6 of the Best Cryptocurrencies to Invest Now

With crypto up dramatically so far in 2023, here are the top cryptocurrencies to buy now.

In less than 15 years, cryptocurrencies emerged from obscurity to become an important part of financial markets. But there’s one thing the industry’s evolution hasn’t eradicated: extreme volatility. As a parade of highly visible failures, implosions and frauds harangued digital assets last year, the crypto market as a whole erased 63% of its value in 2022 alone.

If you’re not willing to endure such violent swings, you simply shouldn’t own cryptocurrencies. And if you do get into crypto, there are thousands of coins to choose from, each one with different dynamics. It’s daunting. Here are six of the best cryptocurrencies to buy now:

1.Bitcoin (BTC)

Cryptocurrency is an incredibly nascent asset class, with origins only dating back to 2009. As 2022 showed, extreme volatility is par for the course, so investors looking to insulate themselves from the potential total collapse of their holdings will want to go with more established names. None is more established than Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency and largest by market capitalization with a valuation of about $500 billion, or nearly 49% of the overall market.

2.Ether (ETH)

Second by market capitalization is Ether, which is the native token on the widely used Ethereum blockchain. Often colloquially referred to as Ethereum, ETH’s market cap is about $190 billion and accounts for about 19% of the total cryptocurrency market. Unlike Bitcoin, Ether’s underlying network is far more than just a tool for peer-to-peer payments; the Ethereum blockchain is custom-made for smart contracts and decentralized finance tools, as well as for so-called Web 3.0 applications and the trading of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

3.Avalanche (AVAX)

When investing in cryptocurrency, investors should understand that it’s Bitcoin and Ether in their own tier, and then there’s everything else. AVAX and the following altcoins on this list all have more risk, and investors should factor that into their decisions. This distinction in quality has been abundantly clear throughout 2023, with BTC and ETH doing quite well and the rest of the market, broadly speaking, struggling to keep up. AVAX and the rest of the coins mentioned should be considered purely speculative wagers.

4.Polygon (MATIC)

Excluding stablecoins, MATIC is now the 11th-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, with a capitalization of about $4.7 billion. Still constituting less than 1% of the overall market size, Polygon has plenty of room to grow. That said, its future success is largely tied to the acceptance and ongoing usage of the Ethereum network. That’s because the Polygon network is a scaling platform that aims to increase the capabilities of Ethereum, allowing it to eventually run a potentially limitless number of decentralized applications, or dApps.

5.Cardano (ADA)

Founded in 2017 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson, Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain and one of the largest blockchains to successfully run that more energy-efficient protocol. Cardano aims to foster a developer-friendly ecosystem for dApps. Unlike Ethereum, Cardano has a hard cap on the number of coins that can ever exist, topping out at 45 billion. Thankfully for investors, around 35 billion, or about 78%, of that supply is already in circulation, meaning the amount of overall dilution remaining is both known and relatively limited.

6.Cosmos (ATOM)

Last and least valuable by market cap is ATOM, the native token of the Cosmos Hub blockchain. ATOM is more than just a means for securing the network. It’s also a governance token, giving holders a say in how the Cosmos ecosystem should evolve. One issue with the nascent cryptocurrency space is that there are so many different, independent blockchains. This is a challenge that Cosmos aims to alleviate by making inter-blockchain communication easier, faster and less expensive. Cosmos’s ultimate aspiration is to make blockchain technology more accessible for both coders and end-users, which could pay off if blockchain tech becomes as ubiquitous as some optimists in the space expect.