7 Crypto Assets I Won’t Touch
I’m not here to tell you what to buy. This is what I have zero plans on buying, and why the window to exit some of these positions may be closing faster than people realize. Seven crypto assets or categories: some are old favorites people are emotionally attached to and can’t let go of, some are structural traps that were always going to end this way, and one has a fair-value calculation so brutal the number alone should end the debate.
1. Cardano
A lot of respect to Charles, I made a 50x on Cardano back in ’21, no hate. But eight years in the market, billions raised, one of the most peer-reviewed blockchains in history, here’s what that’s bought: current DeFiLlama stats show $50 million in stablecoins, $3 million a day in DEX volume, and $7,000 a day in app revenue.
Compare that to Solana
By comparison, this younger chain shows $15 billion in stablecoins, $1.5 billion in daily DEX volume, and $3 million a day in app revenue, per the same DeFiLlama data. Solana generates roughly 400x the activity and 300x the stablecoin adoption. Applying Solana’s market-cap-to-activity ratio to Cardano’s actual numbers (generously) puts Cardano’s fair market cap around $100 million, based on this comparison. It’s currently trading around $5.5 billion. That gap is eight years of narrative premium sitting on top of $7,000 a day in real economic activity.
Other legacy Layer-1s
Polkadot and a struggling Avalanche carry the same disease in different doses, surviving on name recognition while usage consolidates elsewhere. But Cardano is the most extreme case.
2. Governance and L2 tokens
Governance tokens have been structurally broken since 2021, yet still command billions in combined market cap. They give you the right to vote on decisions the team was going to make anyway, insiders and aligned VCs control the majority. No revenue share, no fee capture, just the theater of decentralization.
The shift toward revenue-generating protocols
The narrative has shifted toward revenue-generating protocols that share economic benefits with holders, real cash flow via staking rewards or token buybacks. Uniswap turned on its fee switch, moving from a pure governance token to one capturing real revenue. Aave, Jupiter, Hyperliquid, and others are heading the same direction.
L2 tokens have the same problem
Most are functionally governance tokens capturing almost none of the value the network generates, while sequencer revenue flows to the foundations. Arbitrum, Optimism, and similar tokens fall into this category. If a token doesn’t distribute real revenue to holders, it’s a speculation on narrative.
3. Memecoins
Not saying don’t speculate, plenty of people made money, mostly insiders. But 99%+ of memecoins go to zero; that was always the outcome. The 2024–25 memecoin supercycle created thousands of tokens and destroyed most of the wealth that flowed into them. A handful survive because they achieve genuine cultural permanence, Dogecoin, arguably Pepe.
New launches follow the same pattern
Concentrated insider allocation, manufactured social proof via influencers, exit into retail buying, then dump. The people who made money were almost always the launchers and connected insiders, not buyers, with rare exceptions that keep the dream alive. These are short-term speculations, not investments, and the ratio isn’t expected to improve next cycle.
4. Hyperliquid competitors
Hyperliquid built the dominant onchain perpetual exchange, revenue, users, and open interest all point to a network effect that’s calcified into structural dominance. Dethroning a winner at this stage requires either a catastrophic failure by Hyperliquid or a genuinely superior, hard-to-replicate distribution mechanism. Nobody currently competing has either. Liquidity attracts liquidity, traders go where the depth is, once that flywheel hits escape velocity, catching up requires something close to a miracle. Competitors like Lighter or Aster might still be decent trades, just not likely long-term winners over Hyperliquid.
5. Low-float, high-FDV launches
The cleanest wealth-transfer mechanism in crypto: VCs get in at a cent, the token lists at a huge fully-diluted valuation with only a few percent of supply circulating, retail buys the narrative, price pumps on thin float, then unlock schedules kick in and VCs exit into every pump while retail holds the bag. The tech is usually just real enough to justify the listing, the token economics are the actual product, designed to move money from retail to insiders.
6. Litecoin
Founder Charlie Lee has publicly said he should have just held his Bitcoin instead of launching Litecoin. It had relevance in 2017 but shows little differentiation or developer activity now, and has underperformed Bitcoin by most measures for a decade, including missing a new high this cycle.
7. Zcash
Controversial pick, it’s been on a strong run, and the privacy use case was real when Zcash was the only credible answer (arguably Monero was always better). But a reportedly recent exploit is a real unknown since everything sits in a shielded pool. More importantly, the privacy narrative is weakening as Ethereum and Solana build privacy into their base layers, being first no longer matters once larger networks solve the same problem at scale with more users and liquidity.
Closing take
None of these are guaranteed to hit zero, nothing really “goes to zero” as long as it trades somewhere. But they’re expected to underperform, in this view: Avalanche, Cardano, and Arbitrum all failed to approach prior all-time highs last cycle. Narratives are powerful and markets stay irrational longer than expected, but a pump isn’t the same as an investment. The real question isn’t whether these can rally with the broader market, it’s whether they deserve a spot in a portfolio compared to everything else out there. For all seven, the answer here is no.
