Health, Wealth, and Happiness

February 26, 2024

"Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the centre. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly."

- Vitalik Buterin

Howdy, investors!

There are two sides of investing: risk and reward. Today's roundup of our Risk Scorecards shows you the projects we've rated lowest-risk.

Restaking is all the rage, and EigenLabs is hot. Check out the fireside chat between Coinbase and EigenLabs CEO Sreeram Kannan.

Everyone's talking about AI and crypto, including the two University of Oxford graduates who wrote the AI + crypto primer below.

Want to know how to find the best potential altcoins for the next bull run? Crypto Narratives breaks down the 2021 bull run to predict the next.

Read on to explore more!

Crypto With Confidence: Best Bets from our Crypto Risk Scorecard

by Danielle Greving

Investing in crypto, like investing in any asset, carries some risk. From inexperienced teams to bugs in a smart contract, a lot can go wrong with a crypto project in ways that can drive the price down.

That’s why we developed the industry-leading Blockchain Risk Scorecard.

Where our premiere Blockchain Investor Scorecard measures reward, our Blockchain Risk Scorecard measures risk so you can confidently invest in crypto.

In our new guide, we’ve analyzed the last year and a half of Blockchain Risk Scorecards to show you the crypto investments our analysts believe have the lowest risk. (Hint: bitcoin is NOT on the list!)

Check out our Blockchain Risk Best Bets here >>

Premium Power-Ups

Level up your crypto investing game.

Our Newest Blockchain Risk Scorecard: Optimism (OP)

Layer-2 projects have been a major topic throughout 2023, and Optimism is one of the top L2s on the market.

But how risky of an investment is OP?

We recently released our Investor Scorecard on OP, where our analysts gave Optimism a better-than-average (but not great) overall rating.

Next, our analysts put OP into our industry-leading Blockchain Risk Scorecard, which measures the risk level (or potential downside). Premium members can download the Optimism Risk Scorecard here.

Not yet a Premium member? Sign up now and get access to all our investor scorecards, along with other great benefits like monthly BMJ token airdrops (the next one is on March 1!).

Must Read

Today's most important stories for crypto investors.

Fireside Chat: Restaking, AVSs, and Building on EigenLayer (Coinbase)

Restaking is all the rage, and EigenLabs is leading the charge. In this video, Coinbase Senior Protocol Specialist Ben Rodriguez speaks with EigenLabs CEO Sreeram Kannan. They discuss how Restaked Rollups (a newly introduced AVS category) work, introduce new projects building on EigenLayer, and get into what's next for the project. As we discussed last week, EigenLayer is one to watch.

AI x Crypto Primer (Github)

This paper by an AI & Robotics Ph.D. and Physics Alumni from the University of Oxford is the most comprehensive look into the current state and potential future of the intersection of AI and crypto. Worth a read for crypto investors looking for new ideas at the intersection of these two technologies.

How to Catch a Few 20x to 100x Coins During the Next Bull Run? (Crypto Narratives)

This is a comprehensive look at the trends and themes that drove altcoin performance in the last bull run. The author shows that the best performers were new rather than older projects. While the past does not always predict the future, he also gives some insights into where investors might focus their attention once a new bull run begins.

Long-Term Wealth

$1K invested at today's market prices

This asset	invested 5 years ago	is now worth
Bitcoin (BTC)	$1,000	$8,044
Ethereum (ETH)	$1,000	$7,092
Uniswap (UNI)*	$1,000	$1,843
BNB Chain (BNB)	$1,000	$28,570

Note: The future may look different from the past. Please invest carefully.

* As UNI is less than five years old, we calculate from the launch date (Sep 2020).

Chart of the Day

The race of the Layer-2s

Active users is a primary metric for determining the actual utility of a blockchain project. A growing user base is generally positive, while a shrinking user base shows a project that may be losing market share.

While Ethereum still has the largest active user base in the DeFi space, it is not invulnerable, and in 2024 we've seen Layer-2 solutions in the aggregate overtake Ethereum's active user numbers.

Even in the space of the Layer-2s we continue to see jockeying for dominance. While Arbitrum and Optimism led the pack in 2023, thanks in large part to a first-mover advantage, more recently they've been overtaken by the newer zkSync Era and Starknet L2 solutions.

While we feel that there will eventually be a dominant L2 solution, that fight is still playing out. And Ethereum can't be discounted as future developments in scaling and fee reduction could snuff out the competition from L2s.

For those investing and trading in the DeFi space this is a fight well worth watching as the spoils for the winner could total in the billions in the coming years.

ICYMI