With $1,000 to allocate and decades ahead to let investments compound, there aren't too many investments that are high enough quality to bother with, especially not in crypto. Put simply, you need staying power, and cryptocurrency as an asset class hasn't even reached its 20th birthday yet, so the field of contenders is quite small.
Nonetheless, there are three cryptocurrencies that currently look like they will stand the test of time. Each is worth buying with $1,000, but if you can only pick one, there's a clear winner.
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It's hard to beat Solana's feature set
Solana (SOL 0.66%) is designed for high-throughput, consumer-grade purposes in which transaction confirmation is nearly instant and fees are so small (think less than a penny) that most users can safely ignore them.
Today, Solana is the cheapest and fastest general-purpose blockchain with smart contract support among the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.
Low cost is a core feature, and it's responsible for the network's ability to process a theoretical maximum of 65,000 transactions per second (TPS). It's also the exact profile you'd want for decentralized applications (dApps) for economy-scale payment processing, games with microtransactions, and machine-to-machine activity, such as AI agents.
Although its positioning may change in the future, its plans to continue bolstering its scaling capabilities suggest that it will stay relevant. As financial institutions look for blockchain solutions to transition their handling of assets like tokenized stocks, Solana will continue to be an obvious place to build, and that will increase demand for the coin for quite some time.
Ethereum is where the capital and developers already are
Ethereum (ETH 2.29%) remains crypto's deepest financial center, as it's the home of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. In other words, if you follow the money flowing through the crypto sector, you will always end up on this chain.
With $93.4 billion in total value locked (TVL) in its DeFi segment, Ethereum sits at the front of the pack. It's where both assets and counterparties tend to congregate for lending, decentralized exchanges (DEXes), asset tokenization rails, transaction settlement, stablecoin usage, generating a yield via staking, and many other purposes. And once capital settles into an ecosystem, it's hard to dislodge unless there's dramatically more money to be made elsewhere.
The chain's talent advantage compounds its other advantages. Ethereum continues to command the largest total developer population active on its chain, which is a leading indicator for new applications, tooling, and upgrades that keep the value-generation flywheel spinning even when activity temporarily cycles elsewhere.
What's more, many other smart contract chains use the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) tooling, which means that learning how to code such contracts is a high-value activity for new developers. This keeps its talent pool growing consistently over time.
For a decades-long hold, the combination of entrenched capital, persistent DeFi depth, and the largest developer bench is a sturdy foundation.
Bitcoin remains tops
Bitcoin (BTC 2.45%) is the leader of cryptocurrencies, and it's the coin that's the most worth buying if you can only allocate a total of $1,000.
The investment thesis for buying it and holding it forever starts with math.
Its supply is capped at 21 million coins, and the circulating count is already near the limit, leaving very little new issuance to meet incremental demand over time. Plus, its new issuance as created by mining keeps tightening on the roughly four-year halving schedule, when the reward for mining new bitcoins is cut in half. Historically each halving correlates with supply becoming significantly harder to source at scale, which in turn sends prices higher as buyers start competing fiercely with each other in the form of higher prices.
At this point in Bitcoin's life, there's also another very powerful trend that justifies buying and holding it for years: Sovereign adoption. On March 6, an executive order in the U.S. called for establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR), directing agencies to retain Bitcoin from asset forfeitures as a reserve asset rather than auctioning it off immediately. Other countries are also hoarding the coin, with some like El Salvador opting to buy it directly on the market.
Over decades, slowing supply increase plus growing normalization of ownership by governments and financial institutions is a simple, resilient story, and it's very likely to continue to hold up. After all, governments always tend to create just a bit more fiat currency, but they -- and everyone else -- know that nobody can create more Bitcoin.
