- Ben Armstrong is pacing himself for the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.
- He’s holding five altcoins that he believes will see big price surges when the bull run takes place.
- He says he plans on selling 80% of his positions once he sees peak price points.
Ben Armstrong became a crypto investor by accident.
It all started after he had to make a payment to a software company that couldn’t accept money in cash due to certain restrictions.
He first bought $400 worth of bitcoin in 2017, just enough to cover a few monthly payments for an ads software he used for his business. One day, he woke up and realized the remaining $200 worth of bitcoin he had was worth about $2,000, something he hadn’t seen before. With little thought, he cashed it out and took his family on vacation.
In hindsight, he regretted spending his bitcoin and promised himself he’d make up the losses. Today, he’s known as BitBoy Crypto, a Youtube influencer whose content is focused on crypto news and projects.
Armstrong is currently prepping for the final quarter of 2021, which he anticipates will be a final bull run on of the price of many cryptocurrencies.
If bitcoin reaches an all-time high of about $100,000, about 71% higher than where it traded on Wednesday, he expects altcoins to rally shortly behind it. He expects bitcoin to see that peak in December or January, in line with previous cycles.
While bitcoin has a longer history that allows investors to track its cycles with relatively more certainty, altcoins are less predictable. Regardless, Armstrong is going off of the outcomes from 2017's bull run.
Altcoins are outshining bitcoin this year as interest in crypto investing and the use cases of blockchains widens. Bitcoin's dominance ratio, which measures its market cap relative to the total crypto market's, has fallen 42% year-to-date according to TradingView.
BitBoy Crypto's Top altcoin picks
Armstrong's first pick is FTX Token (FTT). CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is the co-founder of this crypto-derivatives exchange platform, something that gives Armstrong confidence in the project.
He's anticipating a lot of upside potential for this digital asset because institutional investors are also considering adding it to their portfolios, he said.
FTT is trading at around $51, according to CoinMarketCap, down 39% from its September peak of $84.
"In general, a winning strategy or a winning formula is always buy in the red, sell in the green. So that does add a little bit of fuel to the fire for FTT," Armstrong said.
His second top pick is THORChain (RUNE). The main reason Armstrong thinks it's a good buy right now is because the project is planning to launch its mainnet, or move to its own chain, Armstrong said. The switch is currently estimated to take place in the first quarter of 2022.
In the past, when projects like Trong and Cardano did the same, they were followed by price run ups. He's expecting to see the same result for RUNE, which currently runs on the Binance Smart Chain.
The crypto is down by about 46% from its May all-time high of about $21.
His third pick is avalanche (AVAX), a blockchain focused on low transaction costs and speed. He perceives this as the next Solana because its features are similar. Solana went parabolic during the first week of November after it saw mass adoption and funding that sent its price up by a staggering 15,475% within 11 months. He believes AVAX is following the same path as it adopts DeFi and attracts venture-capital money.
In September, the project raised $230 million from a private sale of AVAX. The funds came from a group led by Polychain and Three Arrows Capital.
His fourth pick is ethereum (ETH), a crypto he says you can't go wrong with. This asset is his top holding.
"Ethereum is consistent and it's been around forever," Armstrong said. "And it's outperformed bitcoin for its entire history. And I believe we will continue to see that."
He estimates ether will peak at around $10,500 in January or possibly February.
His final pick is polygon (MATIC) because this crypto tends to move parallel with ether's price. It's an Ethereum layer-2 protocol which solves high gas fees. Armstrong says he uses it for his own projects and Daps to avoid high fees.
"Ethereum in a lot of ways is a victim of its own success," Armstrong said. "So when ethereum goes up, so do the gas fees."
The outcome means that users on Ethereum's blockchain could end up paying fees higher than their trades. And they will look for solutions around that, often through Polygon's protocol.
"You're looking at a difference of, you know, $300 per transaction versus $.10 to $.20 per transaction," Armstrong said. "So polygon makes it more scalable, faster, more secure, and makes the gas fees lower."
These positions are mainly temporary. Armstrong plans on selling 80% of his portfolio by the end of the bull run so he can buy back in when the rates have dropped, a strategy that he says helps him accumulate faster.