12 Best Crypto to Buy Now in April 2026

With the cryptocurrency markets being in a constant state of unpredictability, many crypto investors are wondering if it’s time to sell in order to secure their profits, or continue to hold, or even accumulate, to benefit from a potential price rally that could be in the store in the short to medium term.

Even though the crypto markets have always recovered from their bearish periods so far, every bear market has its “casualties” that never make a strong recovery. Therefore, it’s important to choose quality crypto projects that have a good chance of surviving the bear market and thriving when the market sentiment is bullish.

We’ve analyzed 200 of the top cryptocurrencies based on their liquidity and availability, technology, sector leadership, tokenomics, and other key factors. You can read more about our criteria a bit further down in the article.

By doing so, we’ve narrowed the list down to a dozen cryptocurrencies that present the most compelling opportunities at the moment. The top three coins on our list are updated weekly to reflect the most up-to-date developments in the crypto and blockchain sectors.

Examining the best cryptos to buy right now

Let’s start off by highlighting three cryptocurrency projects that have seen important developments recently or have big events coming up in the near future. We update these highlighted coins on a weekly basis to reflect the latest developments in the world of crypto and blockchain.

Before we dive into our list of the best cryptos to buy, we should note that choosing which crypto to buy is only the first step in your crypto investment journey. It's also important to choose the right platform to buy crypto, and you also have to decide how you will be storing your cryptocurrency.

In our opinion, the best way to invest in crypto is to transfer your coins to a hardware wallet after you buy it on an exchange. A great starting point is to buy cryptocurrency on KuCoin and store it in a Ledger hardware wallet.

1. Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that was initially described in 2008 and launched in early 2009. Bitcoin was invented by a person using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, whose real identity is still unknown.

Bitcoin introduced the concept of a blockchain and provides a fully decentralized digital currency that’s extremely secure. It implements Proof-of-Work to make it very difficult to alter the history of transactions or double-spend coins. The network is secured by miners, who are rewarded with BTC coins for adding blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain.

BTC can be sent anywhere in the world on a 24/7 basis, and transactions cannot be blocked by any intermediaries. By holding their own private keys, users can self-custody their Bitcoin without requiring institutions such as banks.

Even though countless cryptocurrencies and blockchain platforms have been released after Bitcoin, BTC is still easily the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Why Bitcoin?

Last week, banking giant Morgan Stanley launched its spot Bitcoin ETF, trading under the ticker MSBT. The fund debuted with more than $34 million in first-day trading volume, placing it among the top 1% of ETF launches, and stands out with the lowest fee in the category at 0.14%. 

Beyond pricing, MSBT’s real advantage lies in distribution. Morgan Stanley’s network of around 16,000 financial advisors and trillions in managed client assets could channel substantial capital into Bitcoin, especially as the firm already recommends a 2% to 4% crypto allocation. 

This launch comes at a time when overall crypto demand has been relatively subdued, suggesting that traditional finance players are positioning themselves ahead of a potential resurgence in interest, while also expanding further into digital assets with plans for additional crypto products.

According to a CoinShares report, Bitcoin investment products worldwide saw $872 million in net inflows last week. These inflows were driven to some extent by the temporary ceasefire in Iran, but the situation has since re-escalated again with Donald Trump announcing that the U.S. will be blockading Iran’s ports. 

Meanwhile, Michael Saylor’s Strategy continues to double down on its long-term Bitcoin bet, purchasing nearly 14,000 BTC over the past week for about $1 billion. 

This brings the company’s total holdings to an enormous 780,897 BTC, acquired at a cumulative cost of roughly $59 billion. T

The latest buy, was funded entirely through a preferred stock sale and reinforces Strategy’s aggressive accumulation strategy even as Bitcoin trades slightly below its recent purchase price. 

2. Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid is a layer 1 blockchain that’s designed to enable decentralized trading with very low fees and slippage. With the ability to handle around 100,000 orders per second, Hyperliquid provides a decentralized trading platform with an orderbook that offers a user experience similar to a centralized exchange. 

The platform offers a broad range of crypto assets for trading and provides up to 50x leverage on select pairs. Hyperliquid also has copy trading functionality, which is a fairly unique feature in the decentralized finance ecosystem.

In November 2024, the Hyperliquid project launched its HYPE token via an airdrop to more than 90,000 users. The community responded positively, largely due to the generous token distribution and the absence of venture capital involvement.

HYPE functions as both a utility and governance token within the Hyperliquid ecosystem. It has a capped supply of 1 billion tokens, with over 76% allocated to the Hyperliquid user community.

Why Hyperliquid?

Hyperliquid is gaining momentum this week as both institutional developments and high-profile investor activity converge around the HYPE token. 

Bitwise appears to be nearing the launch of the first U.S. spot Hyperliquid ETF after filing a second amendment that finalizes key operational details, including trading counterparties and custody arrangements. 

The proposed fund, which carries a 0.67% management fee and the ticker BHYP, could go live imminently, signaling a major shift toward mainstream financial access to the asset. The update follows Bitwise’s parallel move in Europe, where it has already listed a Hyperliquid staking ETP, and reinforces its lead over competitors like Grayscale and 21Shares in the race to bring a U.S.-listed product to market. 

This growing institutional framework comes as Hyperliquid itself has seen strong growth, with the token up significantly over the past year alongside rising activity on its on-chain derivatives platform.

At the same time, renewed buying from BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes is adding another layer of bullish sentiment. Hayes recently purchased over 26,000 HYPE tokens, bringing his total holdings to more than 247,000 tokens worth over $10 million, and marking his first accumulation in months. 

His position is already sitting on notable unrealized gains, and he has reiterated a $150 price target by August 2026, implying substantial upside from current levels. Hayes has pointed to Hyperliquid’s tokenomics as a core strength, particularly its model of returning 97% of trading fees to buy back and burn HYPE, effectively linking token value to platform usage in a deflationary loop.

3. World

World is a cryptocurrency project that claims to be building an economic system that is universally accessible from anywhere on the planet. The project could potentially also implement a form of UBI, or universal basic income.

While the World project was founded already in 2019, it took until July 2023 for the token to actually launch. After WLD was launched, it was almost immediately listed by large cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, OKX, KuCoin and Huobi.

One of the most unique aspects of World is its proof of personhood system, which aims to ensure that every participant is a real person and not a bot or artificial intelligence agent. After verification, users receive a World ID, which serves as a digital passport that shows its owner is a unique and real person, and not a bot.

In order to get a World ID, users must scan their eyes with a device called an Orb, which uses multispectral sensors to obtain biometric data. This allows users to prove that they are a person and verify their World ID.

Why World?

WLD is back in focus this week as the project prepares for a major tokenomics shift that could materially impact supply dynamics.

Starting July 24, the daily unlock rate of WLD will drop by 43%, reducing total daily emissions from roughly 5.1 million tokens to 2.9 million. The largest cut comes from the World Community allocation, where daily unlocks will be halved from 3.2 million to 1.6 million tokens, while allocations for the team and investors will see a 32% reduction. 

The market has responded positively to the news, with WLD gaining 20% in the last 7 days. 

This change is built into the project’s long-term unlock schedule and reflects earlier decisions to extend lock-ups for insider allocations, with no large “cliff” events expected. In a market where WLD recently hit a new all-time low, the reduction in new supply could ease persistent selling pressure and reshape short-term price dynamics.

At the same time, the broader context of WLD’s token distribution highlights why this adjustment matters. 4.9 billion of the total 10 billion WLD supply is already unlocked, with 3.3 billion actively circulating. This means ongoing emissions have been a key factor influencing the market. 

With 75% of the supply allocated to the community and the rest split among the team, investors, and reserves, the gradual and predictable release schedule has been central to the project’s design. 

The upcoming slowdown in token unlocks signals a transition into a less inflationary phase, which investors will be watching closely to see whether reduced supply pressure can help stabilize price action and restore confidence in the asset.

4. Solana

Solana is a smart contracts platform with a unique architecture that allows it to process thousands of transactions per second while keeping costs extremely low. Solana achieves this by utilizing a unique Proof-of-History algorithm and a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. SOL is among the cheapest cryptos to transfer on the market, as users pay less than $0.001 per transaction on average.

Solana was founded in 2018 by Anatoly Yakovenko. The platform’s mainnet launched in March 2020 and saw a huge boost in adoption in 2021. While SOL has lost a lot of its value in the 2022 bear market, Solana still has one of the most impressive ecosystems in the cryptocurrency sector and is potentially still one of the next cryptos to explode.

Why Solana?

The Solana Foundation has introduced a set of new security initiatives aimed at strengthening the safety of its ecosystem, coming shortly after a major exploit on the Drift platform highlighted existing vulnerabilities.

Central to this effort is STRIDE, a structured program led by Asymmetric Research that evaluates Solana-based projects across a defined security framework and publishes the results for transparency. Protocols with more than $10 million in total value locked that successfully pass the assessment will receive ongoing operational security support and active threat monitoring funded by the foundation, while those exceeding $100 million in TVL will also gain access to formal verification tools to ensure the reliability of their smart contracts.

In parallel, the foundation launched the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN), a membership-based group of security firms and researchers focused on coordinating rapid responses to security incidents. 

Founding participants include organizations such as Asymmetric Research, OtterSec, and Neodyme, with the network open to all Solana protocols but prioritizing access based on TVL. 

Another notable recent development for Solana is that the blockchain will be leveraged by SoFi’s recently announced Big Business Banking platform. The product enables enterprises to manage both fiat and crypto transactions within a single regulated banking system, offering real-time payments, settlement, and digital asset support.

5. Ethereum

Ethereum is a blockchain that supports smart contracts, enabling more complex use cases such as decentralized lending protocols and non-fungible tokens. The Ethereum project was founded by Vitalik Buterin, who published the Ethereum whitepaper in late 2013. The Ethereum blockchain launched in July 2015.

One of the first use cases enabled by Ethereum that gained a lot of traction was the ability to issue custom tokens that could be transacted over the Ethereum blockchain. This feature was utilized by many projects to conduct fundraising through Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and other types of token sales.

Today, Ethereum has an extremely vibrant ecosystem of decentralized applications – including decentralized financial services, NFT marketplaces, publishing platforms, decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges, and more – which makes it a good investment in 2023, in our opinion.

ETH is the native asset of the Ethereum blockchain, providing an incentive for users to secure the network. The Ethereum network originally implemented a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism but switched over to Proof-of-Stake in September of 2022.

Why Ethereum?

Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) has continued to aggressively build its Ethereum position, adding 71,252 ETH in the latest week to bring its total holdings to approximately 4.8 million ETH, valued at over $10 billion and representing close to 4% of the total supply. 

The company has sustained a strong pace of accumulation over recent weeks as it positions ETH as a resilient asset in the current market environment. In parallel, Bitmine has also staked more than 3.3 million ETH, worth over $7 billion, reinforcing its dominance as the largest ETH staker globally while generating yield from its holdings.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation has significantly accelerated its own staking efforts, doubling its deployed ETH to 47,050 in a matter of days and moving closer to its 70,000 ETH target. 

This rapid ramp-up comes just weeks after it began staking and reflects a broader shift in treasury strategy toward actively earning yield rather than relying on token sales. 

6. Bittensor

Bittensor is a decentralized platform that provides a peer-to-peer market for machine intelligence. Bittensor consists of multiple subnets, which are specialized for particular tasks, for example text prompting, transcription or audio generation. There are currently more than 30 Bittensor subnets in operation. 

Bittensor incorporates a very unique consensus mechanism called Yuma Consensus, which allows validators on different subnets to shape what the network should learn. 

The computational resources required to perform machine learning tasks on the Bittensor network are provided by miners, and TAO tokens are used to incentivize them. Users who require machine learning services have to pay with TAO tokens to access them. 

By providing a decentralized and cost-effective network of machine learning algorithms, Bittensor makes these advanced solutions accessible to everyday users.

Why Bittensor?

Bittensor’s TAO coin defied last week’s lukewarm crypto market activity by gaining an impressive 16% in the last 7 days. 

Some of this gain was likely catalyzed by Bittensor’s Subnet 3 (Templar), which released Covenant-72B, a large language model trained in a permissionless manner across Bittensor’s decentralized network by more than 70 contributors. The model was trained on 1.1 trillion tokens and reached an MMLU score of 67.1.

This places it in a competitive range with Meta’s Llama 2 70B, a model created by one of the world’s most resource-rich AI labs.

Templar serves as Bittensor’s decentralized AI training network. Miners supply GPU compute and compete to generate valuable training gradients for large language models, while validators assess the quality of these contributions and allocate TAO rewards accordingly.

While TAO is of course the key asset in the Bittensor ecosystem, crypto investors also shouldn’t ignore the tokens issued by various Bittensor subnets like Templar (there are over 120 Bittensor subnets in total). Subnet tokens like Targon, Lium and Score have seen significant gains recently. 

TAO is up +87% in the last month, and other AI crypto projects have seen strong demand in the same time frame as well. RENDER is up 31%, FET is up 60%, and VVV is up 37%. Here, it’s worth highlighting that VVV is the crypto top 200’s best performer year-to-date with gains of nearly 300%.

With AI-related cryptocurrencies being arguably the hottest crypto sector at the moment, TAO could be positioned well for further growth. Despite its impressive gains, TAO is still trading about 59% down from its $776 all-time high, leaving the current rally with quite a bit of potential upside.

6. XRP

XRP is a cryptocurrency that was launched in June of 2012. It was developed by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto, who started a company called OpenCoin together with Chris Larsen. 80% of the XRP supply was gifted to the company by the developers of XRP. OpenCoin has since been renamed to Ripple, and the company has put the majority of its XRP holdings into escrow.

XRP provides very fast and low-cost transfers, making it suitable for use cases like remittances. It uses neither Proof-of-Work nor Proof-of-Stake but instead implements the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol. Every participant in the XRP network can choose a set of validators that they trust to behave honestly.

Ripple has implemented the XRP cryptocurrency into its products, most notably On-Demand Liquidity (ODL). ODL works in partnership with cryptocurrency exchanges and uses XRP to provide efficient cross-border money transfers.

Why XRP?

Evernorth’s latest S-4 filing with the SEC highlights one of the most significant institutional moves around XRP in recent months, and it helps explain why the coin is worth watching in the short term.

The company is preparing to go public through a SPAC merger with a treasury of roughly 473 million XRP, valued at about $685 million. A large portion of that position didn’t come from open-market buying but from strategic contributions, including around 127 million XRP from Ripple and over 211 million XRP from Arrington Capital.

The scale of the bet is also notable. Evernorth raised more than $1 billion to build its XRP treasury, even though the current value of its holdings is significantly lower due to XRP’s price decline. The firm purchased a portion of its XRP at an average price of about $2.53, well above the current price near $1.45, resulting in a sizable accounting impairment. 

What makes Evernorth interesting is that it is not treating XRP as a passive reserve asset. The company plans to actively manage its holdings by deploying XRP in decentralized finance strategies, including liquidity provision, lending, and options-based income generation. It also intends to integrate Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin into these activities. This approach introduces a more dynamic source of demand for XRP, as the coin becomes part of yield-generating strategies rather than just speculative holding.

With XRP still trading well below its all-time high and below the average price paid by Evernorth, the current setup creates a compelling short-term story. Investors are seeing a large, publicly listed vehicle accumulate XRP, actively deploy it for yield, and position itself at the center of its ecosystem. Combined with the visibility of the upcoming SPAC merger, this could drive renewed attention and momentum around XRP as the market reacts to growing institutional involvement.

7. Zcash

Initially proposed in a publication entitled "Zerocash" in 2014, Zcash is a decentralized public peer-to-peer cryptocurrency launched in 2016 that offers features similar to Bitcoin with a twist of unique privacy and security features found only in a handful of public digital currencies.

More specifically, ZEC was the first cryptocurrency to leverage 'zk-SNARKS', a zero-knowledge protocol that was considered among the top 10 breakthrough technologies of 2018 according to MIT's Technology Review.

New ZEC coins are introduced into the circulating supply through mining - Zcash is a cryptocurrency based on Proof-of-Work. Tokenomics-wise, Zcash has kept the same 21 million total supply cap introduced by Bitcoin. Similarly to Bitcoin, Zcash also has a halving mechanism. The first Zcash halving happened at block height 1,046,400 in 2020.

The Zcash project is very likely to adopt a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism in the future, as Zcash’s main developer Electric Coin Company and the majority of the Zcash community have expressed support for transitioning away from Proof-of-Work.

Why Zcash?

Zcash’s fundamentals are set to improve significantly thanks to two recent news which could have a substantial impact on Zcash’s wallet and mining ecosystems. 

Zodl, the Zcash wallet project formerly known as Zashi, announced a seed funding round of over $25 million that includes some very prominent investors. This includes major crypto VCs like Paradigm, a16z crypto and Coinbase Ventures, as well notable angel investors as Balaji Srinivasan, Haseeb Qureshi and Mert Mumtaz.

According to the Zodl team, the fundraise will be used to fuel growth, including expanding Zodl’s team to continue its core missions of Zcash protocol development and improving the Zodl wallet.

Zodl was founded by Josh Swihart, the former CEO of Electric Coin Company (ECC). The organization also includes members of the core engineering team who previously contributed to Zcash development at ECC.

Meanwhile, major Bitcoin mining pool operator Foundry has announced plans to  launch an institutional-grade Zcash mining pool in April 2026. The company said the new pool aims to address a gap in the Zcash mining ecosystem, where much of the existing infrastructure consists of smaller global pools that often lack formal compliance frameworks. 

By expanding into Zcash, Foundry intends to provide miners with a U.S.-based platform designed to meet the operational, reporting and compliance requirements commonly expected by public companies and large institutions.

According to Foundry CEO Mike Colyer, the launch reflects the growing maturity of Zcash as a digital asset and the need for mining infrastructure that can support institutional participants. 

The pool will apply the same compliance-first operational framework used by Foundry USA Pool, which has undergone SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 audits. It will include identity verification procedures through know-your-customer and anti-money laundering checks, transparent payout calculations, detailed reporting tools and 24/7 operational support.

8. Uniswap

Uniswap is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that introduced and popularized the AMM (automated market maker) model. This unique design removes the need for order books, providing an elegant way for swapping between different tokens directly on the blockchain without relying on intermediaries.

The Uniswap protocol is decentralized, and anyone can create liquidity pools for any token. This means that the newest crypto assets are often traded on Uniswap before they make their way on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges.

The model introduced by Uniswap has been adopted by many decentralized exchanges on different blockchain platforms. However, Uniswap remains the most active decentralized exchange in terms of trading volume.

Uniswap is governed by holders of the UNI token, who can submit and vote for proposals. UNI was distributed to past users of the Uniswap protocol via an airdrop in 2020, and the token is now available for purchase on a variety of both decentralized and centralized trading platforms.

Why Uniswap?

Recently, the Uniswap team announced a partnership with Securitize, bringing BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) to the UniswapX platform.

The move unlocks new liquidity options for investors and marks a major milestone in bridging traditional finance with decentralized finance (DeFi). Through UniswapX’s RFQ framework, Securitize Markets will enable trading for eligible BUIDL investors, allowing them to access competitive quotes from a network of whitelisted market makers and settle transactions atomically on-chain via smart contracts. 

All participating investors are pre-qualified and whitelisted through Securitize, combining DeFi efficiency with traditional regulatory standards.

BlackRock plays a central role in the partnership, with its BUIDL fund serving as the tokenized real-world asset integrated into UniswapX. Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s Global Head of Digital Assets, described the integration as a major step forward in the convergence of tokenized assets and DeFi. 

In addition to enabling BUIDL trading on UniswapX, BlackRock has also made a strategic investment within the Uniswap ecosystem.

9. Sky

Sky is a decentralized finance protocol that issues and manages USDS, a decentralized stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Users that hold assets that are supported as collateral (for example, ETH) can lock their coins into Sky’s smart contracts in order to issue USDS. The protocol also incorporates the SKY token, which facilitates decentralized governance.

The system is overcollateralized—in order to mint USDS, users need to provide collateral that exceeds the value of minted USDS, and users are required to monitor the value of their collateral in order to avoid liquidation.

Sky was founded under the name Maker in 2014, and the platform’s stablecoin was first launched in late 2017 under the name Dai. Initially, the protocol only supported ETH as collateral. With the launch of Multi-Collateral Dai in 2019, it also became possible to use other forms of collateral. Today, Sky’s stablecoin USDS is backed by a diverse range of assets.

Why Sky?

SKY has been a solid performer recently, gaining a modest 1% in the last week while most major crypto assets sustained losses. The Sky decentralized ecosystem is on a positive trajectory, as evidenced by its performance in 2025.

Sky DeFi delivered breakout growth in 2025 while becoming meaningfully more efficient. Protocol revenue climbed to $338M, driven by strong growth of the USDS stablecoin, whose supply rose 74% YoY to $9.2B, clearly outperforming broader stablecoin market growth. 

At the same time, Sky sharply reduced costs as core operating expenses fell 63% YoY, reaching just $8.8M in Q4. Growth initiatives were delegated to autonomous Sky Agents and the core protocol remained lean. With one-off transformation costs related to the project’s rebrand now behind it, the Sky Ecosystem heads into 2026 structurally more efficient.

USDS strengthened its position as a capital-efficient institutional stablecoin. Sky maintained over $4B in instant redemption liquidity via the Peg Stability Module, while zero-slippage USDC–USDS swaps reinforced USDS’s role as a low-friction settlement and liquidity asset.

Adoption remained resilient despite a lower-yield environment. Even as DeFi rates compressed and the Sky Savings Rate declined from 12.5% to 4%, USDS continued to attract users. The number of holders grew from 509K to 582K, while grewy from $5.3B to $9.2B.

10. BNB

BNB is a token that was launched by the Binance cryptocurrency exchange in 2017. BNB serves two primary functions. Holders of the token get access to special benefits when using Binance – this includes lower trading fees, access the exchange’s Launchpad and Launchpool programs, cashback on Binance Visa card purchases, and more.

The token is also used as the native asset of the BNB Chain blockchain. BNB Chain is a variant of Ethereum that offers significantly lower transaction fees to users, and it allows developers to easily deploy EVM-compatible decentralized applications. Previously known as Binance Coin, BNB has now gone through an extensive rebranding.

Why BNB?

Recently, the 33rd quarterly BNB token burn has been completed, in which 1.44 million BNB (worth approximately $12 billion at the time of the burn) was permanently removed from circulation. 

Compared to the 32nd quarterly BNB burn (1.59 million BNB worth $1 billion), the most recent burn was smaller in terms of BNB burned, but larger in terms of the dollar value.

The burn has reduced the supply of BNB to 137.7 million tokens (the goal is to cut the supply to 100 million). The supply reduction was conducted using the BNB Auto-Burn mechanism, which is based on two parameters: the BNB price and the number of blocks produced by BNB Chain during the given quarter.

BNB has been by far the strongest performer among major cryptocurrencies recently, gaining 20.6% against the US dollar in the last 30 days. In the same time frame, Bitcoin gained 5.2% and Ethereum gained 3.8%.

Recently, BNB was listed on Coinbase, a major cryptocurrency exchange that trades on the NASDAQ. This news is especially notable since Binance (which still plays a key role in the BNB ecosystem) is a major competitor to Coinbase. 

The listing is also a signal of a favorable regulatory environment for the token, as BNB has always been controversial from a securities law standpoint since it was initially created and sold by Binance.

11. Chainlink

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that enables blockchains to access trustworthy data from outside their own systems. The project seeks to solve the “oracle problem” encountered by blockchains. By securely bridging blockchains with external data, Chainlink enables a variety of use cases that cannot be achieved using on-chain data alone.

Chainlink is already the leading oracle service in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space and is also seeing growing adoption in NFT projects and crypto gaming. For instance, a DeFi protocol can use Chainlink’s network to provide its smart contracts with price data from centralized exchanges, which operate off-chain. NFT projects can leverage Chainlink for verifiable randomness, ensuring fairness and building trust in NFT minting and distribution processes.

Why Chainlink?

Chainlink’s native token, LINK, surged 11.5% in the past 24 hours on Monday, spearheading a broader cryptocurrency rebound after last week’s market decline.

According to on-chain analyst Lookonchain, 30 new wallets collectively withdrew 6,256,893 LINK (worth $116.7 million) since October 11, suggesting accumulation by wealthy investors.

In its third-quarter report published Friday, Chainlink Labs highlighted key partnerships and technological achievements that have reignited investor confidence. 

The company revealed collaborations with the interbank messaging service Swift, the U.S. financial clearing giant Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. (DTCC), and its European counterpart Euroclear. It also announced a pilot project with the U.S. Department of Commerce aimed at bringing government data on-chain.

The report further elaborated on Chainlink’s strategic direction, transitioning from a decentralized oracle network into a comprehensive infrastructure layer supporting tokenized and real-world assets.

Data from DeFi Llama indicates that Chainlink continues to dominate the decentralized oracle sector, securing $62 billion in total value (TVS), roughly 62% of the market. The closest rival, Chronicle, trails behind with $10 billion in TVS.

Market share of decentralized oracle by TVS. Source: DeFi Llama

12. Monad

Monad is a high-performance, Ethereum-compatible Layer-1 blockchain designed to deliver both high speeds and decentralization. Built with minimal hardware requirements, it supports a widely distributed validator network while achieving major performance gains through software innovation.

Monad’s fully open-source C++ and Rust codebase introduces new architectures across consensus, execution, networking, and data storage, including the MonadBFT consensus system, RaptorCast block propagation, asynchronous and parallelized execution, JIT compilation, and the efficient MonadDB state store.

These advancements remove core bottlenecks in existing chains while maintaining full EVM and Ethereum RPC compatibility, resulting in a blockchain capable of around 10,000 transactions per second, 400ms block times, and 800ms finality.

Why Monad?

Monad, which is one of the most highly anticipated crypto projects to debut this year, just launched their mainnet. 

After early signs that the MON token sale on Coinbase might underperform, a late surge in demand pushed the offering to nearly $216 million (over 115% of its $187 million target), showing strong market confidence just days before the network goes live. The sale was also the first major test of Coinbase’s new public token sale platform, giving MON broad visibility and signaling institutional support for the project’s distribution strategy.

MON has a total supply of 100 billion tokens, with 10.8% currently unlocked and circulating. That circulating amount is split into two parts: 7.5% was offered over the past week through a public sale on Coinbase’s Token Platform at $0.025 per token, while the remaining 3.3% is being released through the airdrop.

Designed for speed, decentralization, and full Ethereum compatibility, Monad plans to support use cases ranging from high-frequency trading to mass-market consumer apps, positioning it as a serious contender in next-generation blockchain infrastructure.

Crypto traders should keep MON on their radar this week as the token could display a lot of volatility. Given the current state of the crypto market (the Fear & Greed index is well into “Extreme Fear” territory), it’s difficult to predict how MON will perform at launch, but there will almost certainly be some big trading opportunities. 

*Data as of April 13, 2026, at 13:35 UTC.

Best crypto to buy for beginners

If you're a new entrant in the cryptocurrency space, it's probably best to stick to cryptocurrencies that have been around for a longer period of time and have a well-developed ecosystem of resources for users. This will make it easier for you to set up your wallet and find answers if you encounter any problems along the way.

If you're a beginner, consider sticking to cryptocurrencies that satisfy the following criteria:

• The coin has a significant market capitalization ($1 billion and up)
• The coin is listed on many cryptocurrency exchanges and can easily be exchanged against fiat currencies
• The coin has solid liquidity (at least $100 million in 24-hour trading volume)
• The coin is already a working product and is not based on future promises

If you stick to coins that meet these criteria, you'll automatically be filtering out a lot of low-quality projects and reducing your chances of falling victim to scams. You will also easily be able to sell your coins and convert them to fiat currency if you ever decide to do so.

Here are a few examples of cryptocurrencies that are worth considering for beginner investors in crypto. These coins have a lot of liquidity, well-developed ecosystems, and a lot of educational resources and tools that will help beginners get up to speed.

• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Litecoin
• Polygon
• Solana

Please note that cryptocurrencies are risky investments and typically display a lot of price volatility. This is true even for established cryptocurrencies with multi-billion dollar market capitalizations. Never invest more than you are willing to lose.

Best crypto to buy for long-term investors

Many crypto investors prefer to passively hold their cryptocurrencies over the long term instead of actively trading them. Frankly, this is a good decision if you don't want to put a lot of time and effort into following everything that's happening in the crypto and blockchain space.

If you're trying to invest in crypto for the long term, we recommend that you only stick to the most established cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. While they are still risky, their fundamentals are much more robust than projects that heavily depend on just a few developers and community leaders.

In order to invest in crypto successfully over the long term, we recommend that you store your coins safely using a hardware crypto wallet. Although there are plenty of high-quality hardware wallets out there, Ledger's devices stand out as the best choice overall, in our opinion.

Get a Ledger Hardware Wallet

How we chose the best cryptocurrencies to buy

With thousands of different cryptocurrencies on the market, it can be challenging to narrow down the list to only about a dozen coins. When creating this list, we aimed to showcase a variety of cryptocurrency projects, ranging from well-established projects to more speculative projects that could potentially have a lot of upside. Here are the factors we considered when deciding which cryptocurrencies to feature.

Availability

It's important for a cryptocurrency to be easily available across a variety of cryptocurrency exchanges, including both centralized and decentralized options. We also considered whether the cryptocurrency can be traded directly against fiat currencies, which makes the process of buying and selling much more straightforward.

Market capitalization

The coins featured on our list of the best cryptocurrencies to buy in 2023 are all among the 100 largest crypto assets by market capitalization. By itself, a large market capitalization doesn't mean that the project is of high quality. However, it is a good indication that there's a lot of community interest in the project, and coins with a larger market cap are more resilient to market manipulation attempts, as moving the market requires large amounts of capital.  

Sector leadership

The cryptocurrency market can be divided into several sectors. For example, we have Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies, which represent two of the main approaches towards achieving decentralized consensus. We can further identify other sectors such as decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, layer 2 projects, meme coins and others.

We attempted to highlight projects that are leaders in their respective sectors in order to showcase the variety that can be found in the crypto and blockchain space.

Working products

It's important that the cryptocurrency we're featuring has a working product already and isn't simply based on future promises. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, we generally avoid highlighting coins that don't have a working mainnet yet. When it comes to tokens, we try to focus on tokens that are used as utility tokens in a working product or as governance tokens in an actively used decentralized protocol.

Occasionally, we will highlight coins that are about to launch their mainnet or key product soon. However, we try to limit this only to top-tier projects that are highly anticipated by the crypto community.

Team and development

Most high-quality crypto and blockchain projects are transparent about their team and their credentials. We prefer to highlight projects developed and managed by highly qualified individuals. In addition, we put a lot of value on activity. If a project is being developed actively, we're much more likely to feature it over a project that is only improved occasionally. 

Of course, a project's team or founders being anonymous is not a dealbreaker in every single case. After all, we still don't know who created Bitcoin.

How to buy crypto for beginners

If you're new to crypto, the first step is to choose a reliable cryptocurrency exchange. We provide a list of the best crypto exchanges for beginners to help you get started. At the moment, the best all-around exchange for beginners is Kraken.

Create Kraken Account

After you create your account on a cryptocurrency exchange, you'll have to deposit some funds to your account. Most high-quality exchanges will support various payment methods, including bank transfers and credit/debit card transfers.

Next, decide on the amount you would like to invest and the cryptocurrencies you want to buy. If you're a beginner, we recommend starting with smaller amounts and sticking to well-established cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. After you become more comfortable with how cryptocurrencies work and conduct some extra research, you might also become interested in altcoins with a lower market cap. 

Next, place a buy order for the cryptocurrency you want to buy using either a market or limit order. For additional security, consider transferring your Bitcoin to your own wallet (preferably a hardware wallet) after completing your purchase instead of leaving it on the exchange.

The bottom line: What crypto to buy now?

What is the best crypto to buy now is mostly dependent on your own individual risk profile and investment goals. If you are interested in cryptocurrencies that have long-term potential, then staples like BTC and ETH are probably the right choice for you. 

If your risk appetite is greater, you can try to pursue investments in cryptos under 1 cent or participate in the latest crypto presales if you are feeling especially frisky. We provide a number of resources that will help you identify interesting opportunities in the crypto market:

• Top Crypto Gainers and Losers
• Undervalued Cryptos
• Trending Cryptos

In any case, please keep in mind that the cryptocurrency market is highly volatile and that investing in cryptocurrency is subject to considerable risk. Always do your research and consider your financial situation before making any investment, and never invest more than you are willing to lose.