3 Superior Cryptocurrencies to Buy and Hold for 10 Years

Bitcoin and the upcoming halvings

In my view, the three cryptocurrencies that belong in every crypto portfolio for at least the next 10 years are Bitcoin (BTC +3.09%), Ethereum (ETH +1.91%), and Solana (SOL +3.88%). Although it's tough to predict whether they will even be around in 2036, the odds are they will, and if their superiority in their respective domains is as it is now, they will have gained a ton of value. Let's take a closer look at each.

Today, Bitcoin's miners produce about 450 new coins daily, and 95.7% of all 21 million coins that can ever exist are already in circulation. The next halving, which cuts the daily issuance of new Bitcoin in half, is expected in April 2028. After that, there will be another halving in 2032, and a third in early 2036, after which only 56 new bitcoins will be mined per day. So the next 10 years will see daily new supply growth slow to a little more than 12% of what it is today.

It's true that scarcity on its own can't drive asset prices higher without demand. Still, each successive halving makes new Bitcoin buyers compete for fewer coins, a supply squeeze that has been central to what makes the cryptocurrency valuable since its inception. And, if the coin continues to behave as an inflation hedge during the coming years, it will see even more demand than it might otherwise.

Ethereum and tokenized assets

Asset tokenization is a process that encodes the ownership data of assets like Treasury bonds or stocks onto a crypto token that can be traded and hosted on a blockchain. On Sept. 30, Ethereum's network hosted $16.6 billion in tokenized assets, giving it almost a 43% share of the $38.7 billion market. That lead could make Ethereum central to the future of cryptocurrency if tokenization becomes a multitrillion-dollar market by 2030, as many estimates, including one from the consultancy McKinsey, have projected.

The network's weak spot is its scaling strategy, one of its long-running bugbears. After the last big push to make Ethereum cheaper to use, the value of the network burn fees used to take coins out of circulation collapsed from about $2 billion in 2024 to just $285 million in 2025; users get cheaper transactions, but that means the coin's holders don't get much in the way of value from the network being used more.

Glamsterdam, a planned upgrade, is likely to partially address that issue while further bolstering the main network's ability to process more transactions so it can handle the increasing load from tokenized asset trading. The upgrade should roll out sometime in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Solana updates and investment allocation

Alpenglow, a new consensus system that handles how Solana's validators agree on the data that's on the blockchain ledger, aims to cut the time until a payment is irreversible (a transaction's finality) from about 13 seconds to 0.15 seconds. When that happens, it will further cement Solana's standing as the fastest major blockchain and make it even better positioned to take on business that other networks aren't able to handle, like processing payments at major scale in real time.

At the same time, the coin's supply is set to tighten as a result of governance actions, which is bullish because it shows the network's community can vote in favor of its own interests in big ways that disrupt past norms for the better. In August 2026, validators approved Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) 0550, which doubles how fast Solana's supply growth rate decreases. New issuance will now hit its terminal 1.5%-per-year floor in 2029, not 2032, which means holders won't get their value diluted by nearly as much over the long term.

For the purposes of a 10-year hold, Bitcoin should take about 60% of the money you're looking to allocate to these three cryptocurrencies. It's a scarce asset, and the most likely to survive even radical changes to the world over the coming years, as it doesn't actually do much or seek to do anything other than retain value for those who hold it. Ethereum and Solana should split the remaining 40% equally, at 20% each.

Both are leaders in the crypto sector, yet they have major issues that could impair their competitiveness as investments, particularly regarding supply. While progress has been made on that front recently, and more is likely on the way, they're still much riskier than Bitcoin, which has long since figured out the best supply policy.