Regardless of What My Colleagues Say, I Have 99 Reasons To Avoid Ankr

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Every once in awhile, I get an annoying assignment from my InvestorPlace editors. So it was when they asked me to write about Ankr (CCC:ANKR-USD), the 100th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization according to CoinMarketCap.com.

ANKR: A visual representation of the cryptocurrency Ankr
Source: karnoff

While Ankr’s website describes all kinds of interesting stories, events, and projects taking place, I don’t see the point of another cryptocurrency.

That ranking may have changed by the time you read this. The 12-month ANKR-USD price range on the token is a low of 0.3 cents to a high of 22.5 cents. As of 6:12 UTC today, the price was 7.72 cents, giving it a market capitalization of $540.1 billion, according to CoinMarketCap

But with all of those others ranked higher than Ankr, I have 99 reasons why investors — particularly those new to cryptocurrency investing — should stay the blazes away. 

Here’s why.

What You Get With Your Ankr

To figure out the point of Ankr, I turned to the blockchain’s creator’s, Chandler Song, June 30, 2018, article on Medium about why he started it

Song wanted to “push the boundaries of blockchain,” expanding the technology’s uses beyond how it was utilized at the time. He believed that the future use case for Ankr was to provide inexpensive cloud computing on a decentralized platform. 

At least, that’s what I think he was aiming for. That’s because he elaborates further in what any novice would have to consider nothing more than garbled nonsense.

“Ankr has Proof of Useful Work, and we’ve designed a job dispatcher on top of the consensus mechanism, so the miner itself is ready for enterprise, rather than having a smart contract limit the performance of the whole network,” Song wrote in his 2018 piece. 

Please. 

Imagine if you used that line on someone while trying to sell them your house? You’d experience nothing but realtors running away terrified of what they’d just experienced.

It’s time that the cryptocurrency industry figures out how to sell their products and services like normal people. 

Do you think Elon Musk would have sold as many electric vehicles as he has by throwing gobbledygook at the wall in hopes that something sticks? 

No, he made the sale an emotional one: Save the world while having fun doing it. Now, I’m exaggerating to make my point: the average person has no freaking’ idea what they get with their Ankr. 

None.

What Are the Alternatives?

As I said earlier, at the 100 rank on CoinMarketCap’s table, there are 99 cryptocurrencies ahead of Ankr. The odds of one of those 99 delivering a better risk-adjusted return over the long haul than Ankr are tremendous. 

The same could be said of the Nasdaq 100 index. You can bet on Fox (NASDAQ:FOX), which is in last place by weighting, or you can bet on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) or even Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA). I’d put my money on the latter regardless of the so-called potential of Fox. 

InvestorPlace’s Thomas Niel recently suggested that investors consider including Ankr in a basket of other long-shot cryptocurrencies. He lists a couple if you’re interested. 

However, it is Niel’s explanation of what’s so interesting about Ankr that has me referencing his recent article. 

“Those with excess capacity can ‘lend’ it through the platform, receiving ANKR-USD tokens as compensation. The borrowers are those who need the capacity for DeFi (decentralized finance) activities, such as staking and node deployment,” he wrote earlier this week.

Niel suggests that if you are going to assemble a basket of cryptos, you include those that provide utility, which Ankr most certainly does. 

It’s an argument that I can get behind. But, unfortunately, no such exchange-traded fund exists to make your life a little easier.

The Bottom Line

InvestorPlace contributor Mark Hake recently discussed Bounce, Ankr’s own DeFi platform. I clicked through to the Bounce page, and like a lot of things related to cryptocurrencies, there seems to be a lot more sizzle than steak at this point. 

Perhaps it would make sense to take the top 100 cryptos by market cap and rank them on a scale of 1 to 100 for their utility. At that point, perhaps Ankr becomes a much more attractive long-term buy. 

Until someone other than a crypto-nerd does this, I find it hard to fathom why someone would risk their hard-earned capital on something so esoteric as Ankr. 

Am I missing something elementary? Perhaps. 

But from where I sit, there has got to be a better buy from a utility perspective from one of the 99 cryptocurrencies with a greater market cap than Ankr.

Common sense says so.

On the date of publication, Will Ashworth did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.

Will Ashworth has written about investments full-time since 2008. Publications where he’s appeared include InvestorPlace, The Motley Fool Canada, Investopedia, Kiplinger, and several others in both the U.S. and Canada. He particularly enjoys creating model portfolios that stand the test of time. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At the time of this writing Will Ashworth did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

Will Ashworth has written about investments full-time since 2008. Publications where he’s appeared include InvestorPlace, The Motley Fool Canada, Investopedia, Kiplinger, and several others in both the U.S. and Canada. He particularly enjoys creating model portfolios that stand the test of time. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.


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