With Bitcoin (BTC-USD) dipping below $62,000 again, and BlockTower Capital suffering a major hacking blow, things are starting to look shaky once more for cryptocurrencies. Even more interesting, the Commodities and Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) has announced new crackdowns on unregistered brokerages. Beyond crackdowns, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has vowed to enact more intensive regulations to protect new retail investors from inevitable scams. These events, now more than ever, underscore the inherent risks of cryptocurrency trading and give insight into which cryptos to avoid.
For starters, the most important aspect behind a crypto’s true future value is its projects and level of application or integration. In the case of Bitcoin, its long-running status as the most valuable and most accepted cryptocurrency has enabled it to maintain its first-place spot since its inception. However for novel cryptos with little or nothing to show other than price fluctuations tied to trading volumes, the reality is nothing more than a pump-and-dump scheme.
Bonk (BONK-USD)
Admittedly a funny name based on the meme of a Shiba Inu with a club, Bonk (BONK-USD) has little to no real-world application. On the surface, Bonk has one of the more attractive propositions to new investors: it acts as a “meme-layer” coin tied to the value of Solana (SOL-USD). This might sound exciting to retail investors because, at first glance, the coin offers an extremely low purchase price while capitalizing on the success and technology of Solana.
Unfortunately, Solana had its heyday during the non-fungible token (NFT) boom, as it was the blockchain of choice for NFT minting due to its speed and accessibility. Once interest in NFTs dwindled, as they essentially had no real-world value other than what people would pay for them, Solana’s hype train slowed. As a result, Bonk has remained relatively unstable and sees significant price swings during cycles of crypto hype, making it one of the cryptos to avoid if you want real, long-term returns.
PancakeSwap (CAKE-USD)
With its adorable 3D rabbits and butter-laden pancakes, PancakeSwap (CAKE-USD) offers a friendly aesthetic to market its products. The crypto’s creators do a good job at making its proposition accessible, which is that PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange in which you can then buy a coin value tied to it.
Decentralized exchanges are online constructs, running on blockchains, like the Binance Smart Chain in the case of PancakeSwap. Traders then use these blockchains to trade cryptos directly amongst each other. Thus, no fiat currency interferes in the trades.
As an investor, this means you are hedging your cash on the crypto community’s willingness and interest to use PancakeSwap’s trading platform. This is exceptionally risky during crypto crashes because most people convert their coins to fiat currency rather than holding or trading them into other coins.
Amp (AMP-USD)
Three years ago, the Amp (AMP-USD) token traded at an all-time high of 12 cents a coin. Today the coin trades for a little over half a cent. In other words, it has lost more than 90% of its value since the crypto boom in the summer of 2021. Around a year later, in June of 2022, its creators stopped posting to its Medium.com blog about the token.
This means investors can still buy the coin on large exchanges like Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) but have zero information on whether or not the project is still alive. More likely than not, Amp’s creators abandoned it.
If this is the case, Amp would be considered a dead coin and certainly one of the cryptos you should avoid if you’re looking to get started. Moreover, the coin never had a particularly strong use case, as it was meant to be a universal form of loan collateral despite having little intrinsic value.
On the date of publication, Viktor Zarev 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.
