The Feb. 5 crypto sell-off was ugly, and the market hasn't exactly snapped back with confidence. On that day, the crypto majors crashed by 14% or more, and none have completely recovered to their prior levels.
Still, now's the time to be shopping for bargains. If I were looking to allocate $1,000 to crypto via lump sum purchases today, there are three coins in particular that I'd be buying.
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Bitcoin is the anchor
Bitcoin (BTC 0.38%) earns the biggest slice of the $1,000 because it's the foundational asset in the crypto sector.
I'd buy $700 worth of Bitcoin. It's a scarce, in-demand asset that more and more people choose to hold as it becomes scarcer. I also consider it the first coin to start a diversified crypto portfolio with, as it teaches key lessons such as the importance of patience, the irrelevance of day-to-day price action, and the benefits of a long-term investment horizon.
CRYPTO: BTC
Key Data Points
Of course, Bitcoin could still perform poorly in the coming quarters, or even years. It isn't a safe investment by any means, but it is one of the safest in crypto, which is why it gets to be the steak on the plate of this allocation.
Ethereum offers upside, but with more moving parts
Ethereum (ETH 0.24%) is my second choice to buy, and I'd allocate $200 to it.
Regardless of its recent price decline, it's still the nexus for most smart contract activity in crypto, and it has a solid plan to continue scaling to keep driving down transaction costs and making them faster, too. For applications in decentralized finance and asset tokenization, there's simply no equal to Ethereum, and that dynamic is highly likely to persist and even intensify for the foreseeable future.
CRYPTO: ETH
Key Data Points
But that's also precisely why it's a far riskier bet than Bitcoin. Ethereum faces more competition for developers, dramatically more technical complexity, and far more ways for its execution to disappoint both users and investors.
Put differently, Ethereum is indeed very important, but that doesn't mean that it's safe, so it gets a smaller slice of the pie here.
XRP is the riskiest pick, for now
XRP (XRP 0.69%) is the coin that gets the smallest allocation of $100, because its upside, while significant in the long view of things, depends on winning at least one tight contest among the several that it's in.
One such contest is its bid to become a hub for financial institutions that need to trade and manage tokenized real-world assets. It's currently trailing Ethereum significantly in that fight, but it could still succeed in the long run, as it has an extensive suite of built-in features for regulatory compliance. And those same features could also help it to succeed in another one of its target arenas, processing payments and facilitating international money transfers.
CRYPTO: XRP
Key Data Points
But, wherever XRP goes for growth, it'll face incumbents as well as other entrants looking for bounty. And that's why it gets the smallest allocation of these three coins.
