Okay, you need to get in on this. There’s only one problem.

When you open up Robinhood, there’s like 20 different coins to choose from. Then you check out Coinbase or Kraken only to see a thousand more options. Where do you even start?

First of all, this is not financial advice. This is purely educational. You are here to learn about crypto after all.

Now that that’s out of the way, the most important thing to consider when investing is your risk tolerance. How much are you willing to lose? 

All investments carry risk, and you must accept the possibility that you could lose what you put in. The trade-off of this risk, however, is the potential for gains.

You have to look at your monthly expenses and be sure that you’re still covering those bases. After the important things are taken care of and you have leftover money, then you can choose to invest as much of that as you feel comfortable with.

One of the safer strategies involves choosing an asset with a strong track record. 

Some of these coins have been around for a while and have demonstrated serious staying power—surviving market crashes, hostile governments, and outright attempts to ban them.

The main champs here are Bitcoin and Ethereum. They’ve been to hell and back—living through crashes that wiped out entire projects, exchanges and hedge funds—and have still managed to consistently attract investor funds and grow as networks, demonstrating stability and reliability.

These aren’t the only coins that have been around for a while, but they’re the most common starting point for good reason. 

History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Another solid path forward involves spotting emerging trends that have long-term longevity. 

When new tech that is going to be a big deal comes out, it can be rewarding to new apps and chains that embrace them in ways that add value to their existing ecosystems. Obvious plays are obvious, right?

Off top, AI is the current wave. And it’s a big one.

Every Fortune 500 company out there won’t shut up about how they’re incorporating it into their products, workflows and long-term business plans. Safe to say it’s here for good.

In AI, there will be many winners, but projects like Tao, Akash and Virtuals Protocol serve as interesting starting points.

Sometimes you get handed the clear long-term narratives on a silver platter by the largest companies in the world. Other times, they’re even relevant to the industry that you work in. 

If you work in payments and transfers, you might hear a lot of noise about stablecoins.

Stablecoin is a fun term for the blockchain version of a normal United States Dollar. Paypal has a stablecoin, JPMorgan has a stablecoin, Meta, IBM, Telegram, Goldman Sachs all have them and more are coming.

Hell, even Visa is partnering with some fintechs to settle payments on the Ethereum blockchain through a stablecoin called USDC. 

Stablecoin issuers like Circle, Paxos, Ethena, among others, are in strong positions to capture significant market share moving forward.

Well. This one’s the most obvious. 

Buy the coins supporting networks and protocols that actually make money.

You have to pay fees to the blockchain to submit a transaction, right? Yes. Most commonly, you have to pay this fee in the currency of the chain itself. You use BTC to pay Bitcoin’s network fees

Buying the coin so that you can use the chain moves the price up. What you want to look for here is a chain that continually adds new users by attracting developers to build new applications on the platform.

A steady stream of new applications will create consistent growth in fees generated, which means you can expect to see the growth reflected in the value of its native coin. 

This is often referred to as Adoption.

Simple.

Tools like DefiLlama and Messari help you get a clear picture of fees generated. Token Terminal is another good one, with the added benefit of generating quarterly and annual reports. These reports are akin to financial statements that are found in companies traded on the stock market.

These methods are just the tip of the iceberg, but will prove to be more than enough to get you started in a stable direction. 

Best of luck.