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• Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley has suggested that the era of investing in cryptocurrencies primarily based on market capitalization is ending.

• Horsley is betting on a new age that bears similarities to investing in companies on Wall Street.

• Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan has recently urged cryptocurrency investors to look beyond Bitcoin.

For most people looking to dip their toes in the cryptocurrency market for the first time, the instinctive thing to do for years has been to scan the list of top coins on aggregation platforms like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko and pick an asset that seems to align with them. But this approach to cryptocurrency investing may soon be at an end as the market matures, according to Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley.

“I think the CoinMarketCap leaderboard era of crypto is close to its end,” Horsley said on Wednesday.

He drew parallels to Wall Street, noting that investors did not pick companies by comparing market capitalizations.

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“Is it interesting to invest in Walmart? Adobe? Mastercard? Johnson & Johnson?” He quizzed rhetorically. “You don’t answer that question by looking to see how their ranking in the S&P and market caps compare. You don’t invest in Exxon because its market cap is cheaper than Eli Lilly & Co.”

Horsley said that instead, investors made picks by building a thesis around the business, considering its place in the market and prospects.

“I think that’s what’s coming in crypto,” he said. “These things are not all the same.”

Indeed, the idea of narrative-driven investing has been gaining momentum in recent years as new sectors emerge in the market, such as tokenization, games, middleware services, and even AI projects.

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Last week, Bitwise investment chief Matt Hougan advocated for cryptocurrency investors to look beyond Bitcoin and diversify their portfolio across several verticals. He compared the cryptocurrency landscape to the internet in 2004.

Hougan noted that many would have been tempted to invest in only Google at the time due to the dominance of search, but added that while that would have paid off, it wouldn’t have been the best strategy in hindsight.