The lead crypto analyst at a $750 million investment advisor reveals the 6 cryptocurrencies

• Gritt Trakulhoon is the lead crypto analyst at Titan Invest, an A16z backed investment fund.
• The former BCG consultant remains confident about the long-term growth of the sector.
• Trakulhoon says stay away from altcoins and stick to the big cryptos to protect your portfolio.

Warren Buffett once said, “Be greedy when others are fearful,” and this current

bear market

may be a perfect time for smart, cautious investors to capitalize on others’ fear of  crypto. 

While the crypto market has seen over $2 trillion of its value wiped out since fall 2021, Gritt Trakulhoon, the lead crypto analyst at Titan Global Capital Management  — a  $750 million investment adviser — believes that now is a great time to invest in projects with strong fundamentals that will allow them to survive the crypto winter.

In a recent interview with Insider, Trakulhoon shared which cryptocurrencies he plans to hold through the current bear market, and what about them makes him bullish.

Crypto crash

Crypto has become one of the most volatile asset classes, largely due to its price swings. Last weekend, bitcoin fell to $17,000 while ethereum touched $900 — a far cry from their respective price peaks near $69,000 and $5,000 last fall.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the insane growth of crypto over the last couple years because of the extremely loose Fed monetary policies,” Trakulhoon said. “And so what we’re seeing now is a lot of things being overvalued and coming back down to a more reasonable valuation. That’s what you see across all risk assets, not just crypto.”

Trakulhoon says the crypto market moves in cycles. With free Fed money leaving the industry, crypto is in the down portion of the cycle, and projects and coins across the board are feeling the pain.

But it’s during this period that innovation really begins to blossom, and the best crypto projects not only survive but thrive. 

“A lot of projects did not really have strong long term fundamentals,” Trakulhoon said. “And what’s gonna happen now is after this sort of market-wide purge there will be a building period, a period of time where real innovation starts, where founders start to really buckle down, start building platforms that really garner our attention and have exciting use cases rather than just raising funds every three months.”

Trakulhoon pointed out that there’s money still coming into the crypto space. Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz just raised money for a $4.5 billion crypto fund, while Volt Capital raised $50 million in under three weeks. 

“With VC funds there’s still a lot of dry powder on the sidelines,” Trakulhoon said. “Basically you can think of this as a building period.”

According to Trakulhoon, this building period should last for the next few years as the strongest crypto projects survive while the projects designed to capitalize on loose money and investor interest wither on the vine. 

“If you look at cryptos in terms of cycles, like a lot of people do, we expect 2024 to 2025 to be when the

bull market

cycle comes back,” Trakulhoon said. 

“It’s still gonna be a decade for crypto and use this opportunity to slowly accumulate your holdings to slowly invest in educating yourself in crypto. This is the perfect time to actually invest in crypto.”

Crypto investment advice

Trakulhoon said it was overexposure to many of the more risky altcoins that caused crypto funds like Three Arrows Capital to collapse during this bear market. He emphasized that Titan’s portfolio is overwhelmingly skewed to bitcoin and ethereum. The two most popular cryptocurrencies compose 60% and 22% respectively of their crypto holdings, while altcoins are under 1% each.

It is also worth noting that every cryptocurrency in their portfolio — alongside the market in general — is down double-digit percentages this year.

When it comes to selecting what cryptocurrency to add to Titan’s portfolio, Trakulhoon summarized the four metrics he looks for with a potential crypto investment. 

The first thing that he evaluates is the value proposition of the cryptocurrency, including what it tries to solve and whether there’s a market for it.

Next he looks for a cryptocurrency’s growth. Trakulhoon says “We look at several growth metrics to try to gauge their traction and growth, in terms of number of unique users, number of active addresses, transaction volumes on chain, total value lock.” 

The next thing he looks for is a cryptocurrency’s integration with other projects. “When you look at a company, you look at the suppliers, the clients — if their clients are solid blue chip companies, market leaders in their respective sectors, you tend to feel more confident about them,” he said. “So we do a similar thing. We look at the ecosystem, we look at how expansive it is, how multifaceted it is.” 

The final thing that Trakulhoon looks for is the project’s tokenomics, summarizing this simply as “what’s the utility of the token, what’s the supply schedule, what’s the vesting schedule, issuance rate, and so on.”

Trakulhoon listed the six cryptocurrencies that Titan holds, and his logic behind why. While the majority of Titan’s holdings are in bitcoin and ethereum, he does diversify his portfolio with the four other altcoins.