Crypto Shopping Cart – 11 August

 

I haven’t traded much in the last month or two. With the altcoin market still dead, one has to move very cautiously: being careful not to sell low and being equally careful not to buy rubbish.

Here’s what I’ve been selling and buying over the last three weeks or so:

 

Shopping trip 1:

The second part of my OByte airdrop came through about a month ago. Byteball (as it was then known) was airdropped to STEEM holders a little over a year ago, and I’ve been holding onto mine ever since, waiting for the second part of the airdrop to unlock. Obviously this was not a large amount (I didn’t have much STEEM a year ago), but every little bit counts, especially in an altcoin market as undervalued as this one is.

I’ve been watching OByte for as long as I have been holding it, and so far I have just failed to see a good use case for it. It doesn’t have the market penetration of similar coins, and it lacks the product differentiation required to give it unique desirability. I’m using the altcoin winter to weed out my weaker projects, and OByte is one of those which I decided to dump.

I headed over to Bittrex to sell it. Sadly I must say that Bittrex really doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the newer exchanges, it’s still a bit of a pain to use. Because my OByte was not worth much, and I didn’t feel like withdrawing BTC that would have cost me half it’s value in transaction fees, I decided to buy the one coin which I still leave on Bittrex: I bought Blocknet

Blocknet is not a name you hear every day. It’s basically a multi-chain, second-layer, blockchain interoperability system. It’s not a sure thing, but I have high hopes for it and see no reason why it should not succeed. To put it another way: I give it far greater odds of success than Cardano! Take a look at BLOCK if you are unfamiliar with it, they have some interesting things going on, including their own DEX (called “Block DX”). https://blocknet.co

Having nothing more to do on Bittrex, I headed over to KuCoin and sold off some of my TenX (PAY). While I still believe in TenX, I have not been happy with all of their recent decisions. A decision with regard to the distribution of tokens was badly received by the community, and indicative of poor management. That kind of thing sets off warning bells, the last thing I want is to sit on another Electroneum-like management disaster. So I dumped about 40% of my TenX and bought KuCoin Shares (KCS) with it. KuCoin shares are always a good investment – at least they have been for the last two years that they have existed.

Shopping trip 2:

Just before the month drew to a close, KuCoin dropped another surprise on us: the KuCoin Shares Lockup program. Staking rewards offered by this three month staking opportunity were ridiculously good, and I decided to participate. KuCoin Shares are not particularly cheap, but they are cheap for what they are. In an attempt to maximise returns on this opportunity, I traded my small emergency Ethereum fund (stored on KuCoin for just such cases) and bought KCS with it. In addition to that, I also sold off a substantial amount of my STEEM that has been powering down for the last few weeks – unfortunately at a very bad price. With altcoins universally low, it’s become a case of “which coins have the best potential for recovery?” I generally hedge my bets, but a STEEM to KCS swap was a no-brainer in this case.

I was fortunate enough to stake my KCS on Day 1 of the lockup at the maximum ROI percentage – I calculate that I should make a profit of over 10% (in KCS) in three months, which is fantastic! The KCS price climbed during the Lockup program, and for the most part it’s held onto its gains – hardly surprising when KuCoin continues to innovate and offer excellent service. See if you can spot the 24 hours before the staking contract first opened on the chart below…

From https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/kucoin-shares

 

Shopping trip 3:

My most recent shopping trip took place this weekend. ZCash (ZEC) has been under my watchful eye for the last few weeks. I have been growing increasingly uneasy towards it and last week I finally reached the end of my tether and decided to dump it. It’s a risky move: ZEC is far from bad, but I am unhappy with the direction that the management team has moved in. My decision was to get out before the coin suddenly loses most of its supporters – something which I consider to be a very real possibility. I don’t like the funding issues that ZCash is having – that’s bad financial planning. I don’t like the founder rewards disagreements – those are not in the best interests of the community, and have already caused the YCash fork to take place. The final straw for me was hearing that they wanted to basically rewrite the code for ZCash – which would open it up to a whole new set of bugs (remember: this is a privacy coin we’re talking about). Reading the latest posts by the ZCash Foundation and Electric Coin Company (the company which is confusingly ZCash – yet also isn’t – much like the Ripple/XRP obfuscation) did nothing to allay my fears, in fact it made them worse.

I held ZCash for a long time, so this was not a decision taken lightly (especially considering how much the price has dropped since I got it!). I wanted to put the newly freed up ZCash funds into the best possible coins. I sold my ZEC on Binance, so to keep things simple, I decided that I would only buy cryptos from Binance with those funds. I did entertain the possibility of leaving it in BTC, but because BTC dominance is so high right now, I consider any attempt to sell altcoins into BTC as a bad trade and a case of FUD selling. I opted to buy three altcoins instead.

It should be mentioned that I came very close to buying Holo (HOT) again. The only reason I didn’t buy it is that I have a fairly large amount of Holo already when compared to my other alts (not that any of my altcoin holdings can really be called “large” these days!). Civic (CVC) has been on my “want” list for several months now. With Civic at ATL prices, both in BTC and USD, it looks like an excellent buy opportunity. Combined with the fact that it still looks like a seriously good project and that it’s slowly getting some attention, I more than doubled my Civic stack for only a few dollars. I know that someday I will look back on these purchases and laugh. What remains to be seen is if the laughter will be at the massive profits I have made from them, or from the sheer foolishness of buying altcoins in a market that looks so disinterested in them!

Next on the list was Ontology (ONT). I’m still kicking myself for selling the first ONT that was airdropped to me for holding NEO. I often see ONT as a backup to NEO: should NEO for some inane reason fail to takeoff, then surely ONT will. For now my money is still on NEO (literally), but I think that ONT (which is basically just NEO dressed up in a suit and tie) is a very valuable addition to any crypto portfolio.

The last coin in my shopping cart is Waltonchain (WTC). I’m a VeChain supporter at heart, but Walton has always been worthy competition for them, and honestly there’s not much difference between the two. Lately it seems as if my #2 horse in the race has been outperforming my #1. Keeping my ear to the ground, it sounds as if Walton has been making the good deals lately – deals which should increase its adoption. “Adoption” is the name of the game in the altcoin world. With that in mind, I put the last of my old ZEC funds into WTC.

Conclusion

That’s the end of another month of shopping. While the markets may seem dead, I think this is a great time to accumulate all the good altcoins which are being overlooked by the “new money’ in crypto. The more fickle “old money” has turned BTC maximalist for now, but will surely swing the other way again once the altcoin money starts to flow. FOMO will pull them back over to the alts – where some of us have been waiting all along…

These are not the usual coins that I buy – with the obvious exception of KuCoin Shares. I’m taking this opportunity to increase my stake in some coins I don’t hold enough of, and also taking this opportunity to get rid of my non-performers. I’m also seriously considering putting more fiat in – even though I have none to spare – for reasons which I may elaborate on in my next post.

Opportunities surround us in crypto right now, fantastic opportunities. The trick is to tell the good from the bad. Remember that risk mitigation lies in diversification. Good luck out there.

 

Yours in crypto
Bit Brain

“The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first” 

~ Mark Twain

“Crypto does not require institutional investment to succeed; institutions require crypto investments to remain successful” 

~ Bit Brain

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About the author: Bit Brain
A walking crypto encyclopedia. Honest, Realistic, Opinionated. Futurist, Autodidact, Polymath.

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