Since peaking in November, the crypto market has plunged almost 70% and shed more than $2 trillion in value. That sharp decline has been driven by an increasingly worrisome economic environment. With inflation running rampant, some economists believe a recession is imminent, so investors are pulling money out of risky assets.
However, crypto investors have seen this sort of crash before. In fact, the market lost 88% of its value during the last crypto winter, a three-year downturn that started in 2018. Of course, past performance is never a guarantee of future returns, but the investment thesis for Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) and Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) remains intact.
Here's why both cryptocurrencies are worth buying now.
1. Solana
Solana is a smart-contracts platform designed to support fast and scalable decentralized applications (dApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) services. Its core innovation is a unique consensus mechanism that blends proof of stake and proof of history to timestamp incoming transactions. That creates a verifiable order of events, which accelerates throughput and keeps fees low.
In fact, Solana can theoretically handle 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), and each transaction costs a fraction of a cent. By comparison, Ethereum handles fewer than 15 TPS, and the average fee currently sits at $6.50. That discrepancy has developers rushing to Solana.
Last year, with the exception of Fantom, Solana saw its developer community grow more quickly than any other blockchain project, according to data from Electric Capital. Better yet, Solana ranked as the fourth-most-popular blockchain in terms of total developers, and that advantage has led to rapid growth in its ecosystem of dApps and DeFi services.
For instance, over the past 30 days, Solana-based Magic Eden ranks as the crypto industry's second-most-popular NFT marketplace (behind Ethereum-based OpenSea) in terms of volume and users. More broadly, Solana is the fourth-largest DeFi platform, with $2.7 billion invested in products on the blockchain. DeFi is particularly noteworthy because it promises to make financial services more efficient by eliminating intermediaries such as banks.
Assuming Solana-based dApps and DeFi services continue to gain traction with users, demand for the underlying SOL coin should rise, making it more valuable over time. And with Solana trading 88% below its high, now looks like a good time to buy.
2. Bitcoin
In many ways, Bitcoin is the heart of the crypto industry. Its blockchain doesn't offer the same programmability as Solana, and its proof of work consensus protocol has drawn criticism for its energy-intensive nature and substantial carbon emissions footprint. Even so, Bitcoin was the first modern cryptocurrency, and it remains the most popular and the most valuable. In fact, approximately 75% of U.S. crypto investors own Bitcoin, according to eMarketer. The next-closest rival is Ethereum at 39%. Perhaps more impressive, Bitcoin currently accounts for about 45% of the entire crypto market's value.
A constellation of factors is driving those trends. First, Bitcoin has seen adoption by numerous fintech platforms -- including digital wallets like Block's Cash App, PayPal, and Venmo -- and that has made it more accessible. Additionally, Bitcoin's source code limits its supply to 21 million coins, and its finite nature has helped it earn a reputation as digital gold. Finally, public companies like Tesla and MicroStrategy have put Bitcoin on their balance sheets, and more institutional investors are adding Bitcoin to their portfolios. In fact, Bitcoin ranks as the most widely held digital asset among institutions, according to a survey published by Fidelity in September 2021.
Provided those trends remain in place, Bitcoin's price should rise as more public companies, retail traders, and institutional investors diversify into digital assets. For what it's worth, asset manager Ark Invest believes Bitcoin's value could hit $1.36 million per coin by 2030, implying a 61-fold return from its current price of about $22,000. With that type of upside on the table, I think it's worth buying this cryptocurrency.
