Most Altcoins NEVER Recover. Here’s How to Pick the Ones That Do

Did you know that in the 2021 bull run, the top 10 performing altcoins did an average about 40x. Now the moment you go down to the top 50 coins, you're now looking at an average of about 15x. But here's what nobody talks about. If you go beyond the top 50 and just randomly picked any coin from the top 200, your average return throughout that entire two to three year bull market would be just about 3x. And and if you went outside of that to find like hidden gems or meme coins, right now 99% of them are still down 90% of their peaks. And this is after four years later in 2025. Just let that sink in for a second. The top coins did a 40x. Most of the so called undiscovered gems that people were so excited about basically dead. So far throughout this 2025 cycle, this same thing's playing out again. We have some people whose portfolios are up about 10x. Well most of you are probably still holding bags from four years ago or potentially just break even. Here's the thing, right? This is the same bull market, the opportunities are the same, but people are getting completely different results. And so in this video I'm going to break down exactly why you are lagging behind while others seem to be making life changing money from crypto during this bull run. Then I'm going to give you a proven strategy backed by actual data to help you position for those 10x plays rather than throwing your money into coins and so called hidden gems that will never actually end up panning out. To be honest with you, this is not going to be what you want to hear. But if you're serious about actually making money instead of just feeling smart about finding undervalued projects, I highly encourage you to watch this entire video. So let's dive right in. So before we get into the strategy, need to talk about why most people get this so wrong in the first place. And it comes down to something that I like to call the winner's bias. Except we're kind of doing it backward. Here's what I mean. You know that coin that you bought like you know, six months ago, you know the one that's down about 50% while Bitcoin the other top altcoins are making new all time highs, you're still holding onto it because you're convinced that you know it's just behind schedule, right? That it'll have its turn, that alt season rotates into everything and the coin will pump eventually. But here's the reality that is a lie. You're lying to yourself. You're doing it because of something called the sum cost fallacy. At this point, you probably already down a significant amount. And selling now just feels like you're admitting defeat, right? It feels like you've taken an L and accepting that you were wrong. So instead you hold, you tell yourself that you're in it for the long run. You know, you wait for the team to deliver and you know, you check Telegram every day for updates. You refresh the Twitter page. You're hoping for some good news. But here's what's really happening. Your entry price has now become an emotional anchor. You're no longer making investment decisions based on where is this coin going? But rather you're making decisions based on this is how much I paid for it. This is the exact entry price. But here's the thing. The market doesn't care about what you paid, doesn't care about that. You know, you believe in the fundamentals, doesn't even care how much. You know, you need to have to go back to the break even, right? Market only cares about one thing, which is where is the momentum? In the bull markets, momentum has this brutal tendency to stay with the winners and completely abandon the losers. Here's the part that really hurts, right? Every day you're holding a losing position, you're making an active choice, just that you're choosing not to be in a winning position. It sounds obvious, but let me give you an example, right? Let's say you have like 5k stuck in a coin that's done nothing for the same like for the last six months and during the same period, Solana went up by 4x. In fact it actually did. In this case, you didn't just not make money, you lost the opportunity to turn that 5k into 20k. That's opportunity cost. And most people spend so much energy defending their losing positions that, you know, they just tend to miss the obvious winners that are right in front of them. All right, so now let's talk about, you know, why the top coins you usually continue to outperform. Because once you understand this, this entire strategy that I'm going to share with you is going to make sense. Now firstly, momentum creates momentum, right? When a coin starts pumping, it get attention. Attention brings new buyers, new buyers push the price higher and higher prices creates even more attention and it becomes a self reinforcing positive feedback loop. And suddenly you know, it's trending on Twitter. It's at the top of like CoinGecko's trending list. YouTubers start making videos about it. Influencers, you know, start talking about it. But the point is this leads to more people fomoing in. And when this happens, the cycle accelerates. And this is also the reason why, you know, when people say trend is your friend, it's not just some trading cliche, right? It's actually true. Coins in uptrends tend to continue going into uptrends. Secondly, liquidity attracts liquidity. This is a massive. And a lot of people just completely miss this, right? When a coin has high trading volume, the spread because of the volume becomes much more favorable. And so now whales can actually enter positions without going through massive slippage. And so they do, which brings more volume, which attracts more traders, which makes the coin even more liquid. And again, it becomes a virtuous cycle. So meanwhile, your hidden gem, you know, with like a million dollars in daily volume, a whale literally cannot buy a meaningful position without moving the price by like 20 or 30%. And so they don't even try. And so your coin continues to stay starved capital, you know, it continues to get forgotten, stays in the shadow and it never actually gets the liquidity it needs to pop. Big money tends to go to where big money already is. That's just how the markets work. And it also doesn't help that nowadays there are like 36 million unique crypto tokens out there compared to the 10,000 that existed in 2021. And I think back in 2018 there were a total of 3,000 tokens in the market. This ridiculous token dilution. Instead there are now many more buckets for money to flow into, which also means another thing, right? Your coin is just that much more unlikely to pump. Times have changed and you know, in all of the past cycles we could have just threw your money into anything and it would give you a return because again, there's just not too many buckets for money to go into. But that's no longer the case when there is 10,000 times the amount of tokens today compared to what existed back then and now. Thirdly, this is also very important. Like mindshare matters way more than technology. It's going to upset some people, but it does truly need to be said, like in a bull run marketing, you know, community hype and narrative matters so much more than the technology. You could have the fastest blockchain, like the most scalable, best developer friendly experience, the most innovative consensus mechanism. But if nobody understands this and if nobody talks about this, if it's not trend on social media or if influencers and YouTubers and talking about it, then, you know, there's no excitement. And if there's no excitement, it's not going to pop. Right? The winners tend to be the coins that capture mind share and attention, period. You know, the ones that are easy to understand. Right. Look at Dogecoin back in 2021. Is it technologically superior to anything? No. Does it even have a smart contract? I would think so. You, does it solve any real world, you know, problems? Debatable at best. But what it did have was Elon Musk tweeting about it. What it did have was a massive Reddit community. It also had cultural relevance. It had a narrative people could easily understand and get excited about. And so it went to $0.70 and created helpless millionaires. Meanwhile, there were 50, you know, technically superior layer one blockchains that went absolutely nowhere because, frankly put, nobody cared about them. Technology is cool, but attention is what moves prices. The first mover advantage in narratives is critical. Like whenever a new narrative emerges in crypto, right? Whether it's AI, real world assets, deepin gaming, you know, liquid staking, whatever, right? These are the new ones to cycle. The first project to truly capture that narrative tends to win hugely. And by the time the better of the better version launches with like, superior tech and improved features, it's usually already too late because the market has already crowned a champion, the attention has already moved on, uh, the capital has already been deployed, and people have gotten familiar with this token. You may end up with, you know, a better mousetrap, but if someone else is already, you know, perceived as the leader in that category, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle. And so the first mover tends to get the first initial explosion. But in a bull market, that initial explosion is where 80% of the gains happen. Let's talk about the painful part now, right? Which is, you know, why your coin is moving and why it probably will not mid cycle. The reason, number one, is that you have back holders at previous highs. This is usually the biggest reason. And most people don't even think about this. Let's say your coin hits like, let's say $8 back in 2021, and then it crashed to 80 cents during the bear market, right? That's a 90% drop. Now it's slowly grinding up back to, let's say $3, right? On the surface it looks great. It's up almost 4x from the bottom. But here's what you're missing. There are tens of thousands of people who probably bought this coin between $3 and $8 over the last cycle. And at this point they've been hold three and maybe even four years. They've watched their investment get completely decimated and all they've been hoping, praying for is just for price to get back to the break even point. And what do you think every one of those people is going to do the moment the coin touches break even? They're selling all of them instantly. And so every resistance level on the way back up is usually packed with sellers desperate to exit every previous high. Some kind of massive psychological barrier with just everyone waiting to just dub their tokens. As though your coin isn't consolidating or like, oh, it's building a base or it's just ranging, but it really is that it's trapped underneath a layer after layer of just overhead supply, right? If you pull up the chart of any coin that ran hard 20, 21, you see these previous peaks, right? You see these previous swing highs where there are literal walls of sell orders, then reason number two, right, which is on that note, which is tokenomics are generally working against you. Let's talk about this because this matters more than almost anything else that destroys your altcoin, which is token unlock schedules. And most tokens don't launch with their entire supply in circulation. A massive percentage is usually locked up and usually they're allocated to the team or early investors, you know, venture capital funds, advisors, ecosystem developers or whatever. But the point is Olofton got in at a price that was never offered to us retail normies. Now these tokens unlock on a schedule, right? Sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly, sometimes weekly. And here's the thing that's going to kill you. Let's say your coin has like a $1 billion market cap right now and there's like a scheduled 5% token unlock happening next month. At current prices, that's $50 million worth of tokens that are about to hit the market boom instantly, just like that. That is guaranteed instant sell pressure. And for the price to stay flat to just remain, you need $50 million worth of buys to absorb that sell pressure. And that's just to keep the price where it is. Chances are it's probably not going to happen, right? That's the reality. Most of the time there's not enough buy pressure. And so what happens? The price dumps by 10%, 15, 20. And over time, like as more and more of these tokens get unlocked and people aren't buying into them, it's just going to keep tanking. And if you just take A look at major unlock schedules for a lot of your altcoins that have existed in history, that that basically marks the top, right? Once the tokens start getting unlocked, new supply is constantly hitting the market, which keeps adding downward pressure. And then, you know, early investors are looking to take profit. You know, team members are looking to take profit. You know, VCs need to take profit and they're all now selling into just whole lot of selling. And so at this point, you're no longer investing, right? You just exit liquidity. And so. And the best way you can do that is to go onto this website called Token Unlocks. If you search whatever token you have, it'll actually tell you when the tokens have been unlocked. And let me tell you one thing, if you see a whole load of tokens being unlocked in like almost like a staircase pattern, that's the end of your coin, right? The best example that I can remember is this coin called Sand Sandbox. If you look it up and if you look at the token unlock schedule and then you try to, you know, put it onto the chart, you see that the top came when tokens started being unlocked and has never went up since. That selling pressure from people looking to take profit because they were early investors. Plus the fact that you have back holders because it's an old coin and people bought really high and they're looking to take profit or just, you know, recoup some of their losses, means that this token, unless some miracle happens, it's not going to come back. So look into the tokenomics is also the reason why new coins tend to perform the best in every single bull run because they don't have those old bag holders and they don't have this new tokenomic dumping yet. And just to really drive this point home, only five of the top 50 coins from 2018 finished in the top 50 coins by the end of the 2021 bull run. And this time around, we're seeing it again. So just remember, like, focus on whatever has hype. It's just that also most of the time, the coin that is having hype just tends to be something new. All right, so now that we've established that, you know, loading up on these hidden gems and hoping for like a moonshot is a statistically terrible strategy, let's look into what actually works. And this is what I wish I had done in past bull runs, but it's at least what I'm currently doing now. And I call this the 8020 portfolio strategy. And here's the breakdown. So 80% of your capital goes into alpha plays, right? These are the proven winners, the market leaders, the coins that have momentum. And then the reigning 20% goes into beta plays. And these are the ones that are, you know, they're not huge yet, but they have potential. And let me explain both in detail. So the 80%, right, Alpha plays, these are the coins that are already winning and these are the coins that have already proven themselves right. They have momentum, they have liquidity, community, they have a good track record. And the easiest way to identify these is to just take a look at the top one or two coins within each narrative as an example. The best perpetual dex right now is by far hyperliquid. It's pretty much the only token within this sector that is performing well, and that's because it's the leader. Now, of course, this goes beyond, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, bnb, xrp. These are just like crypto market leaders in general, not necessarily narrative leaders. So what alpha plays usually just means is the top one or two tokens within the sector. Now, I already know what some of you are thinking, hey, but you know, those are already pumped. You know, aren't I late to the party? That mindset right there, that's what's going to keep you broke. Now here's what actually happens in Bolland. So, and this is what you need to understand, right? Winners tend to keep winning. Solana didn't just go from like $40 to like 80 and then stop because it ran out of room, right? It went to 60. Ethereum didn't peak at a thousand dollars in 2021 because it was overbought, continued to go higher to almost 5k. Bitcoin didn't top out at 30k because of whatever reason, just kept going, right? Winners continue to be winners in crypto bull runs, leaders continue to lead. That's the pattern and that's what past data shows. So your alpha player is not going to do 50x from here, but what is likely to happen is that they're likely to do like 3x, 5x or maybe even 10x. But the thing is, that's a high probability play compared to investing into some kind of beta coin that has a 90% chance of failure. When you invest in the alpha place, you have a pretty decent chance of getting a pretty decent return. And I know this does not sound the most exciting, and I say this from a place where my first three bull runs were exclusively focused on trying to get the most return possible. And so I invested most of my money into Very risky investments. And I used to throw in like, know 10 to 50k into every single one of these projects. And now, like, even after four years later, as painfully as this is going to sound, I think those 50k investments are worth about 300 at best, if I'm even able to sell it in the illiquid conditions that they are in. And so this is why 80% of your portfolio should be deployed. Where the question is, isn't like, is this going to work? But rather you deploy it into tokens where the question is, how much higher would it go? And here's some. I'm just going to list kind of like a few criteria for identifying alpha place. You know, they're consistently making high highs, high trading volume, they're trending on social media, they generating conversation, they have strong engaged communities and active development. They're usually leading a narrative, not chasing it. They're listed on most of the major exchanges and as visible, just kind of like institutional interest, or at least whale accumulation. Here's the key thing, right? Alpha plays are not secrets. Everyone knows about it. They're obvious. And that's exactly the point. The best investments in a burn are often the most obvious ones. Now let's get into the beta place, right, which is a 20%. These are your calculated risks. These are more, you know, speculative positions with higher potential upside, but also much higher risk. These are coins that show you genuine potential, but they just haven't proven themselves yet. These are earlier in the cycle, usually less established, very volatile. But this is also the point where you can hunt for those 20x to 50x opportunities. This is where you scratch that, you know, find the next big thing kind of itch. But the key is this only makes up 20% of your portfolio. Now the question may be, hey, why not go 100% in the beta plays if they have more upside? Let's do the math real quick. Let's say you spread your money out across 10 beta plays and eight of them go to absolute zero. The remaining two needs to do massive multiples just for you to break even. And if we're being realistic here, maybe 1 out of 10 will actually deliver some sort of significant return. And when 90% of your portfolio is dying, the psychological pull is brutal. You're going to start panic selling at bottoms, you're going to chase other plays, you're going to lose confidence, you're going to make emotional decisions. Let's just say it's not a fun path to go down, both mentally and financially. And while you're waiting and you're hoping and coping. These Elf plays are steadily doing know at 3x and now you're missing the actual money being made. Right? So this strategy gives you just consistent, reliable growth from proven winners, some peace of mind knowing that most of your capital is positioned well, but you're still able to get very big upside potential from these beta plays if they happen to play out. And the if is the big take here anyways. Like, let me just make this concrete with some real examples and some real numbers. Let's go back at 2021, right? Going to look at some winners and then we're going to look at some laggings. I think off the top of my head, here are a few examples of of plays that just absolutely crushed it. You know, Bitcoin went from what, 10k to 69k? So that's about a 7x. Ethereum obviously went from 400 to 4800, which is about a 12x. And Solana went from like $3 to $260. These are very obvious alpha plays. Now at the time they were not very obvious. I'm going to get into how you can learn to. For example, when a beta starts going from a beta play and starts to turn into an emerging alpha, what do you do? Like, do you rotate your capital? I'm going to get into that later. But the key thing here to understand about these alpha plays is that they weren't secret, right? They were discussed everywhere and yet they continued to keep going up. Now here are some examples of beta plays here that ended up working, right. Phantom went from 2 cents to like $3.50. Near went from like a dollar to $20 or Harmony, right? O&E, 1 cent to 38 cents. Now these were more speculative and some early believers did make some life changing money from this. But what doesn't get talked about Enough is the 99% of people that lost every day investing into these coins as well as the ones that, you know, invested into all of the other beta plays that just never ended up working out. This is known as the survivorship bias. Let me tell you one thing. After having experienced three full borns, the only way that you're going to be able to make life changing money is it's mainly true to Elf Place. And I know it seems tempting from Twitter when you see these like 200x returns, but when I tell you that these results are the minority of the minority, I really mean it. Sure, you have higher odds of hitting one of those compared to say a lottery ticket, but those odds are still not in your favor very much so, especially if you don't have already a lot of capital where you know you can afford to take a few losses and still survive. And meanwhile, most of the other beta plays, 99% of them, are still just completely dead right. They're nowhere close to coming back to the all time highs or to even put you back into profit. And so if you do decide to go all in on these beta speculative plays, chances are you'd still be down four years later. And that's the reality of focusing purely on speculative plays. For every winner in a beta, there's probably like 50 losers. But you use this portfolio allocation strategy. Sure you're not going to make a 50x on your account, but we're you will get is a high likelihood of getting a 3x, a 5x or even a 10x. Try the course of a bull run. But most importantly, you're going to sleep better at night. You're not going to be glued to your charts, you know, always panicking and always feeling anxiety. You're not going to be going through some emotional roller coaster. It's just going to be stable and fun as investing supposed to be. Now let's get into something else, right? Which is when do you rotate capital? And it's also critical, right? And first things first, Rotation does not happen often and even when it does, it needs to be strategic and it needs to have rules. The best time to do this is usually when one of your beta plays starts showing clear alpha characteristics. It starts breaking out, starts trending. It's clearly becoming a market leader. That's when you potentially think about sizing up. Now at this point, you're no longer holding a speculated beta. It's now an emerging alpha. And so the dynamics have now started to change. Solana in mid 2021 was the perfect example of this. It started as a beta play for early adopters, but once it start breaking, you know, $50, $80 and $100 started gaining mainstream attention, that's when it transitions into an alpha play. And the right move at the time was not to take profits and to hunt for the next beta. The right move was to add to your position. After all, why would you willingly give up a winner and just take a bet on something that will very likely become a loser? But if there's one thing you take away from this, like your right winners cut losers. Leaders in bull runs usually continue to be leaders, while losers tend to continue to be losers. The performance of any coin is usually highly driven by either having a positive or a negative feedback loop. It either performs well and continues to perform well, or it performs bad and it continues to perform bad. Once you understand this, you understand why you're in bull runs. You ideally want to buy high and sell higher, and not necessarily buying low so that you can sell high later. In fact, I just made a video recently breaking down exact math behind why buying the dip is a losing strategy inside a bull run, and I'll also give you a strategy on what to do instead. If you want to make money in this, borrow highly recommend you give it a watch. Knowing that concept shared in that video is quite literally going to be the difference between you making an extra 10x versus not having anything showed. For after this bonus, it'll be on the screen here.