Last year, bitcoin surged 116% reaching a high of $108,000.
If you missed that move, this is your chance to buy the dip.
The crypto market is consolidating at the moment, with bitcoin trading in the $90k area. I expect the next move higher to come soon.
We’re in what has historically been the best time to own crypto. The “sweet spot” that’s typically produced the biggest gains.
BTC prices have followed a “3 up, 1 down” pattern. We call it the bitcoin 4 year cycle.
Every fourth year, crypto prices plunge. The last time that happened was in 2022.
Markets then recover slowly, with the biggest gains being handed out in years 2 and 3, as this table of bitcoin’s annual returns shows.
Year 2 was 2024, and year 3 is 2025:
In August 2023, when bitcoin was trading for $27,000, I told members of my premium crypto advisory RiskHedge Venture it was headed to $150,000.
Bitcoin price more than tripled since.
Based on how much the price has already risen, and my analysis of past cycles, I now believe BTC could possibly run to $250,000 within the next 12 months.
But I wouldn’t buy bitcoin. I prefer to own smaller, early-stage cryptos with higher upside.
I first heard about bitcoin in 2011 when it was trading under $5.
Didn’t buy any. Big mistake.
But from this mistake, I learned to appreciate the unique trait of crypto. We all had the opportunity to buy BTC from the very beginning, when it was only a pup.
This is the opposite of how the stock market works.
Former cyclist Lance Armstrong was an early investor in Uber (UBER). He invested $100,000 in 2009 when the company was valued at less than $4 million.
He would see gains on his initial stake of around 25,000X — which would turn $100,000 into $2.5 billion.
That’s great for Lance. But he only got that opportunity because he was a rich, connected celebrity. Although an average person could have mathematically turned $1,000 into $25 million investing in Uber, no one did. Uber wasn’t available to invest in for regular folks until it IPO’d in 2019.
By that time… it was already a giant company.
Cryptos are different. They basically “IPO” on day one.
Bitcoin went live in early 2009. That very same day, investors could buy it for fractions of a cent.
Most cryptos work this way. Their tokens launch alongside their businesses on Day 1 when they’re tiny, early-stage startups. It’s like investing in Steve Jobs or Bill Gates tinkering in their garages, long before Apple (AAPL) or Microsoft (MSFT) IPO’d.
Crypto lets ordinary investors truly get in on the ground floor.
You notice how many of the people who got rich in crypto were nowhere near Wall Street?
You’ve surely seen the kids driving Lamborghinis… or the 20-year-olds who turned a couple thousand dollars into a couple million dollars in crypto.
Think about how unique that is. Typically, big early-stage gains flow straight to Wall Street because it controls the deals and access. The rich get richer.
In crypto, it’s different.
Anyone could buy Ethereum (ETH) when it launched in 2014 for 30 cents. Today, ETH is trading around $3,200. Where else can a regular investor throw $100 into an early-stage startup and see it balloon to $11.6 million?
It’s the same for Solana (SOL), which launched in early 2020 at less than $1. It’s up 200X since then.
The point is that the crypto market is still so small and so new, there’s plenty of room for exponential growth.
But you don’t want to buy just any small crypto. I wouldn’t touch 99% of them… but the other 1% have the potential to change the world.
Here are three early-stage cryptos I’m optimistic about for 2025…
Early-stage crypto #1: Hivemapper (HONEY) — the next Google Maps
I first recommended Hivemapper (HONEY) to my RiskHedge Venture subscribers in November 2022.
A year later, we sold half of that position for a 1,050% gain. We continue to hold the other half (+900%) as of this writing.
This may look like you’ve already missed the boat. But don’t worry, Hivemapper is still a very early-stage crypto. It hasn’t even made it into the top 100 cryptos by market cap yet (currently, it’s in the 250th spot). There’s still plenty of upside.
Hivemapper is disrupting one of the biggest monopolies right now…
Remember old-school paper maps you had to unfold and fold all the time?
You rarely see them anymore. These days, we rely on apps like Google Maps to get around.
Most people use Google Maps multiple times a day, without even realizing it. They use it each time they book a room on Airbnb… hail a ride on Uber… review a restaurant on TripAdvisor… order groceries via Instacart… scope out a neighbor’s home on Zillow… track their UPS delivery… or order food on DoorDash.
Every single one of those services runs on Google Maps.
“Mapping” might seem like an obscure industry that doesn’t really matter. But it’s a multibillion-dollar industry — and Google (GOOG) dominates about 85% of it. Morgan Stanley estimates Google Maps raked in $11.1 billion in revenues in 2023.
Building and maintaining a global map is incredibly expensive and time-consuming. There are an estimated 40 million miles of roads around the world…
And roads and routes change all the time, which means you have to re-map them regularly.
Each Google Street View car costs $500,000 to outfit. And Google spends an estimated $2 million per day maintaining and updating its maps. Even with all of Google’s money and might, most roads around the world are only updated every 18–24 months.
That’s a big problem for businesses like Uber and UPS, that rely on fresh, up-to-date maps.
There’s another issue with Google Maps: It’s super expensive. Uber alone paid Google Maps roughly $60 million between 2016 and 2018. That’s over $50,000 per day!
Hivemapper invented a whole new way to build maps.
Here’s how it works…
Hivemapper makes a 4K, high-definition dashcam that’s roughly the size of a deck of cards. Anyone can buy one of these dashcams and attach it to their rearview mirror like this:
Source: Hivemapper
The camera automatically “maps” the roads as you drive around, just like a Google Street View car. Hivemapper then feeds these images into its global map.
The best part? Hivemapper pays you in crypto for updating its map. In other words, you can earn Hivemapper’s token — HONEY — by simply driving your car.
Hivemapper contributors have already mapped 414 million km of roads. For perspective, that’s nearly the same as the distance from Earth to the sun.
This is a FAR better way to build and maintain maps.
Even with hundreds of Street View cars and cash to burn, Google maps a road roughly once every 18 months. With an army of contributors across the world, Hivemapper can map the same road at least once a week. Crypto incentives will motivate contributors to frequently update the maps.
During testing, Hivemapper found it “sees” any given street 25X more frequently than Google.
Think about it this way… Google only gets one shot at taking a high-quality photo of a road once every few years.
Hivemapper gets 25X more opportunities. This gives it a far better chance of building a high-quality, “fresh” map businesses will pay to access.
Look at these two shots of the same road sign, for example. You can see Google’s image (left) is blurry. Hivemapper’s photo (right) is far clearer.
Sources: Google Maps; Hivemapper
Hivemapper is only getting off the ground. But I’m predicting it will eat Google Maps’ lunch in a few years.
Hivemapper is building a much fresher map that covers our whole world. Google’s few hundred Street View cars can’t compete with millions of individual contributors who will cover every inch of highway around the world.
Hivemapper also has a huge cost advantage over Google. Each Street View car costs roughly $500,000. Hivemapper’s dashcams cost 1/1,000th of that. And unlike Google, Hivemapper doesn’t have to pay folks salaries to drive around all day.
This will allow Hivemapper to undercut Google on price and eventually lure its high-paying customers away.
Back in 2022, HONEY reached an all-time high of $0.43. It currently trades at around $0.07. That’s your buy-the-dip opportunity. You can buy HONEY on Coinbase.
Want to learn about the two early-stage cryptos I recommend for 2025?
Access them for free by clicking here.
— Stephen McBride, Chief Analyst at RiskHedge
3 early-stage cryptos to buy in 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.