again. Sigh.)

But, lo and behold, it’s 2024 and it’s the leader among our portfolio, up 27 percent. Yay, MAGIC!

Anyway, There’s Your Portfolio

Again, do your own research. These are ideas, and some of them could eventually drag your portfolio down.

Go get ’em!

Who Needs an ETF When You Have a Growth Portfolio?

There was news this past week about a Bitcoin ETF. And now they’re everywhere, it seems. Alas, you could call up your people and get some Bitcoin ETF action in your IRA or investment account. Or you could just build what we call a “Growth Portfolio.”

So with this post, we’ve decided to take a look at the 2023 Growth Portfolio and get a sense of how it did.

Some thoughts on the above:

Bitcoin Is Halving a Moment

Deliberate play on words there. More on that in a second, but first, here’s as close as we can come to the 2023 chart.

In late October, BTC went above $30,000 — something it had done earlier in the year, too — and has yet to fall below that level. The ETF played a role in that, as rumors were rampant all year that the SEC would say it was okay.

But the “halving,” when the block rewards drop — they’re cut “in half” — is most likely the reason. Estimated to begin in April, if you wanted to bet on Bitcoin before it becomes less lucrative to mine, this is as good a time as any.

An Avalanche Snowball

Or, AVAX had a year, eh? Around the same time BTC was heading above 30K for good (at least for good for now), Avalanche was stuck below 10 bucks a piece. But then, an explosion of sorts…

Yes, that is darn near $50 each right around Christmas.

But here’s a caveat: all of these coins have a lot of ground to make back up. (Remember the ol’ axiom: If it drops 80%, it needs to go back up 5 times to get you back where you were.)

The Worst 2023 Performer? It’s Having a Moment in 2024

ENS is Ethereum Name Service. It’s the only coin in our portfolio that finished the year down (by 10.79%) but that was so 2023.

To be honest, we’re not sure why the above 2024 chart shows so much explosion for ENS, but we’ll take it.

What’s Next for the Growth Portfolio?

In the next week, we’ll update the portfolio with some ideas for 2024; probably a tweak or two (maybe with some help from AI). Stay tuned.

The 2022 Crypto Growth Portfolio

It started with a tweet, shared in response to an epic Twitter thread.

First, the thread:

Then, my tweet:

The thread from Adam is LONG, so you’ll need to devote some serious time to studying it, or you’ll want to keep referring back to it a little at a time (that’s my plan; Adam shares some great info but it wasn’t until one of my Twitter friends referred to a specific recommendation when I started reading chunks in detail).

My tweet, however, was meant to start some conversations around a simpler potential portfolio you could put together to play this new new new NEW economy of web3 and whatever else is going on.

We present our 2022 Growth Portfolio in the same spirit as past HYPOTHETICAL portfolios: Do Your Own Research, Not Investment Advice, and, well, here’s an interesting way to track what’s going on in Crypto.

What’s Here (vs. What Was in the Tweet)

Caveats first: I made a couple changes to the December 30 post; I decided, to be direct, that $UNI and $CRV didn’t fit with the portfolio. So $AVAX and $SUSHI were inserted instead. The “Rank” column on the left-hand side is taken from this morning and all prices (both 1/1/22 and 1/5/22) were from CoinGecko.com.

Also, I created the list, did the whole price thing, and then…”#BitcoinCrash” or whatever, the afternoon of January 5. So I had to recalibrate based on pricing the afternoon of the 5th. (Hopefully the bloodbath is over.)

The idea goes like this: take a hypothetical $10,000 investment and divide it equally among ten coins. Past portfolios used fewer coins (BRED used just 4) but this might be the best way to spread the risk.

Bitcoin and Ethereum

The first two choices may be obvious: Bitcoin ($BTC) at nearly $900m at this writing and Ethereum ($ETH) at $400+m right now are the Big Two; third-place (by market cap) coin $BNB is 1/4 the size of $ETH. Bitcoin may or may not BE the crypto market, but a coin that is 1/3 the size (roughly) of Apple is probably a force to be reckoned with.

Ethereum is rather formidable in its own right, and, for the purposes of having an entry point into the rest of the coins through something like Metamask, you want some $ETH.

(SIDEBAR: Metamask has ONLY 21 million users? You want to get some $ETH and start using Metamask *if only* for the possibility of an airdrop, a la $ENS.)

Avalanche

Avalanche ($AVAX) traded at (GASP) $3.67 on January 1, 2021. So it’s up nearly 30x in one calendar year. Is it done?

We don’t think so; of course we’re kicking ourselves for being late to the party but it, as a platform, is pretty stellar and may have plenty of room to grow. (Could it pull back? Yes. $24B market cap might seem a little pricey. But $100B isn’t out of the realm and, let’s be honest, if you could 4x a piece of your portfolio, you’d probably be willing to risk a little.

Shiba Inu

Yes, we’ve seen the stories about the kid somewhere who invested a few hundred dollars in Shiba Inu ($SHIB) and now owns his own island. This one, for us, is the last of the famous international meme coins. You’re speculating that there’s a chance the $SHIB community can get this thing to a tenth of a penny, which would mean roughly 30x growth from here. (It would also mean that its value dwarfs the current value of $ETH, so yeah that’s a tall order.)

Realistically, though, expect a couple more bullish cycles of this highly volatile meme coin. Worth taking a chance on.

Crypto.com

You can’t go anywhere without seeing BRAND SPONSORSHIPS IN CRYPTO. FTX has an arena, as does Crypto.com; Crypto.com has Matt Damon, so advantage $CRO, its coin.

AND HERE’S A CLEARLY MARKED AFFILIATE LINK: We can both get a little something if you use this link and sign up and make a qualifying purchase.

This is probably the best way to play “pure retail crypto,” if that’s what you call a brand that pays big bucks to have Matt Damon on board.

Sushi

We pulled out Uniswap specifically and replaced it with Sushi ($SUSHI). We like the platform better and, while Sushi has ebbed and flowed and zigged and zagged — $3.32 on 1/1/21, then a high of $23.38 in March of 2021, and today at $7.76 — its one-stop-shop of Pooling and Staking and Farming is pretty nifty.

DeFi Kingdoms

$JEWEL is the token behind DeFi Kingdoms, which our buddy @TxdoHawk on Twitter talked about yesterday.

If you’re playing the DeFi-meets-Gaming-meets-NFTs space, there are worse places to do so.

Ethereum Name Service

$ENS is the governance token behind the Ethereum Name Service, and it was airdropped in November to users; we did a deeper dive on the site a couple weeks back. We still like it a ton.

Treasure

We talked about this one yesterday, too; $MAGIC is the coin and it is on a roller coaster this year already. (And today, dropping from an all-time high of $4.75 to its current level at $3.61 a token.)

The part above about DeFi Kingdoms playing the intersection of a couple of categories applies here: $MAGIC could very well be a ten-bagger this year (and that would put it just above $1B market cap).

What’s Next?

We plan, as we did in past years with the BRED Portfolio, to keep tabs on this one, with an update at least at the beginning of each quarter. It should be fascinating to see unfold.

A Month Later: Is $ENS the Perfect* Web3 Token?

If you were lucky enough to grab some $ENS, the token from the Ethereum Name Service project, congrats! (If you haven’t but think you may be entitled to some, there’s still time. Go here: ens.mirror.xyz and take a look.) The token dropped into wallets on November 8 and it’s been nearly a month to watch it unfold, so we thought we’d examine a little further.

The price chart has been a thing to behold: if the average user got a couple hundred $ENS tokens, and those are now trading in the low $40 range, an $8000 or $9000 payday is nothing to sneeze at. Pick out your Christmas gifts — so long as they’re not negatively impacted by the supply chain — and rock on!

Not Bad for Playing on the Internet for Three Years

But, long term, is $ENS all it’s cracked up to be?

First, the Background

We actually talked about this in our post from June 2019 called “Playing the Long Game.” Back then, we didn’t really see the prospect of an airdrop coming, we were just looking for a combination of Ethereum Cybersquatting and Finding A Cool Domain Name.

You can register a bunch and they only cost about $5 a year; we registered several and use one of them as our principal registry.

In theory, we could use one of the ones in our stable, like “jamiedimon.eth,” and set it up to give and receive tokens. (Or you could try to sell it to JP Morgan Chase, which the owner of the above coin appears to be doing.) (Note that it doesn’t take an internet super sleuth to figure out that the author of this post owns jamiedimon.eth.)

If you think of these dot-eth domains as your portal to Web3, the metaverse, AND your crypto holdings…that’s a pretty good way to look at it. Now, let’s do a little analysis.

‘I Promise, It’s Perfect.’

That was the tagline from a golf club that was sold in the early 2000s. Called “The Perfect Club,” it could get you out of trouble, like tight lies, and suggested that mere mortals like me (with my handicap of…well, let’s say it’s not pretty) could use it on shots from about 190 yards out and drop the ball on the green with minimal effort.

I don’t remember seeing an asterisk — * — like the one in the headline of this blog post, but it should have come with one. Especially when the announcer himself said “I Promise, It’s Perfect.”

But the question at hand, and where the asterisk leads us, is whether or not $ENS *may* be the Perfect* Web3 token.

Here are a couple reasons — and yes, this is not financial advice and you should DYOR (Do Your Own Research) and we’re not responsible for your gains or losses — why $ENS could be the on-ramp to Web3.

The Analysts Are Taking Note

Van Eck is kindof a big deal. One of their analysts did a pretty solid analysis of what’s going on with Ethereum domain names, the bread-and-butter of the ENS entry point to the rest of the investment world.

We’ll link to Matthew Sigel’s post here, and we found it more than a little interesting (in a good way) that Sigel compares the ENS domain business to Verisign. (We also didn’t realize Verisign was such a stud.)

Van Eck’s Sigel summarizes the dot-eth trend better than we could right here:

Plus the Airdrop Means Fewer People “Heading for the Exits”

Here’s another aspect to look at: when you have projects that make people rich very early — not just crypto or Web3, but IPOs, too — you always run the risk of a “cut and run.” For instance, a Junior Software Developer signs up for a gig at a startup, is given some options, and the startup IPOs. Whenever the lockup expires, the developer gets bored, has high-six or low-seven figures in cash, and heads straight for the exit.

Because of an airdrop that didn’t end up with tons of rich people, and with no VCs taking part, the result is that nobody (aside from the founders, who are in this for the long haul) got super rich. The lack of “F*** You Money” makes this a potential winner.

AND…It’s a DAO

This would be the third reason this is so huge: governance.

DAOs are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Simply put, they’re designed to run with limited involvement from management, delegating votes on a variety of governance issues to a team. To collect your $ENS tokens you had to vote on a series of proposals and select a delegate to vote on your behalf.

They’ve built a black box and the management of that black box is in the hands of the team of delegates, but proposals to change the way the black box functions take a majority. And some of it is immutable — like the DAO can’t really go out of business — so they’re definitely looking at this with a decades-long time horizon.

Should You Buy at This Price?

Again, this is not financial recommendation, and do your own research.

But the token itself is right around the top 100 in market cap and it’s just north of $1B. Compare and contrast that with tokens like $SHIB (~$19B market cap as of this writing) and take a look at the functionality of $ENS in comparison with other tokens ($SHIB has a cult-like following and has rocketed upwards, but is it really THAT valuable?).

$ENS might not be a bad bet in the grand scheme.

Good luck.