Lately, I’ve been thinking about which value coins would be the safest to accumulate now and hold through the next bull market.
I took another look at the top 50 tokens by market cap and found that the number of projects with genuinely deflationary tokenomics is shockingly small.
BTC was created to counter excessive money printing, yet most so-called “value coins” still increase their supply or unlock tokens, relying on later investors’ money to absorb early holders’ tokens.
Excluding stablecoins, the projects with genuinely healthy supply structures are mainly BTC, ETH, and BNB. The rest are hard to look at 🤣
BNB deserves special praise here. Its quarterly Auto-Burn steadily reduces the supply, with a long-term goal of cutting it from the initial 200 million tokens to 100 million. Some Gas fees on BNB Chain are also burned.
More importantly, BNB isn’t burned simply to make it deflationary. Trading fees, Launchpool, on-chain Gas, and ecosystem apps all create real demand, forming a virtuous cycle: “platform growth—increased usage—token burns.”
As for tokens like SOL, DOGE, LINK, and HYPE, they still have protocol emissions or future unlocks. Although XRP has a fixed total supply, escrow releases still create selling pressure.
So, looking only at the top 20 by market cap, the ones I’d be most willing to hold for the long term—combining low inflation, real demand, strong liquidity, and a mature ecosystem—are:
BTC, ETH, and BNB.
BTC’s strength is that its supply can’t be changed; ETH’s is its ecosystem value; and BNB’s is that real-world use and ongoing deflation go hand in hand.
Deflation doesn’t guarantee a price increase. But a project with a growing ecosystem and a shrinking token supply at least won’t leave long-term holders constantly footing the bill for new issuance and unlocks.
On that front, BNB really is a project many “value coins” could learn from.
I took another look at the top 50 tokens by market cap and found that the number of projects with genuinely deflationary tokenomics is shockingly small.
BTC was created to counter excessive money printing, yet most so-called “value coins” still increase their supply or unlock tokens, relying on later investors’ money to absorb early holders’ tokens.
Excluding stablecoins, the projects with genuinely healthy supply structures are mainly BTC, ETH, and BNB. The rest are hard to look at 🤣
BNB deserves special praise here. Its quarterly Auto-Burn steadily reduces the supply, with a long-term goal of cutting it from the initial 200 million tokens to 100 million. Some Gas fees on BNB Chain are also burned.
More importantly, BNB isn’t burned simply to make it deflationary. Trading fees, Launchpool, on-chain Gas, and ecosystem apps all create real demand, forming a virtuous cycle: “platform growth—increased usage—token burns.”
As for tokens like SOL, DOGE, LINK, and HYPE, they still have protocol emissions or future unlocks. Although XRP has a fixed total supply, escrow releases still create selling pressure.
So, looking only at the top 20 by market cap, the ones I’d be most willing to hold for the long term—combining low inflation, real demand, strong liquidity, and a mature ecosystem—are:
BTC, ETH, and BNB.
BTC’s strength is that its supply can’t be changed; ETH’s is its ecosystem value; and BNB’s is that real-world use and ongoing deflation go hand in hand.
Deflation doesn’t guarantee a price increase. But a project with a growing ecosystem and a shrinking token supply at least won’t leave long-term holders constantly footing the bill for new issuance and unlocks.
On that front, BNB really is a project many “value coins” could learn from.