Since everyone in crypto tends to promote a pro-holding narrative—encouraging people to hold their favorite assets over the long term—this is our critical assessment of assets and strategies you should avoid holding. Not everything deserves a permanent place in your portfolio.
🔺 Reactionary Memes: The first asset type you shouldn’t hold long-term is reactionary memes. These memes arise out of sudden, unpredictable events and can explode in popularity over a few days. The issue with holding these types of assets is that they’re typically unsustainable. Their value is fleeting, and they often lack solid communities to provide long-term support.
As time passes, the hype declines, engagement wanes, and the social backing disappears. When reactionary memes fall out of the spotlight, they tend to vanish entirely, leaving holders spamming social media comments in the hope of reigniting interest. Unlike popular long-term assets, reactionary memes generally lack a foundation or long-lasting appeal.
🔺 Celebrity Coins: Perhaps one of the riskiest categories of all, celebrity coins should be approached with extreme caution. In mid-2024, these coins flooded the market as celebrities across industries attempted to cash in on their fame by promoting their own cryptocurrencies. Many succeeded, at least initially, but celebrity coins usually lack substance. Unlike some memecoins, which build dedicated communities and liquidity, celebrity coins are often just quick cash grabs. There’s rarely a concerted effort to grow their social presence, and without community-driven growth, they lack any real longevity.
These coins are bought because of celebrity endorsement rather than intrinsic value. Now, 99% of celebrity coins are down by 90% or more—even after just six months. Many people who bought these coins are still promoting them in comments, trying to recover their losses. Don’t make the same mistake.
🔺 Pre-sale Memes: Another hype-fueled phenomenon of 2024 was the pre-sale meme wave, triggered by the success of $SLERF. In this case, a developer accidentally burned the entire liquidity collected in presale, and thanks to exchange support, $SLERF quickly became one of the fastest coins to achieve a 100x return, with a 500M market cap. Inspired by this success, countless social media influencers and developers attempted to replicate the model.
But the $SLERF case was a rare event, nearly impossible to recreate. Many people started sending Solana to any listed Solana address in hopes of getting in early on the next big hit. Unfortunately, around 90% of these projects resulted in scams, with developers simply running off with funds. The remaining projects launched but had no impact on the meme community and faded quickly.
🔺 Shilled Picks: A frequent pitfall in crypto investing is following influencer picks without adequate research. Many people jump blindly into these recommendations, holding them indefinitely. However, influencer picks often don’t carry the promise of good returns. Influencers might have undisclosed partnerships or be incentivized to promote certain coins for personal gain, rather than due to their quality or value.
A common tactic used to market these picks is the “comparison template,” where influencers create charts that show their chosen coin ranking higher than others. These tactics can be misleading, so it’s crucial to double-check the legitimacy of an asset before holding it based on influencer endorsements.
🔺 Hypothetical Projects: The most misleading category is filled with hypothetical projects and promises. Recently, Franklin Templeton highlighted Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization as a potential $14 trillion opportunity, and crypto projects quickly jumped in to capitalize on this. But this figure is purely theoretical, and no crypto project is realistically positioned to reflect even 5% of this valuation in its market cap. Current RWA projects are primarily driven by speculation and partnerships, and very few hold substantial tokenized assets on their protocols.
Similar risks apply to AI projects, as numerous ventures brand themselves as “AI-driven” without concrete, revenue-generating products. Often, these AI projects rely on ambitious whitepapers, prototypes, and promises instead of tangible outcomes. Investors should question what these projects are genuinely building to avoid falling victim to speculation-driven projects. For those interested, we offer detailed research on legitimate AI projects.
So, What Should You Do?
The purpose of this article isn’t to discourage you from holding assets you genuinely believe in; it’s to help you identify the potential risks of holding speculative or unproven assets. Long-term holding is a powerful strategy for building wealth, as many successful investors have demonstrated by holding assets they’ve researched thoroughly. Cryptocurrencies are no different, and the best approach is to build a core holding portfolio based on fundamental research rather than hype.
In the long term, projects with substantial utility and a strong foundation tend to outlast trends and speculation. While memecoins are a fascinating cultural phenomenon and may deserve a small portion of your portfolio, projects with real-world use cases and robust fundamentals generally offer an advantage for sustained growth. Keep in mind that in the world of crypto, resilience and a genuine utility often determine a project’s lasting value.
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