Super good question Kevin!

Tl;dr: L2 ZK rollups, some metaverse project, and some DeFi dex/liquidity protocol :).

I'm personally essentially an ETH maxi and believe as Vitalik does that the future will be multi-chain, but not cross-chain: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1479501366192132099

As such, I'm incredibly bullish on L2s on top of Ethereum. Specifically, I'm very bullish on ZK rollups as the most technologically advanced L2s that have the best combination of security, speed and scalability.

This is a great collection of reads on why ZK rollups are awesome: https://www.reddit.com/r/loopringorg/comments/qq7of9/zk_rollups_explained_why_they_are_the_future_of/

My favorite of those articles is specifically https://polynya.medium.com/why-rollups-data-shards-are-the-only-sustainable-solution-for-high-scalability-c9aabd6fbb48

All of that said, right now, the most promising ZK rollups on top of Ethereum are StarkEx and zkSync.

Out of these two, it's harder to pick the clear favorite. Starkware (creators of StarkEx) has a bit of a head start, but zkSync is very close to launching EVM compatibility (public testnet for zkSync 2.0 with EVM compatibility went live at the tail end of February), which is a huge game changer, imo.

Tl;dr L2 ZK rollups on Ethereum are where I'd have the most confidence that we absolutely have another long term major dominant crypto asset player.

That said, there is a major caveat here - is there necessarily a use case for a cryptocurrency that represents a L2 rollup in some way? ETH is useful for covering transaction fees on Ethereum (also slightly questionable exactly how valuable that when PoS and L2s make transaction costs negligible), but what would an L2 cryptocurrency be useful for? To date, zkSync & StarkEx both haven't announced tokens yet, so we can't be totally sure exactly how much value these tokens might capture, no matter how valuable the infrastructure provided by these L2 platforms might be.

Outside of that, I'm pretty bullish on something in DeFi being big, and something in NFTs being big, and something in DAOs being big, though as to exactly what those might play out to be is anyone's guess.

In NFTs, I'd pick up CryptoPunks & ArtBlocks as probably the safest bets that exist today.

In DeFi, possibly Uniswap would be my safest bet. Would watch Aave for sure too though!

DeFi is also an infinite rabbit hole and infinitely interesting protocols continue to emerge here doing very novel things, like Alchemix with self-repaying loans and Pendle for selling your future yield immediately, but these things are way too novel on the frontier for me to have any confidence they'll truly be around in 5-10 years. It's without question that something doing things just like these pioneers, however, will most certainly be around in the future, and likely be worth quite a bit.

In the metaverse domain, I feel pretty strongly that the future dominant players like probably Facebook likely don't exist yet. Right now, all we have are MySpaces and Friendsters and Xyngas - would be wary of going all in on the current crop of entrants lasting for the long run, but would keep a very close eye on the space as something most certainly will be trillion dollar ecosystem in here one day.

I feel similarly about blockchain gaming - something most certainly will be massive here, but that thing quite probably doesn't exist yet. But it will be here sooner than later, so keep your eyes peeled :).

I'm personally a huge fan of Immutable, the creators of Gods Unchained, Guild of Guardians, and Immutable X, for just being incredibly upstanding and historically one of the very first OG blockchain companies pushing forward with very high resiliency in this space, but it's anyone's guess if their latest thing, Guild of Guardians, pulls off a major hit or not. It's one of the first mobile focused blockchain games though, so that's super exciting.

Gala Games is also a huge player in this space, and they already have massive traction - 2.80 million monthly visits on their site alone!

As for DAOs - also not certain any of the major infrastructure players for DAOs or DAOs themselves have yet established themselves enough for me to have strong confidence in them lasting for the long run, but most certainly a space to watch out for.

Finally, there's a class of infrastructure providers on the blockchain that all are likely to be pretty valuable. Chainlink as an oracle service is a huge value-add to the ecosystem, as is IPFS and Arweave for decentralized file storage, and The Graph for querying data on decentralized blockchains and other networks like IPFS.

Alright - now you have my hot takes :). Hope that helps!

Lots of good suggestions here. My perspective is that since you're looking at a long time horizon of up to a decade, you should go back to first principles. Rather than looking at specific projects, consider some broader questions: like the following which can help guide your investment strategy:

1. Where do you think the world will be 5-10 years from now? And how can crypto fit into that vision?
2. Are there any specific trends that crypto can capitalise on? What areas of crypto will have the largest addressable market? E.g. the advent of carbon markets or regenerative finance (ReFi); the mainstreaming of DeFi; real-world applications for NFTs being developed; the imperative to scale blockspace (roll-ups).

More tactically, I would also focus on projects that have a sustainable revenue model, in particular for DeFi. I believe one should analyse protocols as if they were businesses, i.e. to be investable, protocols should have a clear business case and recurring cashflows that accrue value to equity/token holders.

I'd consider MATIC given that Polygon usage has been on the rise as an alternative to Ethereum's gas fees.

I've heard arguments for the ENS governence tokens as well. The idea is that if Ethereum remains the dominant smart contract blockchain, as the equivalent to domain names, ENS will play a big role in ease of use and growth of the ecosystem.

Great question Kevin!

I usually bet assets that have strong fundamentals and that is the reason why I have most of my assets in ETH/BTC (much more ETH than BTC as I develop apps on Ethereum and see how strong Ethereum developer ecosystem is and how well developed so that devs can build app on top of it so much easier than other blockchains).

Aside from that, not a big amount but I recently purchased $LINK (https://chain.link/) and $GRT (https://thegraph.com/en/) as they are strong infrastructure that supports dapps in the future and they don't have strong competitors in the space yet and they will keep attracting developers even in bear market. (Alchemy was founded in 2017, and they said they weren't affected much in bear market as developers don't leave as devs still keep building in bear market).

$LINK is the token for Chainlink, the company that offers an infrastructure for smart contracts to get data outside of blockchain (stock market data, weather data, sport data or whatever the data smart contracts want to use) and I believe the use cases are going to keep growing as Chainlink offers the best solution for getting real-world data. When we tried to use chainlink, I was also surprised how amazing their resources are and how thorough they explain how to use it, which really helps developer adoption.

This tweet argues that Chainlink will be next Google as they own data: https://twitter.com/LifeisMalleable/status/1528195546959290369

$GRT is graphQL for blockchain, which allows devs to query blockchain data with graphQL APIs. As more and more Web2 engineers entering the space, those dev infrastructure that makes developers life easier is going to grow so much more. They are also used by one of the largest players in each category (Uniswap (DeFi), Decentraland (Metaverse), Aragon (DAO)) and as they were able to capture industry leaders, I can imagine they will be able to capture more players in each category in the future, so as each category (DeFi/NFT/DAO) grows, The Graph grows.

As for multi-chain solutions, Polkadot and Cosmos are building a good Layer 0 solutions where devs can build blockchain on top of their infrastructure that supports security layers and all the data flows. Although I do believe Ethereum is going to win, I plan to invest a tiny bit in case one of them wins (and if they win, that small amount will pay off).

Solana Cardano Avalanche (dark horse) Fantom (super dark horse)

Platforms like Solana and Polygon are believed to grow in value by many people, because they help lowering the high transaction fees needed on Ethereum network. I would suggest checking Polygon and Solana out.