Angel investor Balaji Srinivasan is sharing a crypto investing strategy that newbies can use to build their portfolio.
In an interview on Real Vision Finance, the former Coinbase CTO says that the best way to learn how to invest in crypto is to get started with Bitcoin.
“If you don’t know what you’re doing in the space yet, buy BTC and learn. Most people will buy BTC custodially on Coinbase. Then they’ll get a wallet, they’ll play around with it to immerse themselves in the community, they’ll develop their own theses on it.”
Srinivasan explains why he refers to Bitcoin as the “lingua Franca of the crypto Babel.”
“Everybody, no matter what their crypto subculture, knows and respects BTC. If you’re Ethereum or you’re in EOS, or you’re in Zcash or you’re in Cosmos or whatever, BTC is just kind of the universal sort of denominator.”
Srinivasan also says investors won’t go wrong by having the king coin but notes that there are other important projects to explore.
“If you want to go further, it depends on your thesis and how you’re exploring the space. For example, if you’re very much into privacy, then looking at Zcash is interesting. If you’re interested in program building from the developers – and not just Zcash, but other zkSNARKs-related things (zero-knowledge proofs), Grin… Some amazing stuff is happening there in terms of privacy-preserving computation – hugely important, frankly, for where the internet is going…
Another angle, if you care about finance, is to get into Ethereum and DeFi (decentralized finance), where every single financial instrument is being rebuilt on-chain from derivatives to stocks and bonds and what have you, and you can basically set up a Bloomberg terminal anywhere from your computer without a Bloomberg terminal fee.
And that’s insanely valuable and interesting because what’s going to happen is, just like Twitter, how many folks were journalists in 1995 versus posting online by 2015? It went from a few thousand people to hundreds of millions of people posting online. In the same way, if the internet turned the world into publishers, crypto is going to turn the world into investors and financiers So if you’re interested in that, then Ethereum and DeFi and all the new protocols that are related to that are interesting.”
On top of privacy and finance, Srinivasan points out that investors should look into other interesting sectors which they can invest in and add to their crypto portfolio.
“So the kinds of technologies I’m interested in are those that complement BTC where BTC is a digital gold. I don’t feel it’s threatened, but I do think we also need a digital banking system. We need private coins. I think we’re going to need, for example, streaming video and uncensorable messaging and all this other type of stuff, right? And I think that crypto will be a massive component of that, even if it takes 5, 10, 15 years for the whole thing to build out.”
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