Best penny cryptocurrency to invest in 2022: From metaverse to meme coins
Which penny coins are a wise investment in the year to come? Here is our two cents’ worth!
Contents
- ‘Metaverse’ altcoins
- Is Gala Games undervalued?
- Some penny utility coins to consider
- Is Chiliz undervalued?
- Large-cap penny coins
- What about the meme coins?
- Final thoughts
- FAQs
Penny stocks, cheap shares selling for less than a dollar, have their equivalent today in penny cryptocurrencies.
But what makes for a pretty penny? How do you separate the good from the bad? With thousands of options out there, ranging from meme coins like Shiba Inu to many low-cap utility tokens, it can be hard to cut through the noise and decide which penny crypto could boom.
Furthermore, the diversity of potential cryptocurrency investment options continues to expand. Sports tokens, stablecoins, gaming tokens and privacy coins all present different investment opportunities.
Here we aim to give you the low down on the cryptocurrencies currently trading for under a dollar. What’s hot in 2022? Let’s find out!
‘Metaverse’ altcoins
The metaverse is still in hypothesis mode. The word means different things to different people.
Aside from in-game NFT trading, buying and flipping gaming tokens is the standard way to invest and potentially profit from the nascent metaverse market. With multibillion-dollar valuations for the likes of Decentraland’s MANA token and The Sandbox’s SAND token, metaverse cryptocurrencies are not a fringe concept anymore.
Are there some good penny cryptocurrency opportunities to invest in? First, it must be taken into account that short-term investing in gaming projects has a particular risk factor. We witnessed some impressive returns in the later stages of 2021 as FOMO (fear of missing out) kicked in, with a fairly quick market correction shortly after.
Dorian Banks, CEO at Looking Glass Labs and owner of the metaverse creator House of Kibaa, believes that it starts with common business sense. “Avoid the anonymous ones,” he told Currency.com. “If you don’t know who they are, they can just leave at any time, and you’re stuck with a bag of coins that are worth nothing.”
Furthermore, “you’ve got to read their whitepaper. You’ve got to make sure that future token issuance doesn’t kill you in the future.” Things to look out for include vesting periods and cliffs that might pre-empt a large-scale coin dump.
It is also advisale to take short-term volatility into account whenever considering an investment, a fact thrown into the spotlight in the first quarter of 2022 as interest in metaverse projects took a sharp downturn. With that in mind, let’s check out some penny cryptocurrency projects in the metaverse and gaming spaces.
Victoria VR, which closed a $5.5m funding round with a pool of venture capital investors in November 2021, is a virtual world enhanced by Unreal Engine graphics power and due for launch in the second quarter of 2022. With diverse worlds and extensive customisation, Victoria VR looks pleasing on paper, but further in-game assets available for scrutiny would be useful.
In January 2022, Victoria VR secured a partnership with technology company Dell Technnologies. Pavel Halfar, regional sales manager for Dell Technologies, Czech Republic, said: “We are delighted to have formed a partnership with Victoria VR, which we consider to be a ground-breaking initiative. What they are creating shows that they are, without a doubt, at the forefront of metaverse development.”
The ERC-20 VR token is tradeable on the Uniswap decentralised exchange (DEX) and the Gate.io and KuCoin centralised exchanges (CEXs). Staking programmes are also in operation. The token is currently (3 May) valued at $0.099, with a circulation of 725,239,008 tokens, just 4% of a total of 16.8 billion. If the project is a success, the token has a lot of room to grow.
One thing to consider is the scope of the project. Victoria VR, billed as a combination of a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), an enterprise platform and an NFT exchange, is promising a lot of moving parts; whether they all succeed is another story. In terms of recent price movements, the token did suffer a dip in the first quarter of 2022, and leading into May, the token is yet to see a reversal.
Star Atlas and Bloktopia present other penny cryptocurrency opportunities for entry into the world of metaverse investment.
Star Atlas has a Solana-based NFT marketplace baked into a science-fiction MMORPG built on modern Unreal Engine 5 graphics technology. But, while the NFT marketplace is fully operational, with ships, outfits and property readily available for purchase, the game is, at the time of writing, unplayable. Genuine gameplay information is scant, despite an extremely slick, interactive website.
However, “that’s super common”, according to Banks, who points out that even Decentraland is very limited in scope and size in its current iteration.
The ATLAS penny cryptocurrency, available on FTX, is trading for $0.015 (as of 3 May), with a market capitalisation of $35.94m. Current circulation of 2.16 billion amounts to 6% of the 36 billion total ATLAS supply. We have seen ATLAS climb as high as $0.21 in the third quarter of 2021. If the project can grow legs and start launching playable content, there is possible room for strong growth.
The Polygon-based Bloktopia is billed as a virtual skyscraper, consisting of 21 levels (a nod to bitcoin’s 21 million coin supply) to house users known as “Bloktopians”. The native token BLOK (predominantly traded on KuCoin) will be the medium of exchange of real estate and other NFTs.
Behind the neon-lit, futuristic aesthetic, Bloktopia at its core operates as an enterprise hub for developers and users to interact with and buy and sell digital assets. Bloktopia’s chief technology officer, Simon Benson, was previously director of immersive technology at Sony.
BLOK is trading at $0.011 (as of 3 May), with a market capitalisation of $95.63m. Of the total supply of 200 billion, 8.34 billion coins (just over 4%) are currently in circulation. Despite downtrending towards the tail end of 2021, BLOK saw some strong gains throughout the year, reaching a high of $0.17 on 30 October. More recently, the token began a sideways trade in early March after downtrending for the first two months of 2022.
Bloktopia has already managed to secure some big-ticket partnerships, including, American boxer Jake Paul. On 29 March, Bloktopia released its 2022 technical roadmap, outlining an NFT land sale launch in the second quarter and the grand opening of the first 10 floors in October.
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With high-profile partnerships and room to grow, BLOK could be a penny cryptocurrency to keep an eye on. Just make sure to conduct thorough due diligence before making any investment and remember: Currency.com is not your financial adviser. This article is for educational purposes only.
If investing in speculative projects does not appeal, there is another potential option when considering the best penny crypto 2022 investments in the gaming sector.
Efinity, built on Polkadot protocols, is a cross-chain blockchain purpose-built for NFTs, making it a natural fit to power future metaverse projects. Microsoft is counted as a business partner, having co-developed the child-friendly Azure Heroes NFT game.
But what makes Efinity’s native EFI token notable? Well, despite strong scalability credentials and natural synergy with the metaverse, EFI is currently trading at $0.36 (as of 3 May). Market capitalisation is $62m, while circulation is at 8% of the 2 billion maximum supply.
EFI has been experiencing a sideways trade since 20 January. The token is likely stymied by the bearish metaverse market, so growth could be contingent of a trend reversal in the market.
Is Gala Games undervalued?
With Eric Schiermeyer, co-founder of the gaming giant Zynga, at the helm, Gala Games comes to the play-to-earn gaming scene with an impressive pedigree.
The GALA token, trading at $0.14 as of 3 May, powers a growing gaming ecosystem with numerous active use cases and many more in production. Official statistics outline 1.3 million active Gala Games users and more than 26,000 NFTs sold on the platform so far.
GALA enjoyed late-2021 price runs, including a 770% month-to-date (MTD) jump to $0.74 on 26 November, buoyed by major exchange listings. A correction is ongoing. Investors may want to keep an eye on the $0.37 resistance line, which could preempt uptrend back to the $0.74 target.
GALA is lacking in some official documentation, including in regards to concrete, transparent tokenomics, although its real-world utility is evident.
Axie Infinity showed us that a fully operational decentralised gaming platform can achieve a $6.5bn market cap. Should Gala Games develop its ecosystem into a genuine competitor, its current $1.9bn valuation could potentially go up.
Some penny utility coins to consider
The enterprise blockchain sector witnessed considerable growth in recent years. One report predicts an annual growth rate of 82.4% from 2018 to 2021, with a market size of $5.88bn in 2021.
What is your sentiment on BTC/USDT?
One old-school player in the enterprise blockchain space is NEM, an abbreviation of New Economy Movement, whose trailblazing smart contracts platform was released back in 2015. However, time has not been too kind on NEM, preempting the 2021 launch of Symbol (XYM), which hopes to achieve the cross-chain interoperability that its predecessor never managed.
So should XYM be on your 2022 radar? If Symbol manages to achieve the scalability that NEM originally promised, then user uptake could surge, taking the value of the blockchain’s native token with it.
XYM is currently trading at $0.091 (3 May). Market capitalisation is $510m, with circulating supply of 5.58 billion tokens out of a 9 billion maximum supply.
Symbol faces a lot of competition. Vj Angelo, founder and chief executive of the decentralised digital wealth ecosystem Inspira Digital Wealth Club, told Currency.com: “It is a very crowded marketplace. There’s a lot of money behind it and every platform is trying to get a critical mass of tokens on them. The question is, are they going to be able to get enough tokens which are trading continuously and successfully to grab enough market share?”
Does he have his eye on a particular competitor? “Concordium is a really good platform with an exciting future,” according to Angelo.
Where other decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols might run away, Concordium is welcoming regulation with open arms, actively attempting to “integrate with current financial and business systems that require knowledge of a user’s identity”, according to its whitepaper.
Concordium’s native CCD token recently closed a private sales round and community airdrop of 4.5 million CCD at $0.56. On 3 May, CCD was trading at $0.033, though investors may want to keep their eyes peeled for exchange listings in 2022, having only gained support from Bitfinex and BitGlobal so far.
Is Chiliz undervalued?
With a focus on the cross-sector of sports, NFTs and fan engagement, not to mention Binance as a strategic partner and investor, Chiliz (CHZ) is generating a tonne of buzz lately.
The CHZ token has some unique utilities that allow fans to connect with their favourite teams, even having a say in team governance. CHZ also has some head-turning tokenomics, including a dynamic token burn strategy pegged to team performance. Many feel Chiliz is an exciting crypto project with some innovative features.
CHZ is currently trading at $0.18 (3 May). The circulating supply of 6 billion CHZ amounts to a market cap slightly over $1.09bn. If Chiliz manages to capture the imaginations of fans and sports clubs alike, we could see considerable growth of these figures, but as a highly inflationary penny cryptocurrency, token demand faces an uphill struggle.
Once a European venture, Chiliz managed to expand into the critical US market throughout 2021 following a $50m investment strategy. Partnerships secured since include six-time Super Bowl champions the New England Patriots and no less than 24 NBA franchises.
Despite CHZ suffering a downturn as the crypto market went bearish towards the end of 2021, there are some fundamentals at play. An uptrend starting from late February can be observed. Is CHZ among the best penny cryptocurrency to invest in 2022? It could be worth keeping an eye on. Just remember that Currency.com is not your financial advisor. Please conduct thorough due diligence before making any cryptocurrency investments.
Large-cap penny coins
Typically speaking, when assessing the best penny crypto for 2022 investments, coins with a large market cap are considered conservative investments, being less prone to excessive price volatility. The trade-off is less potential for those huge gains that many are hunting for.
Furthermore, this is undoubtedly a pivotal point for crypto, with investors glued to bellwether coin bitcoin (BTC)’s performance. If the third-quarter downtrend continues, large-cap altcoins could follow. On the other hand, a reversal could see some considerable gains.
Crypto.com’s CRO token is trading at $0.29. Market cap is closing in on $7.5bn, while circulating supply is at 83% of the 30.26 billion maximum. With Matt Damon as a spokesperson and naming rights for the LA Lakers’ home stadium under its belt, the exchange has come a long way in a few short years.
Despite downtrending after a bearish moving average (MA) cross on 18 December, CRO saw some price reversal in the early trading hours of 21 December. The nine-day MA began trending slightly upwards and the moving average convergence divergence (MACD) line hinted at a possible entry point. Eyes are on the $0.59 point of resistance. Once again, a bullish crossover was observed on 22 March 2022.
Stellar Lumens (XLM) made some power moves recently. Chief executive Denelle Dixon went so far as to partake in a recent US House Committee hearing to promote “the interoperability that blockchain has with existing financial infrastructure”. Is XLM positioning itself well for any coming regulatory push?
XLM also announced a partnership with money transfer giant MoneyGram International in October 2021, a blow to MoneyGram’s previous partner, Ripple (XRP), which suffered wounds after being sued by the US Securities Exchange Commission.
In terms of trading activity, XLM is currently valued at $0.17 (3 May) with a market cap of $4.33bn. Just under half of the 50 billion XLM maximum supply is in circulation. If we compare it with XRP’s $42bn market cap against a trading price of $0.874, a case could be made for strong growth potential for XLM.
XRP, for what it’s worth, has also had some positive trading action, having shown signs of recovery since breaking out of its sharp downward channel pattern in November 2021.
But given XRP’s tremendous market cap, there could be less room to move against XLM.
What about the meme coins?
In November 2021, everyone’s favourite meme coin, Shiba Inu (SHIB), reached a significant milestone: 1 million crypto enthusiasts now hold SHIB in their wallets.
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But with a trading value of $0.000027 and more that half a trillion tokens in circulation, can we place SHIB among the best penny cryptocurrency to invest in?
Meme coins are famously fickle, often heading skyward and back again at the whim of Elon Musk’s Twitter account. News that SHIB might get a listing on Robinhood sent the token on a late-October surge, achieving a 700% month-to-date (MTD) rally by 27 October. Despite the following correction, SHIB continued trading at a 400% value increase from pre-surge levels.
The Robinhood listing is yet to eventuate. But if the crypto-conservative exchange (only seven cryptocurrencies are currently listed on Robinhood) concedes to community pressure with a 2022 listing, SHIB has the potential to surge once again.
While SHIB’s October bull run put it briefly above Dogecoin (DOGE) in terms of market cap, DOGE remains the meme coin king. Elon Musk’s go-to penny cryptocurrency, DOGE currently trades at $0.146, with a fully diluted market cap of $19.4bn.
At face value, it might appear that DOGE has less room to grow than SHIB. However, there are some exciting developments on the horizon for DOGE that could act as fundamental catalysts. Tesla announced that it will accept DOGE as payment in its merchandise store on a test basis, while SpaceX’s “DOGE-1 Mission to the Moon” was scheduled for a late-March lift off. Additionally, Bitcoin of America recently added DOGE as an option on its ATMs.
Putting aside pie-in-the-sky $1 projections, a more realistic resistance line of $0.20 could shortly be flipped into support. From there, $0.34 is the next target, which could be tested throughout 2022. Please bear in mind the extreme volatility of meme coins.
Final thoughts
There is a lot to be excited for in 2022, including an expansion of the nascent metaverse economy, new enterprise blockchain offerings and meme coins.
This article aimed to outline some of the best penny crypto 2022 projects worth keeping an eye on. However, Currency.com is not your financial advisor. The information contained in this piece should be used for informational purposes only. It is recommended that you contact an independent financial advisor should you require further guidance in your investment journey.
FAQs
How many types of crypto coins are there?
The number of crypto coins is constantly changing. Coin Gecko currently tracks more than 11,000 different cryptocurrencies, with a total market cap of $2.38trn.
Is it worth investing in cryptocurrency?
As with any type of investment, cryptocurrencies can generate large returns as well as large losses. Extensive research should be conducted before investing in any crypto project.
Should I invest in penny cryptocurrency?
Penny cryptocurrencies may offer large growth potential and healthy returns. At the same time, they are risky and subject to price volatility. Currency.com recommends conducting thorough due diligence and seeking independent financial advice before investing.
