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With Bitcoin (BTC USD) falls back below $62,000 and BlockTower Capital suffers a serious hacker attack, things are once again looking uncertain for cryptocurrencies. Even more interesting is the announcement from the Commodities and Futures Trade Commission (CFTC). new raids against unregistered brokerage firms. Beyond the tough measures, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has promised to impose stricter regulations to protect new retail investors from inevitable scams. Now more than ever, these events highlight the inherent risks of cryptocurrency trading and shed light on which cryptocurrencies to avoid.
First of all, the most important aspect of a cryptocurrency’s true future value is its projects and the level of application or integration. In the case of Bitcoin, its longstanding status as the most valuable and widely accepted cryptocurrency has allowed it to maintain its top spot since its inception. However, with new cryptos that have little or nothing to offer other than price fluctuations tied to trading volume, the reality is nothing more than a pump-and-dump system.
Bonk (BONK-USD)
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Admittedly a funny name based on the meme of a Shiba Inu with a club, Bonk (BONK-USD) has little to no practical application. On the surface, Bonk has one of the more attractive offerings for new investors: it acts as “Meme layer” Coin tied to the value of Solana (SOL USD). This may sound exciting for private investors, because at first glance the coin offers an extremely low purchase price and at the same time benefits from Solana’s success and technology.
Unfortunately, Solana had its heyday during the non-fungible token (NFT) boom, as its speed and accessibility made it the blockchain of choice for NFT minting. As interest in NFTs waned as they essentially had no real value other than what people would pay for them, Solana’s hype train slowed. As a result, Bonk has remained relatively unstable and experiences significant price fluctuations during cycles of crypto hype, making it one of the cryptos to avoid if you want to achieve real, long-term returns.
PancakeSwap (CAKE-USD)
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With adorable 3D bunnies and butter-laden pancakes, PancakeSwap (CAKE-USD) offers a friendly aesthetic to market its products. The cryptocurrency developers do a good job of making their offering accessible, namely that PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange where you can then purchase a coin value tied to it.
Decentralized exchanges are online constructs that run on blockchains, such as: Binance Smart Chain in the case of PancakeSwap. Traders then use these blockchains to trade cryptos directly with each other. This means that no fiat currency interferes with trade.
As an investor, this means hedging your money on the crypto community’s willingness and interest to use PancakeSwap’s trading platform. This is extremely risky during crypto crashes because most people convert their coins into fiat currency instead of holding them or exchanging them for other coins.
Amp (AMP-USD)
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Three years ago the… amp (AMP USD) token traded at an all-time high of 12 cents per coin. Today the coin trades for just over half a cent. In other words, this is the case more than 90% lost lost in value since the crypto boom in summer 2021. About a year later, in June 2022, the creators stopped posting Medium.com blog about the token.
This means that investors can still buy the coin on major exchanges such as Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN), but have no information about whether the project is still alive or not. Most likely the creators of Amp gave up on it.
If this is the case, Amp would be considered a dead coin and would certainly be one of the cryptos you should avoid if you want to get started. Furthermore, the coin never had a particularly strong use case, as it was intended as a universal form of loan security despite its low intrinsic value.
At the time of publication, Viktor Zarev did not hold, directly or indirectly, any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are subject to InvestorPlace.com’s publication policies.