Crypto has been insanely volatile over the past few days and it's been a little
bit scary but there are three altcoins that I've been buying and I want to
share them with you today What's up everyone my name is Ben and
welcome to rareliquid the best channel for tech investing
Today's agenda is simple and looks like this. I'll first be going over my three
picks and then since many of us have lost our gains
from our crypto holdings these past few days, I'll go over how you
can get some free money Before I begin I do want to mention that
these are just three projects that I personally have happened to look into
and liked- there probably are just a ton of other
projects out there that I just haven't been able to look at that are also
really good, viable, and strong projects that might bring about really great
returns so if there are any that you think I should really consider please
leave them in the comments below But anyway first up let's talk about
Solana Put simply Solana is a high performance
blockchain with smart contract functionality so it's just kind of like
Ethereum but on steroids. As of the filming of this
video Solana is ranked 14th on coin market cap and trades in the 40s and has
a market cap of around 13 billion one of Solana's key differentiators is
is Proof of History consensus mechanism and I think this chart that I'm about to
show you really explains solana's differentiation
amongst the competition best As you can see solana has one of the
highest TPS or transactions per second amongst
existing blockchains. Ethereum 2.0 can reach
up to 100,000 transactions per second and so it is a strong competitor
and I'm bullish on Ethereum as well but with that said there still is
a lot for developers to get done before Ethereum completes its upgrade
so I personally like betting on multiple horses
A lot of people also bring up Cardano which I know can reach up to 1 million
transactions per second with its hydra scaling solution,
but something to keep in mind is that Solana and also Ethereum 2.0 can also
technically scale to infinity if hardware improves as well. Cardano has
also been around since 2015 but only later this year is launching its main
net while solana already has a budding
ecosystem of applications while only being founded in 2018,
which speaks volumes to me about the team's ability to execute
Solana's block times and transaction fees are also extremely competitive and
so along with transactions per second this is why I just believe that Solana
is really miles ahead of many other platforms
The percentage of Solana stake is at nearly 67%
which is amongst the highest across many proof-of-stake cryptos and yes I do
see that cardano has around 75% so I do think that I do need to do some more
research on Cardano When you stake your crypto you basically
move them off of exchanges and lock them up for a certain period of time
in order to earn interest in the form of tokens and so it also is kind of a
signal of how much people believe in certain crypto assets
because you basically are staking them away and are earning
more of that token and so a higher percentage stake
is just a positive sign for a crypto asset
With all this said there are some issues about Solana that I just want to be
openly transparent about. The first is that
Ethereum has a huge first mover advantage and its upgrade to Ethereum
2.0 will solve a lot of issues with transaction speed and fees
and so it'll really all come down to which ecosystem developers want to be a
part of Solana is also not EVM compatible which
just means that it can't as easily interoperate with other
decentralized applications that run on Ethereum. But Solana is working on
something called wormhole which will help mitigate this
issue. And lastly there are some pretty high hardware requirements to become a
validator for solana which limits Solana's decentralization especially
versus Ethereum In response to this Anatoly who is
Solana's founder has mentioned that he really builds Solana with the future in
mind meaning that as hardware improves
exponentially in the next three to five to ten years it'll be
easier and easier for people to become validators or purchase
the hardware to become validators for Solana
and decentralization will improve over time. I actually go super in depth on
Solana in one of my previous videos so feel free to check that out if you're
interested Next up let's talk about a really small
cap coin called Serum Serum is described as the infrastructure
for financial projects built on the Solana blockchain
and I think it's a super under the radar project that more people should know
about Serum trades at around six dollars and
has a market cap of around $300 million what's first important to know is that
one of the key people behind Serum is billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, an MIT
grad who is the CEO of the crypto exchange FTX
He also previously worked at Jane Street, which is one of the top trading funds in
the world Also in case you didn't know this fun
fact, FTX actually also bought the rights to call the MiamI heat arena FTX Arena
so FTX is not a tiny little exchange sam really has a very unique set of
experiences that I think will give him an edge when building out one of the top
decentralized exchanges in the world and the fact that he chose Solana also
really validates Solana as a blockchain platform when he
really had a lot of other options he could have chosen from
In several interviews, Sam talks about how he spent months testing various
blockchains and landed on using Solana for Serum
because of the high transaction speed and low fees. Serum is a very ambitious
project as it imagines a defy world with 1
billion users and 10 trillion dollars of on-chain transactions
and it wants to be the project serving all those users and transactions
One of serum's primary differentiators is that it offers a central limit order
book, which is what centralized exchanges use and arguably offers the most
capital efficient markets versus automated market makers which is what
most defi exchanges like Uniswap uses The drawbacks of AMM's include higher gas
fees, network congestion, and more but AMM's by
themselves are not necessarily bad and they can actually be combined with
central limit order books to provide the best of both worlds
Serum does have its own decentralized exchange which I have been using and by
the way really needs a better design in my opinion but as I mentioned earlier
Serum is actually more of an infrastructure that can be built upon
by other projects such as the ones you see here. Another thing I want to point
out about Serum is probably not something that most people will
think that is that important but for me I think it's really worth pointing out
If you go to solana.com and scroll down a bit you can see that Serum is actually
the first project on their site. Now I know this is just a
small detail but solana also supports pretty large and well-known projects
like USDC, Tether and Chainlink and so I think
solana recognizes serum as one of its most crucial projects
to have it be placed there before all the others and I think that kind of
means something So just to sum up everything Serum is
trying to build a defy ecosystem with the lowest transaction costs and the
highest transaction speeds all built on solana and the project is
pretty ambitious and aims to serve 1 billion users and all of
it has the backing of Sam Bankman-Fried a person who has already created a very
successful centralized exchange. I personally view
this as a three to five year long investment because Serum is just such a
new project and unless my thesis changes I'm probably
just gonna buy and hold for a really long period of time or maybe if
it jumps up too quickly take some profits we'll see
but anyway if you are interested in buying Serum and you're
based in the us it is a little bit tricky so I'll leave some instructions
on how to do it in the comments down below. If you are based
outside of the US you can just buy it on ftx.com
or binance.com third and last but not least
is Polygon which is also known as Matic currently Polygon trades at around two
dollars and has a market cap of around $12 billion
now you probably know by now that Ethereum 1.0 has really really
high transaction costs and really really low transaction speeds
and if you do want to learn more about Ethereum check out my video that I made
but basically going back to Polygon it is a layer 2
solution that really solves a lot of these issues
Currently polygon is the only Ethereum aligned and EVM compatible side chain
and is enjoying a significant first mover advantage that is helping
it build its ecosystem. Many popular games and applications have rapidly
migrated to Polygon and the recent launch of defi giant sushi
swap and curve have driven total locked value
on Polygon to over 4 billion dollars which is a 450% increase in one month
While there are many layer two solutions for Ethereum in development
Polygon has succeeded lately because it's readily available and sometimes
adoption is just the most important part of crypto success just like Ethereum
As a result in a relatively short period of time
Polygon has become the dominant option for layer 2 defi activity
as it has surpassed its closest rival zk swap last month by a factor of 3.
In addition to this Polygon has also attracted more assets than any other
non-layer 1 crypto platform. This is what has also led to Polygon's massive
increase in price over the past few months and I think as long as the crypto
market holds up, there will be a lot more room to run
Now before you think that I just chose a random crypto asset that blew up by a
few hundred percentage points over the past few months
I actually did let my patrons know on April 28th
when matic was trading at around 61 cents
that I was purchasing it and so if you'd like to get some buy sell alerts
from me whenever I make trades then feel free to check out my Patreon
in the description below. Anyway what's also important for you to know is that
Polygon has recently pivoted to creating the tools and infrastructure needed for
all evm compatible layer 2 solutions which
are the ones you see here and in Polygon's words they are
aiming to be the aggregator of scalable solutions for
Ethereum. In order to help accomplish this polygon recently launched a 100
million dollar fund to support defi adoption this past April
So clearly, Polygon is a pretty ambitious project
and with its first mover advantage I see a lot of positive growth for it in the
future Okay so last up let me tell you about a
few ways you can earn some free money now normally I wouldn't have an entire
section of the video for something like this but basically
because the crypto market has been going down so much over the past few
days I just thought it might be helpful to
kind of share a few opportunities. The first way is something new that I'm
going to be doing which is that for every video that I post from now on
the first person who comments I'm going to be giving away $10
and I'm also going to be giving away $10 for any random comments so basically
even if you're not the first person to comment I'll be awarding a random
comment as well so it kind of incentivizes you to comment which is
kind of a win-win for you and me just because maybe if you're going to leave a
comment anyway then you have a chance to win $10
and obviously it also helps really with the Youtube algorithm
I'll be doing this for the foreseeable future unless I go broke or something
and I'll be announcing the winners at the
end of each following video so the winners
of this whole video will be announced in the next video
The second way is to go onto my instagram and look for this picture of
Oprah and I'm doing a giveaway on instagram
where you just need to tag three friends and follow my instagram account to
potentially win 10% of my YouTube May 2021 earnings
and I'm promising to give away at least $300
The third and final way I want to mention is to look down below in my
description and also in the comments I'll leave a few links
where basically if you join crypto exchanges
or brokerages that you haven't made accounts with yet they're offering some
free money if you sign up using those links
and so feel free to you know check those out and see if you want to create an
account And lastly what I just want to mention
is please remember that I am not a financial advisor so please treat all
content that I provided as for entertainment and education purposes
only and also want to give a really brief
shout out to DimitrI and Felipe for being the latest
Terabyte Patrons If you want more frequent updates from
me then check out my Twitter, Instagram and I'm also starting a newsletter which
I'll leave to a link for in the description below where you can
sign up and with that said as always thank you so much for tuning in hope to
catch you in the next video thanks so much and peace out
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