Why You Need to Own Crypto Going into 2024

We pick up on the day after Christmas with the second in a short series of year-end dispatches looking back across the year at some of my predictions.

As I noted at the end of Friday’s dispatch, today I’m going to Bonk you over the head.

I’m referring to a cryptocurrency called Bonk. It’s what’s known as a “meme coin,”—coins which pop up all the time and are based on memes of the moment. I’d argue that 99.99% of them are total scams. Pump-and-dump trash that see founders and extremely early investors profit as they dump their crappy coins onto hyped-up newcomers hoping to score big.

Bonk was different from the outset.

The community on Solana, where Bonk emerged, was widely excited about this token.

It was part of a collection of dog-themed meme coins that have popped up over the years on various blockchains. Ethereum has its dog-themed coin called Shiba Inu. Bitcoin has the infamous Dogecoin, made popular by Elon Musk’s tweets. Bonk showed up on Solana in late 2022, magically landing in millions of digital wallets as part of what’s called an “airdrop”—a free distribution of a cryptocurrency.

At the time Bonk arrived, crypto was in a dark place, particularly Solana.

Crypto Winter still seemed to be roaring through the ecosystem. And the FTX crypto exchange scandal/fraud was still a fresh and painful scab for the industry, particularly for Solana, to which FTX had deep financial ties.

Into that environment, Bonk appeared. And something changed.

As I noted at the time, Bonk’s arrival felt like the opposite of a canary in the coal mine, meaning the dying canary was coming back to life. Here’s what I wrote in January:

The dark clouds that hung about for most of last year appear to be lifting. Not only are the animals spirits rekindling on Solana, but bitcoin, the benchmark crypto, is flirting with $23,000, a level not seen since last August when bitcoin was in the process of falling to lows in the mid-$15,000s. Ethereum, meanwhile, is up more than 50% since late-November lows.

We could, of course, see all crypto retest their recent lows, depending on what the Federal Reserve does at its first 2023 meeting next week. But my sense is that the bottom is in.

Recent lows are the lows for the bear cycle.

Turns out, I was dead on. Crypto had bottomed.

The rest of the year saw crypto prices climb substantially higher.

That climb was slow and choppy at first, and then it was rapid and sustained.

Had you invested in bitcoin when I wrote that column, you’d be up almost exactly 100% today. Had you grabbed some Ethereum, you’d be up about 42%. Had you snapped up some Solana, you’d be up nearly 300%.

And Bonk?

Well, I didn’t necessarily suggest anyone go buy Bonk. In fact, I noted in that January column that I sold a large chunk of the Bonk that landed in my account. It was literally free money, so I locked in an easy $475 for having exerted zero effort and having invested zero dollars.

Had you nevertheless bought some Bonk, you’d be up almost 700% today.

Don’t worry about having missed that, though. That $475 worth of Bonk I sold? Yeah, today it would be worth nearly $7,500. Luckily, I kept a bit of Bonk in my wallet that is now worth more than $3,500—not a bad outcome, given that all the Bonk I own was 100% free.

But this update isn’t so much about Bonk as it about crypto, the speed at which crypto moves, and why you need to own crypto going into 2024…

We are clearly in the new bull market, as predicted. We were in that bull market back in January, when I first wrote that the canary was alive and well. That was the time to be a buyer and grab the huge early gains that we’ve seen.

That’s how fast crypto can move. What’s underwater one day, is up hundreds of percent the next.

Indeed, a crypto I recommended to readers of my Frontier Fortunes quarterly newsletter, one called Shadow Token, was down more than 90% at one point. But now that the bull market is back, and because Shadow’s parent company, GenesysGo, spent the entire bear market building a highly useful product for the Solana network, that token today is up 2,500% from lows earlier this year. Frontier Fortunes subscribers who held on during the worst of the worst are up 155%.

That said, you’re still early enough to make big gains going forward.

As I’ve written in recent dispatches, 2024 will be a seminal year in crypto as the industry goes through bitcoin’s fourth halving, a technological matter that sees the difficulty of creating new bitcoins become twice as hard. The previous three halvings—they happen every four years roughly—have seen bitcoin set new all-time highs each time. This time around, I expect bitcoin will rise about 500% to $185,000 or more.

Ethereum will very likely more than double to $5,000.

And Solana will surpass its previous all-time high in the $260 range. I’m saying it touches $400, which would mark a nearly 600% rise from current prices.

Other, smaller cryptos will see even larger gains.

Bonk, for instance, could 10x from current prices (which would mean my $475 Bonk sale in January would have precluded me from collecting more than $75,000). Bonk, the most important meme-coin on Solana (which is also one of the most important networks) is deeply undervalued relative to Dogecoin and Shiba-Inu, and there’s not much rationale for that. In fact, Bonk has real value and a growing number of use cases in commerce. I won’t be surprised to see Bonk have an epic run before this new bull market peters out.

And it promises to be the mother of all asset bull markets.

Those who build positions in key cryptos today will have an opportunity to pocket meaningful wealth.

Me? Based on certain cryptos I own and their price trajectory, I’m looking to use crypto gains to buy an apartment here in Portugal, where I live now.

But that’s an update for next December…