Picking a winner in this year’s crypto markets has been a tough task. With assets deprecated across the board, even the best performing coins are in the red. To put it more accurately then, these are the least worst performing cryptocurrencies of 2018.
None of the Top 20 Cryptos Have Held Their Value This Year
Bitcoin is down 58% in three months and down 66% from its all-time high. Most cryptocurrencies have shed even more since January, but a few have outperformed bitcoin. The handful that are in the green, such as ontology (up 110%) are only up because they weren’t introduced until 2018 was well under way. Had ontology, which was airdropped to NEO holders, been launched last year, there’s every likelihood it too would be in the red.Of the cryptocurrencies that were trading at the start of this year, just two assets are in the green. Digixdao, a gold-backed token, is up 12% in three months, and bytom, a Chinese altcoin is up 2%. Neither of these two coins has produced the sort of return that the hodl strategy was conceived for. In fact, hodling through 2018 is one of the worst strategies a trader could have plumped for. That’s easy to say in hindsight of course. Short of sitting in tether for months, the most effective buy-and-sell strategy would have involved one of the following altcoins.
Meet 2018’s Least Worst Performers
Aside from digixdao and bytom, Binance Coin (BNB) has produced the best three-month return, down just 3%. In addition, Coincodex lists 29 crypto assets that have outperformed bitcoin. The likes of luminocoin and compcoin aren’t exactly household names, and with returns of -12% and -20% respectively, holding them would have brought little satisfaction. A look at the cryptocurrency top 20, based on market cap, reveals which recognizable altcoins have outperformed bitcoin in the past three months. Litecoin, EOS, NEO, monero, binance coin, vechain, and omisego are the only coins to pass this test, and both litecoin and monero are within a percentage point of bitcoin.
On the balance of probability, if you’d attempted to counteract bitcoin’s decline by switching to altcoins, you’d have lost, and lost heavily. Ripple and cardano are down 84% in three months, and NEM has fallen further still. Unless you’re a margin trading demon, your best bet is to keep the majority of your portfolio in bitcoin and forget about it. When the curtain falls on 2018, it’s safe to assume the year’s top performing crypto assets will look very different.