Cryptocurrencies have become legitimate, institutional investments with key blue coins, or blue chips, now that big tech and the government of the United States are pushing for integrations.
The future for crypto is bright with many regulatory actions being taken by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Europe to make it easier for crypto to sit alongside other investment assets.
Like most investment opportunities, there are always projects or companies that are considered the top of the line, blue chips that every investor should consider for their portfolios. Let’s go through some of these blue coins and what they do best.
Blue Chip Cryptocurrencies
What Are Crypto Blue Coins/Blue Chips?
In traditional stock markets, “blue chip” stocks tend to be related to companies that have historically performed well over a long period of time or have proven their worth. The same rule applies to crypto.
There are a group of cryptocurrencies that have been considered blue coins for a long time, going as far back as 2014.
Such blue chips have earned their place due to a wide range of attributes such as longevity in the market. Tokens such as Ripple’s XRP have been active in the market since 2013 when the XRP token first launched.
Such tokens with longevity have lasted multiple market cycles due to their products and active team members building, promoting, and delivering on promises made to investors. With longevity comes credibility and trust from the wider market, making them blue coins.
Another factor is reputation, especially related to the crypto project’s team and founder. Aside from birthing decentralized financial applications, Ethereum is also known for its class of founders who have also gone on to make crypto tokens of their own including Charles Hoskinson (Cardano) and Gavin Wood (Polkadot).
A crypto blue coin will be able to withstand whatever the market throws at it, what matters most is who’s leading the company, the team, the token’s historical performance, and its legitimacy in regard to what the company is trying to achieve or build within the web3 industry.
Which Cryptocurrencies Are Blue Chips?
Ripple XRP
Ripple is a tech company on a mission to revolutionize global payment systems utilizing blockchain technology, the XRP token, and their new stablecoin, RLUSD.
Ripple has been in the cryptocurrency industry since before 2012 and launched their XRP token in 2013. XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger, a fast, low-cost blockchain network that facilitates decentralized financial applications.
RippleNet and Ripple’s Payments are part of Ripple’s ISO compliant global payment system that is onboarding institutional clients and businesses to allow cross-border transactions for extremely low costs with unbeatable speeds when compared to traditional finance alternatives.
Cardano ADA
Cardano was founded in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson in a bid to address Etheruem’s scalability and interoperability issues which plague ETH to this day.
The ADA token is the native crypto of the Cardano blockchain network and is used to access and use decentralized applications and secure the network’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
Since ADA’s launch in 2017, Cardano has grown into one of the largest crypto altcoins, holding a current market capitalization of $25 billion.
Cardano has spawned multiple related companies including Input Output, The Cardano Foundation, and sidechains such as Midnight, which aims to become Cardano’s privacy sidechain for private transactions.
Chainlink LINK
Powered by the LINK token, Chainlink is probably one of the most important cryptocurrencies for web3 growth and innovation. As an oracle, Chainlink helps smart contracts capture real-world, off-chain data with security and trust in mind.
Chainlink’s network performs like a bridge between off-chain data and on-chain data, allowing blockchains to communicate not only to each other but to traditional systems unrelated to web3.
Chainlink’s ability to solve real crypto issues has made it one of the most reliable and important tokens and companies in web3, earning its blue coin status within the crypto industry.
Hedera Hashgraph HBAR
Hedera Hashgraph utilizes distributed ledger technology to facilitate real-world utilities for institutional clients, businesses, and indivdiials. Founded in 2018 by Leemon Baird, the inventor of the Hashgraph consensus, went on to form Hedera Governing Council, named after Hedera, Texas.
The HBAR token launched in 2019 is used to secure the Hedera DLT and its many ventures including Hedera Guardian, an open-source platform for carbon markets, real-world asset tokenization, data integrity and AI, and many more.
Hedera’s partnerships with DELL, IBM, Google, and Ubisoft alongside its real-world integrations with Hedera DLT, have solidified its place in web3 as a strong blue chip company.
The Original Blue Coins: Bitcoin BTC
The original cryptocurrency that started everything. Bitcoin is known as digital gold and has kickstarted an alternative financial market based on decentralization and transparency in finance.
Launched on January 3, 2009, Bitcoin has revolutionized finance and is a blue coin for institutional investors and everybody involved in the cryptocurrency industry.
After the SEC approved BTC ETFs to be listed in the US, Bitcoin ETFs have become the most successful ETFs in history with $107 billion in assets under management (AUM).
The Original Blue Coins: Ethereum ETH
While Bitcoin founded crypto, Ethereum founded the ability for decentralized applications to provide real-world use cases.
Ethereum’s ETH token is used to facilitate transactions and interactions with DeFi apps across Ethereum’s vast, continuously growing network made up of thousands of tokens, projects, crypto companies, and web3 use cases.
Beginning as a proof-of-work network, Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake to help scale and make Ethereum more affordable to use due to rising transaction costs.
The network has since received dozens of side chains such as Polygon and Abriturm, aimed to help the network scale and take on higher transactional loads.
Crypto Blue Coins and ETFs
ETH joined BTC in ETF launches throughout 2024, becoming almost just as successful as Bitcoin with a $7 billion market cap in total at the time of writing.
With Ethereum and Bitcoin leading the way, other blue chip tokens have received ETF filings such as Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR), Cardano (ADA), and Ripple (XRP).
Aside from those three, Litecoin, Sui Network, Aptos (APT), Avalanche (AVAX), and Polkadot have also received ETF filings, causing institutional investors to inspect altcoins and their worth in the global financial system.
