Exactly How I Research and Invest In Crypto Altcoins in 2026

I built a seven figure crypto portfolio from nothing by focusing on long term investing and getting in early on projects. And I've helped thousands of other clients do the exact same thing. So if you stick around to the end, I'm going to show you the exact framework that I utilize to get access to these primary markets where tokens are launched before getting on major exchanges and show you right now the projects that I am personally investing in to get access to before everyone else. Most people fail when investing into crypto because they follow the hype, they follow the influencers, and they just want to get into tokens that get launched online, right? Where someone on Twitter talks About it or YouTube, they follow a coin and you end up with all these different altcoins and you have no idea what any of them are doing. And most of the time they're usually down. The thing that I learned over investing in a crypto over the last nine years is you need an edge. And usually when the asset gets launched onto a major exchange, it's usually too late. And if you look at any of the previous tops of altcoin cycles, they've been primarily around an event that everyone's looking forward to. Something that we hear all the time in crypto that I want you all to learn and understand is buy the hype and sell the news, meaning that you want to get and accumulate on altcoins before there is a big narrative and sell once the major news event hits. This is where most people go wrong and their plan and having a strategy around that is the most important thing. So this is the Shift list, which is our token research platform that my company, Collective Shift, runs. And one of the biggest things we look at whenever looking at altcoins is risk and reward. All right, so as an example, if I'm looking at something like Hyper Liquid, which has been a big winner for us, I want to look at the opportunity, the upside potential with the risk that I'm going to take. And if the risk that you're taking doesn't allow you to reward yourself through that asset more than the risk you're taking, then it's not a good investment. What does that even mean? Well, it means that you don't want to take all this risk to buy an altcoin if it's not even going to outperform bitcoin. So many projects right now in crypto are not even outperforming bitcoin. As an example here, if you look at, when investing into altcoins, you want to make sure that you are outperforming bitcoin. Now, if you look right back, just the start of 2025, on the pink line here is the Bitcoin chart, up 11%. Others, meaning the altcoin return or market cap outside of the top 10 altcoins is down 33%. There's a 44% gap difference between altcoins, coins and bitcoin, meaning that on average, your altcoins are going to be down 40% against Bitcoin price. So whenever you're investing in altcoins, you want to make sure that they're actually outperforming bitcoin. And most of the time they're actually not. Right. So as an example, when I'm investing and looking in, you know, as hyper liquid, as an example, the thing that we looked at and when we invested back, we got in back at around $22 when we shared hyper liquid. Yeah, about seven months ago. The biggest things for me when I'm looking at an altcoin is I want to see clear product market fit. I want to see favorable token economics and fundamentals, the drive adoption for the product and revenue and rewards back to the token. All right, and that's from a risk to reward standpoint. That is the asset that we shared back seven or eight months ago as to why we felt that the risk to reward on hype was quite high. Right. From a token economic standpoint, a lot of the buybacks for the token based on its revenue actually go back to token holders versus something like Uniswap for an example. You know, Uniswap's a great product. I love using uniswap. But a lot of the token revenue or the revenue from the protocol doesn't go back to the token. Crypto is different to the stock market where businesses drive revenue and that revenue goes to the share price. Crypto is different. Depending on the way they've structured the token economics, it can be different for different projects. That's where a lot of the projects may be a good product, but it doesn't actually drive revenue back to token holders. And that's a very, very important part. All right, but one of the crucial value cool mechanisms for hype is specifically around the meaningful fees. All right. It is found product market fit. Whenever I'm looking at crypto right now, this bull market is completely different to previous cycles. We're not seeing the retail interest like we have before. I want to make sure that there is a large amount of revenue being Dr. You know, projects. And this was up, you know, hyperloop went up, you know, 100, 120%. You know, since that $22 price, you know, where we are right now. It also had a bit of a correction from 60%. Another project as an example where I made a lot of money was syrup. So syrup was a big winner for me. I shared this back in around April of, you know, this year when I bought in. I've actually held syrup for a long time. But I shared while I was buying syrup. Syrup did over 1000% from bottom to top. You know, if you go right back to when it was called Maple, it had a token migration to syrup. I took profits on syrup up 560% recently based on my exit strategy and exit strateg. Talk about in another video. But the reason why syrup did 560% in the middle of what was a very choppy sideways altcoin market was again back to the fundamentals. Syrup has a super strong TVL and price appreciation. So much performance of the token goes into how much, you know, TVL total value locked people can contributing to, you know, some of their yield products that generates revenue back to the token holders. And that was the biggest thing for me that I loved about syrup is that that transparent lending protocol. So many of defi projects failed in the defi winter, you know, two or three years ago. Syrup was one of the only products that really, you know, came through. And the reason I went so heavily on syrup and had conviction. And this is probably the biggest thing, having conviction when you have these big drawdowns in price. That is what cuts the best investors from the retail investors or investors that don't have conviction. You have to invest in assets when there's not a lot of excitement, when there's not a lot of confidence in the project. I invested in a syrup two or three years ago when, you know, defi was basically, you know, quote unquote dead. The market cap of syrup or maple back then was, you know, less than 100 million. And the key takeaway here is both hyper liquid and syrup were not available on major exchanges. You have to be able to buy these through decentralized exchanges that or you know, some people call them primary markets. So hyper liquid, you could just simply buy through hyper liquid's own exchange. But one of the things that you know, really gets you an advantage when, especially when you're investing on early stage altcoins is being able to buy just through decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. Uniswap is the best place to get exposure to, you know, Primary market that people talk about, this is where you want to get access to tokens because they are not necessarily listed on the major exchanges when getting in this early. And that's what gives you an advantage. So if you're wanting to get in early on these altcoins, you have to be able to find these tokens before everyone else. Once they arrive on the major exchanges, that's when you're usually taking profits. All right, so I'll share a little bit about my research process in a second. But ultimately that's where I use, you know, to get access to primary markets is Uniswap. And then, you know, Syrup and Hyper Liquid is two examples of that. Now whenever I'm looking at, you know, the market and trying to find new projects that I might want to list in, there's a few different platforms I like to use. So first of all, you know, Collective Shift is my company. Ultimately, you know, we've got an amazing team of research analysts and experts that feed great data. The research team will use a range of different, you know, platforms and indicators and data that we utilize, then synthesize to help make decisions, you know, at a very simple level. Some of the basic platforms that, you know, you guys can use outside of us is, you know, CoinMarketCap just have this season index. Honestly, there's a heap of these around. This essentially just gives you an indication of if we're in more bitcoin season or altcoin season, depending on, you know, the return profiles of, you know, different projects and just sentiment and also capital, where capital is being driven. You can have a look at the altcoin index and kind of just gives you an understanding of where trends are heading. Another one is just ETF inflows. The biggest change this cycle compared to previous cycles is just the amount of institutional inflows that have come into the cycle. Like we're not seeing a lot of retail spot market driven growth. That's where the ETF inflows are super important. This can give you a really good insight just in terms of the sell pressure that's going on. What we've seen over the last couple of months is huge amounts of sell pressure in the bitcoin market, primarily from the etf. So that gives you a good indicator of where things are driving. The next one would be just looking at, you know, token unlocks. This is one that I just mentioned, you know, back at the start, you know, in terms of fundamental investing and my approach and the Collective Shift approach to find projects that are not going to you know, have as much risk because they've got good fundamentals, is understanding token unlocks. All right, and you know, one of the things that I shared with our clients recently is I've just bought two new projects. One of those is Hyper Liquid. And a lot of people are, you know, understandably concerned about the token unlocks. Right. So what are token unlocks where? Token unlocks are essentially where a team has an allocation of tokens that they will release, lease into the market at a certain point in time to sell down. Think of it like vested equity. Like if you're holding like, you know, shares in a company or an early stage startup, you can't sell them until you vested them over a certain period. They're just rewards for the team. Now when we have big token unlocks, historically, depending on what project it is, we can start to see like, you know, a lot of market dumping in the market. And that's something that you wouldn't ultimately be, you know, very bullish on. However, one of the differences with Hyper Liquid as an example is that, you know, it hasn't actually raised a lot of VC capital. One of the biggest problems I see with investors, you know, that you guys might be listening at home, get caught up into, is investing too heavily on VC driven projects. All right, we saw this with Sui as an example. Sui is a huge layer one project. It had a lot of VC capital and a lot of unlocks. Solana is another one that had a lot of VC capital and a lot of unlocks. That causes a lot of cell pressure. So if you're wanting to see when upcoming token unlocks are being, you know, created, one, one site is Tokenomist, if I, if I pronounce that correctly. So you can start to see like the market caps based on the upcoming emissions and essentially token unloc. Right. Very basic way to understand this is you're looking at the market cap, which is the market cap of the total supply in circulation now. And then the fully diluted value, which is the fully diluted value, is essentially looking at the total number of tokens if it was fully in supply times by the current price. And that gives you the fully diluted value. So that's the real market cap you want to be looking at. And then this is also going to give you indications of when these tokens are unlocking more supply. All right, and that can kind of give you an understanding of, you know, what's coming up. Solana as an example, had, you know, a big amount of unlocks, you know, over the last sort of 12 months and that kind of give you an indication there of what's coming up and potential sell side pressure. Now from a long term standpoint, as you can see here, this is one of my platforms, one of my wallets that I have. You can see here from an accumulation standpoint, I'm buying and selling quite regularly in a sense of trying to pick times where I can accumulate harder during periods of weakness and sell during periods of strength. So you can see here like I was accumulating. This is in one wallet. I've been buying Ethereum since 80$80, long time ago. Yeah, I wish I could buy more back here but anyway, this is, this is kind of more, this is in Australia, dollar terms, prices. One of the other things that I really recommend when you know, having an altcoin allocation or whether you're investing long term is you want to be able to have allocation to capital and multiple different exchanges. Because this is one of the exchanges I use. You can see here like over the last year I've traded about $2.2 million, deposited 1.6, withdrawn 1.3, made a lot of different trades. You can see here, the portfolio performance is, you know, quite volatile from a standpoint that I'm constantly depositing capital on one platform, withdrawing it, depositing another platform, trying to get the best token prices, the best platforms where I can allocate different money. And I'm constantly getting in and out of the market from a level of wanting to make sure that, you know, I am in at the right time. Timing is so important in crypto and I think that's something that a lot of people don't realize. Whenever you're adding out, you know, money to the market, not over allocating at a certain time and not under allocating is really important. What does that mean? Let's say in a bear market, you know, the last, you know, leading up until, you know, last year I was primarily just holding Bitcoin and Ethereum In a bear market I want sell down and only hold essentially Bitcoin and Ethereum during downwards periods of time. Altcoins will retrace 60, 70, 80% in the last sort of 12 months I was accumulating a lot of crypto, took a lot of profits on syrup, for example and a range of different projects. I've been looking at primarily selling down at the start of the year on a lot of those projects like gaming and AI and RWAs because simply we weren't getting the narrative or the mindshare and that is really important. To understand mind share of crypto is another way of just understanding what sectors are getting the most narrative and what sectors are getting the most attention. Attention. So when I sold down a lot of projects at the start of the year and moved them into cash and, you know, accumulated more bitcoin, you know, I was essentially looking at, you know, not seeing a lot of narrative and mind share around those AI gaming sectors. And we haven't seen that play out. In fact, a lot of those projects have been quite bad in terms of returns this year. So that was a trade I made earlier in the year that I shared in terms of my portfolio update that I was focusing more on layer 1s. But you can see here like the last month as an example. You can see here like the mindshare, this is the mind share of different sectors, right? Number one at the moment is blockchain infrastructure, blockchain services and centralized finance. You can kind of see like the mindshare percentage growth differences. And this kind of gives you an indication of what is and is irrelevant. Like memes as an example, is down 34 in terms of mind share. All right. The current sentiment is improving or declining. So this can kind of give you an indication of what is happening across different sectors to kind of understand where you want to be allocating your portfolio in terms of the other altcoins. Like our shift list is constantly evolving and re rating different tokens. Like right now, now, you know, I'm very bullish on Hyper liquid. You know, BNB's, you know, done, you know, extremely well, which we've been bullish on. You know, Ethereum's done extremely well. Been holding Ethereum for a long time. Let me know in the comments, you know what token. If you guys want me to do like a token deep dive, I can do that because all of our tokens here we do deep dives on and you know, our analyst team essentially does a full download and breakdown for our members here on like the bullish scenario. Bearish scenario, the token economics, the summary, the finance. And this is ultimately what we help our clients with. Like we do the research for our members. So if you're a sophisticated investor, you don't have the time to all this work yourself or simply you just want to have a look at what tokens we're investing in, where the data is tracking and you want our help and our support. You know, we've got over a thousand clients globally we work with now Coinbase is actually a client of ours, SwiftX, Coinspot, if you're in Australia, So we have clients all around the world and ultimately we do one on one portfolio strategy. We help you with our research. You load up your portfolios, you know, in the dashboard here, we can have a look at it. We can help you with your strategy. We go through our seven step process, you know, and essentially get you all set up. So if you're interested in that, I've got a link in the description below. It's a full training video. Goes through our seven step process, you can understand how we work, how we operate and how we work with clients. I recommend checking that out. Now the next thing is obviously when you're looking at your altcoins and now you've kind of got an understanding of, you know, what altcoins you want to add to your portfolio. The biggest question I always get is, Ben, like I've got a hundred thousand dollars, what should I buy? Or you know, I've got $10,000, what should I buy? It always comes back to the portfolio structure. All right, what strategy do you have and what structure do you want to try and create to allocate towards that goal? So what I would always do is start off by just creating like a new portfolio. You can do this in a spreadsheet if you remember. You can, you know, just create a new portfolio. Go, you know, this is my, you know, portfolio goal. You know, I would always start by adding bitcoin in your portfolio. I always like to say like 60, 70%, honestly, is something I would, I would have layer one for me, you know, is the sector that I'm allocating the most to right now. This is where I'm pretty bullish. Let's say we added Ethereum and Solana, right? And then we want to add, you know, syrup and Rect as an example. Okay, so once we build that goal, all right, now we kind of want to see what this portfolio allocation is going to look like. So let's say, you know, we want to have 70% bitcoin and we want to add some of these alts in here. All right, so let's go that. So let's say we want to get to this point where we've got 67% of our portfolio in bitcoin. I would start to look at what do I need to allocate then to get to this point. All right, now you already may have a portfolio, all right, so you might already have all coins in your portfolio and you want to now adjust and re restructure your portfolio to get to your gold portfolio. I would then have your Existing portfolio and your future state portfolio. And that's what you want to try and buy to accumulate towards that goal. One of the biggest, you know, things I see people make the mistake of is one, having too many altcoins, like simplifying your portfolio and selling down is really important. And then also just not having great enough understanding of their diversification. All right, People overthink diversification. For me, everything is correlated with Bitcoin. Unless Bitcoin is going up, you know, and we're in a bull market, everything's going to come crashing down when this bull market is over. So diversification for me is kind of hard, hard to think about in crypto. I think about diversification like, do I have enough as a layer one example, do I have enough layer ones to offset the risk of my layer one not actually winning? All right, so do I want to, in the case of Ethereum here, do I actually want to add more Solana or. I've already got a lot of Solana, maybe I now want to add in, you know, Cardano. And by adding in Cardano, I can start to offset some more of my Ethereum risk and Solana risk by, you know, adding in some ada. And that kind of helps me, you know, offset that as well. Now you may be thinking, okay, let's go back to the mind share and go, okay, what's kind of like, you know, what's something that isn't being spoken about right now? That might be. All right, gaming is, you know, an obvious one, right? So we might want to look at gaming. Maybe it's, you know, at the bottom, you know, the least mind share narrative right now is something like, well, gaming actually is the, the lowest. But in terms of, you know, what's retraced the most is meme Coins as an example. Maybe gaming is, is the play. All right, so then gaming. What I would do is I'd probably come over to, you know, our platform here. I'll probably go to Shift List and then I would just order these by category and have a look at gaming projects, see if we actually have anything that we're, you know, half interested on. Echelon prime and Ronin, both bearish. All right, okay. So as an ex, we're not really bullish on any gaming coins. Okay. So you look at that and go, cool, if, you know, I'm not bullish on any gaming projects. You know, what else can we see online? So you may want to go to the. Something like crypto coin market Cap, you might want to go to something like categories and Then you can also categorize tokens by gaming can start to have a look at what's been happening on a gaming level. To kind of understand. I usually look at a 30 day level, what the performance has been on certain tokens. So there's been a couple here. Virtual has been a big winner. All right, so virtual is, we can have a look at that. All right. And you can start to see what the performance is of virtuals. Now once looking at virtuals without even going to fundamentals, I would first of all now go to trading View. I will look at virtuals. If it's going to come up, you have a look at virtuals. All right. And then I want to overlay the bitcoin price. All right. And I usually want to go back to about, let's say start of 20, 25 just to kind of get an understanding. I'm going to just remove. All right, so we've got virtuals that is down 64 versus Bitcoin up 11. So one thing that I see a lot of people make the mistake of is initially going, oh, look at this, virtuals is up. You know, what are we up the last 30 days? Let's say it's up, you know, it's actually done reasonably well over the, you know, month, up 100%. But if we look at, you know, overlay to Bitcoin, it's down 64% in contrast to up 11%. That for me is not showing strong indicators at all. I always talk about whenever investing in altcoins, you want to make sure it's outperforming bitcoin so that at an immediate level I would probably be, you know, putting to the parking lot for now. Okay, so let's look at like bitcoin versus Hyper liquid and syrup that I just spoke about as example. Two projects have really good fundamental value. If we look at since that start of 2025, Bitcoin's up 12%, syrup's up 60 and hyper goods up 70%. All right. And then if you add virtuals on top and we look at the same scale, virtual down 64. So that immediately showcased to me that this project, without even looking at the fundamentals, is just not a project that I would be willing to say the risk for the reward potential. Right. Because it's huge amount of risk to invest in any old coins. And at this stage I'd rather just hold bitcoin, I'd be up 12% versus down 64. Now the counter argument to that is, well, if it's underperformed so much, maybe then it's going to turn. All right, and that's a valid point. So now we look, go into virtuals and we kind of do a little bit of a deeper dive and understand, you know, kind of where we're at. You know, one great way to do this as an example, just on an immediate level. You can even go to Twitter and we can start to look at, you know, give me an analysis.

All right, so while that's doing that, I'll probably go back and just kind of look into gaming and start to understand, you know, in the gaming sector itself, like why we're not getting the mind share. Are we starting to see a bit of a turning game here? Because usually when we start to see, you know, projects bottom out and when there's not a lot of sentiment and there's not a lot of interest, that's where we start to see projects starting to turn. All right, now you've got to overlay that a little bit with okay, well, you know, where is the, the inflows coming from right now? Is there attention from RET investors to even buy gaming? Because institutions aren't. That's where you want to start, you know, to think about, you know, where that capital is flowing. So we have a look at some of the bullish perspectives. Bearish. I'd also want to have a look at some of the token unlocks. That's something that usually allow a project to not perform based on a lot of the unlocks that have happened. So if we have a look at. Yeah, look at that. So at the moment we've only got 65% of the token that's actually unlocked. So we've got 35% still to come out in terms of the supply, which is not great. And we can see here, yeah, look at this. There's been a huge increase in the total amount of unlocks over the last couple of years, even the last year or so, as to why we've potentially seen a lot more sell side pressure. And then also again, I haven't even looked into the fundamentals of this project yet, but I kind of look at that like top level before going deeper. So that's kind of how I look at things right now. Where am I looking again? I'm not really looking outside of the layer one space. There's been a couple of things that have popped, like obviously zcash and BNB as an example. They've been quite crazy over the last few weeks. But for me continuing to double down on those projects that are performing. We find that by looking at just a simple chart and what's been outperforming bitcoin already that continues to outperform depending on what timeframe you look for on previous cycles have always played out very similar. Now you have the framework on how I analyze altcoins for seven figure portfolios and beyond. What you want to then allocate that in terms of portfolio structure is getting that seven step strategy process sorted. So you know portfolio construction and altcoin allocation is just one or two parts out of that seven step process. I detailed a full training video below. You can check that out, but that's kind of at a very simple level how I'd start to allocate and think about altcoin investing. If you like these videos, make sure you subscribe and leave me a comment below on what token you want me to do a deep dive on. I'd be happy to know do some more token deep dives to give you guys some insights on those moving forward. Thanks so much and I'll see you on the next video.