My friends, you're about to see my crypto portfolio in detail, along with an explanation of exactly the strategy behind it. After nine years in crypto, this to me is an absolutely ideal portfolio, and I'll explain why. I'll talk about which altcoins I'm thinking about adding, I'll explain the virtues of each of these and why I've set it up this way, and I'll explain how you can suggest to me altcoins you think I should add and altcoins you want me to review. If you want to be part of that conversation, the best way to do it today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community. This is actually the third time I've tried to film this. I usually get it on the first take.
Why I hold no meaningful Ethereum
The first thing I want to mention, which I forgot last time, is why I don't have any Ethereum on here. This is only cryptos that I have at least $500 of, because if I don't have $500 or more of a crypto, I really don't care about it. What I've noticed is that broke people tend to focus a lot on smaller amounts of money, and wealthy people tend to focus on larger amounts of money. If you're sitting there screwing around with these little amounts of crypto, 50 here, 100 there, 20 here, and you're getting all worried and obsessed with it, then you're generally going to do a piss poor job with larger amounts. So I don't even count cryptos that I have less than $500 of. I don't even care about them, and I have no emotions invested in them. To me, if I really like an altcoin, I'll put at least $500 into it and hold on for the ride.
So technically, I do have less than $500 of Ethereum scattered throughout several different wallets, which I had originally bought for fees and such. So yes, technically I have some Ethereum, and I have a few other altcoins, some stupid coins I got stuck staking in and regretted my purchases. I'm no longer putting those on my portfolio, because this is where my real money is, this is what I believe in, and these are what I'm accumulating for this month.
So why do I have 53% Bitcoin this month and no meaningful amount of Ethereum, after I previously had big amounts of Ethereum in my portfolio? I've had a realization about Ethereum. Ethereum may outperform Bitcoin in the next bull market, but it's probably not going to be by that much if it does happen, because the Ethereum market cap is so big that basically only significant institutional money will really move it. What I see is that if I want to preserve my wealth, and this is the largest problem worldwide that crypto can offer a solution for, it's that we're constantly getting destroyed by inflation in all fiat currencies. Bitcoin is the number one crypto by market cap, and to me it's the number one way to preserve wealth, the equivalent of digital gold with better returns and transactability.
Half Bitcoin, half for gains
I think each of my altcoins has a very good chance to far outperform Bitcoin in the next bull market. But if I'm wrong on all of these and they all go to zero and Bitcoin does a 4X, I'll still double my money, even being mostly wrong. That's why I've set my portfolio up like this, and that's why I think this is an ideal portfolio for the average crypto investor to have: half Bitcoin, and then a few other altcoins. Because if I'm right on one of these, we could get some serious gains, maybe a 20-plus X on any of these, maybe two or three X compared to what Bitcoin does in the next bull market. And if I'm wrong on one or two, it won't matter. To me, this is an ideal allocation.
Why? Because Bitcoin is truly decentralized. It has withstood the test of time, and it is seen by many as an emerging global reserve currency. Bitcoin is very low risk. It has performed very well for a long time, and the odds of me losing money in Bitcoin are near zero, maybe one or two percent. Meanwhile Ethereum, while it may outperform Bitcoin in the next bull market by two times at most in my opinion, and this is all my opinion, I think is way, way more risky than Bitcoin. There's so much more that could go wrong with Ethereum that could potentially collapse the price of the whole network, because there's so much built on it, so much complexity, and so many competitors.
Things like Solana are more of a competitor to Ethereum than to Bitcoin. If you're a developer looking to build a dApp, Solana offers a way faster and superior environment to Ethereum in almost every way. And the same kind of person who wants to buy Ethereum and the person who wants to buy Solana overlap a lot, whereas the people buying Bitcoin very often just want to preserve wealth and take low risk. So I see so many potential problems with Ethereum. In my portfolio, I want about half of it to simply preserve wealth, and then the other half to go for gains. To me, Ethereum is too risky compared to its upside potential, whereas Bitcoin does a much better job of preserving my wealth. And if I'm going to hold Ethereum, I'd rather just have Solana, because I think Solana is going to have a way bigger bull market than Ethereum. So why bother with Ethereum at all? Some of you might think, shouldn't I have diversified a little less in each of these and put some more into Ethereum? Why bother, when I think Solana could easily do a 2X more than Ethereum? I'd rather just have more Solana and not have Ethereum at all.
Stop being so willing to lose everything
So let's explain these three altcoins now that I've made the portfolio strategy clear. Most of you I've talked to in Discord and on one-on-one calls are too focused on getting gains and too willing to lose everything, and I wouldn't do that. I invite you to stop being so willing to lose everything if you're wrong, because that's a stupid long-term strategy. When you buy into these altcoins and get absolutely destroyed, like many of you have, then you have to start over again, and you may wreck your financial security for the rest of your life. What I've noticed is that if you've got at least half your portfolio in something that's not risky, then you can sleep at night and relax about the rest of your life. That's the way to take on the risk of your risk-taking. Whereas those of you just putting 100 into all these risky altcoins, if you don't time your sells perfectly, getting out in the next bull market, and you take all this time and energy to try to do it, most of the time you're going to lose again, and you're going to lose in a variety of different ways. Some of you are going to lose because you piss away all the gains you made, you get wrecked in taxes, or you're not making money any other way because you put too much into crypto.
That's how I got wrecked. I made a bunch of gains in altcoins in 2016, 2017, and 2018. But all that time I put into crypto, when the bear market came, my income dried up. Once I spent all the gains I'd made, and you'd be amazed how fast you can spend several hundred thousand dollars, then I was left with a business that was performing poorly, and I got into the worst financial situation I'd ever been in. So to me, that's the worst-case scenario, and it's why I think it's very smart to have at least half a portfolio in Bitcoin. I'm amazed how many of you have almost no Bitcoin and are just thinking about putting money into altcoins. Even though I've done a fantastic amount of research to build this portfolio, I could easily be wrong on all three of these altcoins. I could easily lose everything on all three, because they're all much, much higher risk than Bitcoin: risk that they won't get user adoption, risk that the network has some failure, risk that they become irrelevant and better competitors come along.
Solana: user adoption and low fees
So let's take a look at each of these, and we'll go bottom up. Solana has fantastic user adoption and very low fees. To me, it looks like one of the most attractive Ethereum killers out there. If you're trying to build an application, there are so many things you can do on Solana that you can't do on Ethereum. You can't do anything on Ethereum because of the gas fees. And with all these Ethereum layer twos coming out, it doesn't look attractive to invest in one of the layer twos when I think a better bet would be to grab Solana, because the layer two competition is insane and there are so many problems with layer twos too. Have you tried bridging assets over to a layer two? That's not fun, paying the gas fee, is it?
Solana makes things possible. This is why projects like Helium moved over to Solana. The user adoption on Solana is far superior to almost anything else, so to me it actually has the user adoption to help it continue to grow and grow, and that's what almost no other altcoin can say. Only Tron, Binance, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, from what I see, have higher user adoption. I get a bad feeling about Binance, and a lot of you have bad feelings about Tron. Tron is mainly like gambling in Asia, and that's not fitting my vibe. Solana is also more decentralized than almost any other altcoin, which is one reason I like it. I would say Solana looks more decentralized than Ethereum, which is another reason I don't hold Ethereum in any meaningful amount. I don't like how centralized Ethereum is becoming, and that makes it more risky too.
Deso: decentralized social media
Next we'll move up to Deso. Deso is decentralized social, and it's one of the most attractive decentralized social media platforms out there. They already got the big Clout app viral in the previous bull market, and I think they have a very good shot to get another viral Deso social media app. We have a huge need for decentralized social media, especially as censorship keeps growing. Do you think censorship is going to cut back and they're not going to do as much as they want to? I hope so, but we need some places where we can post without algorithms manipulating what we see and censoring what we say based on arbitrary rules, because many of the places we're censored are the exact places we need to have conversations. So I think decentralized social media is a real need. It's been a narrative we've seen hit hard at various times, like when Steem launched in 2016, and this one could easily be a big narrative, especially heading into a presidential election, when there will likely be extra crap on social media coming up in 2024. I think decentralized social media could hit really hard in 2024 and 2025 for the bull run.
DeSo, to me, is in one of the best positions to capitalize on that and deliver on-chain decentralized social media that has low fees and already has millions of users signed up. User adoption is potentially an issue on DeSo, and I've actually got my DeSo tied up in my creator coin, which to me gives some incredible fundamentals for DeSo. Solana is also in a position to do well with decentralized social media, and then there's ICP, or Internet Computer Protocol. This is my biggest altcoin position, because no other altcoin I see on the market has as many pump narratives as Internet Computer Protocol. Nothing. And keep in mind, I've reviewed hundreds of altcoins this year. I look at new altcoins almost every single day, and nothing comes close.
Why Internet Computer Protocol is my biggest altcoin position
Somebody could argue Ethereum, but no, because you're never going to train on-chain AI on Ethereum. On Internet Computer Protocol, you can train on-chain AI. You can build entire websites on it. You don't have to use oracles. Internet Computer Protocol has built-in Bitcoin at the protocol level, meaning it directly interacts with the Bitcoin blockchain. They've got ChainKey Bitcoin, which is a Bitcoin Layer 2. They're going to have ChainKey Ethereum, which will be an Ethereum Layer 2. It's not even really a blockchain, it's a protocol. It's essentially a second way to build the internet, like rebuilding the entire internet with crypto and ChainKey cryptography instead of building it the way it's built today.
This has so much potential it's ridiculous. Imagine one single place that could hold Bitcoin, which it already does, and Ethereum Layer 2 coming soon, and almost any other crypto. You could build a Cardano Layer 2 into Internet Computer Protocol. You could build in a Solana layer, and while Solana might operate too fast, you could build a lot of other cryptos into it. You should be able to do Solana or almost any other crypto with it. On top of that, there's on-chain gaming. Nothing else has on-chain gaming set up as well as Internet Computer Protocol. They've made it as easy as clicking a few buttons, because there's a team that's taken a ton of time on it, and on-chain gaming is very hard and very expensive almost anywhere else except Internet Computer. It has technology nothing else has. That's why it's my biggest position. I don't see anything on the market that comes close to having as much potential.
How I've built my portfolio to survive being wrong
That said, both Internet Computer Protocol and DeSo are a bit weak in user adoption. What I can see is that if those get the user adoption, which is a big if that almost all altcoins fail at, then there's huge potential. That's why I've set these altcoins up this way, because if these two fail to get user adoption, Solana should cover the difference, preserve wealth, and multiply significantly to make up for the losses. This is what you need to think about: what if you're wrong about the altcoins you're picking? I've set my strategy up so that in almost no scenario does my portfolio get wrecked. Even if the crypto market goes down, one of these three will probably take off to make up for it. In my experience, there's almost no shot of Bitcoin getting wrecked, and I basically have Solana as a hedge against the possibility that I'm wrong about these two.
I could be wrong about Internet Computer doing well if people don't care about doing things on-chain. Right now, people in the crypto space don't care that much about doing stuff on-chain. Almost all crypto projects are built off-chain. For example, your Ethereum NFT is basically a link pointing to Amazon Web Services or the Interplanetary File System. Your NFT is not on-chain in most cases. With Internet Computer Protocol and DeSo, they're actually putting everything directly on-chain. I've come to believe directly on-chain will be a very investable place going forward, because the longer you're in crypto, the more you see that if things aren't directly on-chain, they're in a position where at any time the Amazon Web Services side of it could get wrecked. If the web server gets hacked and all the NFTs go offline, there are so many bad things that can happen when you're mixing on-chain with off-chain. You've always got centralized points of failure, where one person's Amazon Web account getting hacked could knock out a whole NFT marketplace and ruin billions of dollars in transactions.
What I expect from the next bull market
I've set my portfolio up to make sure I get both solid gains and don't lose money. In my experience, I would imagine my portfolio at a bare minimum will 5x during the next bull market on average, meaning maybe I'm wrong about ICP and these other two do well, and it still averages 5x. So to me the bare case for the bull market is a 5x. And if this goes really well, I think Internet Computer Protocol is capable of 100x. If it takes off for all the reasons I think it could, that could really carry the whole rest of my portfolio. I think Solana will far outperform Ethereum, and DeSo is a small enough market cap that if it takes off we can see some big multipliers out of it as well. I've set this up with the intention to lead by example, instead of screwing around with all these other dumb coins, because most of that is a waste of time. To me, ICP, DeSo, and SOL already carry significance, and I definitely don't want anything more risky than that.
Come review altcoins with me
So if you'd like the best experience with me, if you want to ask me to review altcoins, and if you want to ask me more questions, the best way to work with me on this today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family. That's where I read comments, take questions, and get to actually talk with you. Back in these days I ran everything through Discord with Patreon and lifetime-access options tied to it, and I even offered lifetime access if you bought one of my creator coins on DeSo or a key on friend tech, but that whole setup is retired now and my community is where all of that lives.
I'm also a musician, so if you've got a SoundCloud you'll love some of my music. I post on X every day and share these videos there as well, and I mirror them on my podcast. I've also put a six-hour free crypto course up on YouTube, and if you want more of these breakdowns you can go through my Crypto Reviews playlist. I hope showing you my portfolio gets you to demand that anyone you follow does the same. You should not watch anyone who doesn't show you this, because if you don't see it, you don't know whether anything else they're saying is honest or not.
I'll be back next month with another in-depth review of my portfolio, and I would love to get to know you better.