Submitted by John Hoyos

Written by ​Chip Turner @ MacguyverTech

During the holiday season, one of the things my family does is give out lotto scratch-off tickets in cards. It’s a nice touch, an easy gift, and nobody goes broke buying them. Inevitably, someone wins $20-$100 on a ticket, and everyone’s happy.

The same can be done with cheap cryptocurrency coins and tokens. Will they make you rich? Probably not. Will it cost you a ton of money to own? Absolutely not. Can you have a little bit of fun with them? You sure as heck can. And just like those scratch-off tickets, there’s that little voice droning on in the back of your head, saying “Sure, this ticket was probably a waste of five bucks, but you never know. After all, this ticket says I could win $10,000 a week for life!”

The scratch-off ticket is probably the best analogy for purchasing low-priced altcoins. We at MacguyverTech are in no way investment advisors; these are just our opinions. As always, the safest strategy is don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose. With that in mind, here are four altcoins priced under a penny that are fun, inexpensive...and hey, you never know.

4) Shiba Inu

Here’s the perfect example of you never know. If you purchased fifty bucks of SHIB at this time last year, you’d have been a millionaire in October. It was originally a memecoin intended as a joke, with no intrinsic value. It also recently lost a good chunk of its value after Elon Musk revealed that he didn’t actually own any of the stock, resulting in many of profit-takers cashing out (and who could blame them?)

So why should you look at SHIB even though a lot of people cashed out? There are two reasons. First, although SHIB was originally created as a joke, the developers have now used the proceeds to venture into the metaverse and NFTs.

Second, as of November 30, SHIB can be traded directly against the US Dollar and Euro on Kraken. What was once a joke coin now has intrinsic value. Congratulations, SHIB developers. Your coin was literally spoken into existence.

3) Saitama Inu

Saitama had a rough month. On November 13 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, there was an event designed for the release of Saitamask Wallet, a highly anticipated tool for digital finance. Instead, they announced a delay of the release, to the surprise of many.

Less than a week later, an announcement was made on a coin trading platform, reading, “Willie D (a partner of Saitama) Sentenced in Wire Fraud Scam (FBI).” It also offered a link to the FBI announcement. In the space of a week, the coin lost about a third of its value. We’ll get to why the “FBI announcement” was bogus in just a moment.

So why should you look at SAITAMA after this past month? Let’s get one thing out of the way: They could have handled the Saitamask Wallet delay a lot better. Once they realized they weren’t going to be able to deliver the product, they should have shouted it to the heavens. The Crypto community in general doesn’t like even a hint of impropriety.

However, there appears to be a little bit more than that going on in this instance. That “FBI announcement” posted on a coin trading platform was from over eleven years ago about a person who isn’t even part of the development team. In fact, Willie D. had just joined the team a month earlier as the "President of NFT creation and Talent Acquisition.”

This was the equivalent of the Weather Channel sending out a warning about 2012’s Hurricane Sandy this past Halloween to people living in Boise, Idaho. It just didn’t make any sense. The problem is, people have been burned by rug pulls and scams repeatedly in the crypto world, so any hint of anything being even slightly off-kilter sends investors running for the hills. 

As of this writing, Saitama Inu still seems to be a strong community-based coin that, as stated above, just had a bad month.

2) Catgirl

Catgirl, somewhat surprisingly, is not a meme coin that involves Halle Berry. Instead, it’s a token designed to interface with Catgirl-based Anime NFTs. With the coins, one can acquire Catgirl NFTs, which can then go to work in the “Nekoverse.” 

From the Catgirl Whitepaper: “The Catgirl Team values real-world usage when it comes to Cryptocurrency. We want Catgirl to stand out from the rest, and to have a purpose. Our aim is to bring awareness to NFTs and their diverse and engaging market, while also allowing our holders to use our coin in an entertaining way...the anime world is massive and thriving, with a heavy internet presence. We want Catgirl to be the first Crypto brand to bring the anime world, and NFT market together. It's the perfect combination!”

So why should you look at Catgirl? It’s a very specific, but apparently very large target market of anime crossed over with NFTs. It’s also extremely well-presented – one of the dead giveaways of a rug pull waiting to happen is a shoddy-looking Web site and/or whitepaper. Catgirl is the opposite of that.

1)Floki Inu

Yes, another dog coin. Named after the Shiba Inu that Elon Musk adopted, Floki has been in the news a lot lately. They not only partnered with Euro League soccer teams in Spain and Italy but also incurred the wrath of some very proper British advertising persons.

From their Whitepaper: “FLOKI is working on three flagship utility projects: an NFT gaming metaverse known as Valhalla, an NFT and merchandise marketplace known as FlokiPlaces, and a content/education platform known as Floki Inuversity.”

So why should you look at Floki Inu? Their team is investing a LOT into the project; that’s not something done by a group looking to make a quick buck and disappear. 

Summary:

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again – do your research, and don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose. There were a couple of coins researched for this article that quite simply didn’t pass a fairly cursory examination, so we didn’t include them. And even the most thoroughly-researched products have risk...but also potential reward.