- Greg Chase says he made — and then lost — and then made again — a fortune by investing in crypto.
- He shared what he looks for in coins, and how he now keeps his crypto secure.
- He also shared eight coins he plans to invest in when the crypto slump ends.
Greg Chase has had a wild ride investing in crypto.
Using money he made from his successful YouTube channels — including Top Five Best, 100M, and FactFile — the now-24-year-old YouTuber started investing in the digital asset space in 2017, building a portfolio worth $394,000. He took big gains in coins like VIBE and ethereum, according to a record of his crypto wallet on Ethplorer viewed by Insider.
But he said after buying a cheat code (which ended up being
ransomware
) for the video game Counter-Strike, he lost just about all of his crypto to hackers in early 2019.
The incident didn’t scare Chase away from the crypto space (though he now guards his private key with a CryptoSteel capsule with a 24-word code). He has since reinvested in the space, though he says he liquidated all but about $10,000 of his crypto assets in April before moving from Canada to the United Arab Emirates, where there are no income taxes.
Including YouTube and crypto earnings, he now has a net worth of up to $2.1 million, according to a checking account statement viewed by Insider.
In an interview, he shared what he looks for in cryptocurrencies before investing in them, and eight projects he plans to bet on once the current crypto slump is over.
8 crypto projects Chase plans to invest in
Bitcoin, the largest crypto, is still down 17% from its mid-April peak, and was off by nearly 50% in July.
If and when the underperformance in the crypto space finally ends, Chase said he plans to put his money into several projects.
His top two investments will be bitcoin and ethereum. This is because they are two biggest and most established cryptocurrencies, and there’s less relative risk associated with them compared to other coins, he said.
He said he is waiting for bitcoin to drop to $24,000 before he invests in it. He will also buy ethereum at this point, he said, since the two assets’ prices fluctuate in similar fashions.
After these two, Chase said he’s bullish on qtum because it’s a “mix between ethereum and bitcoin.” He pointed to the fact that it has bitcoin’s security and ethereum’s smart contract concept.
“I think that it’s undervalued for where it’s at,” Chase said. “It has unlimited scalability.”
Next, he likes Verge, which allows anonymous transactions. “I like the fact it’s not an ERC-20 / on the ethereum network, rather it works on the bitcoin network yet way faster and cheaper,” he said. He also likes that it’s a trustless system, meaning no trusted third party, like a bank, is necessary for a transaction.
Chase also likes Ether Classic. He’s a fan of it because it’s an original version of ethereum and relies on volunteer developers.
Further, there’s Neo, which is also a smart contracts project Chase likes because it was one of the first coins to offer staking, a process in which token holders lock down their coins in exchange for yield.
He also likes Litecoin because he thinks it has undeservedly underperformed relative to the rest of the crypto space.
“Why is Litecoin so cheap?” he said. “Bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin. That used to be the discussion. Now litecoin is number 16. And when this big boom happened a couple months back, it didn’t go up like the other cryptos. It went to its all-time-highs, and that’s it.”
Another one Chase likes is Basic Attention Token for its use case. The project is an ad-blocker, and pays users who choose to watch ads.
Chase stressed however that outside of bitcoin and ethereum, other crypto assets will make up only 20-25% of his crypto portfolio and that there is significant risk involved with smaller crypto projects. He also said his investment plans should not be taken as advice.
What to look for when choosing altcoins
Chase has a small list of criteria he uses for choosing which coins to invest in. The first is to look for projects that provide actual value, and understand what their purpose is.
“Decentraland, that’s kind of cool, you get paid to play games. But does that have any value? I don’t think so,” he said. “Something like qtum, it’s going to be for business.”
Second, he said to look for coins with a low circulating supply — which to him is around 500,000,000 coins (bitcoin has about 18.83 million, ether has 117.79 million, per CoinMarketCap). Chase also looks to see if the circulating supply is close to the total supply. He generally doesn’t like coins with an unlimited potential supply.
Prices for coins with a larger circulating supply are harder to influence than those with a lower amount of coins in circulation.
“People like dogecoin because it’s so cheap, and they think it’s going to rise to these extreme heights,” Chase said. Dogecoin has a circulating supply of 131 billion.
He continued: “But they’re forgetting that there’s so many coins, so to make up for that, you’re going to have to have so much money to make it $1.”