What Crypto Should You Buy in Australia? How to Decide (Not What to Buy)

By Mario Stanic, Founder of Crypto Research Australia and self-taught algorithmic trading expert (multi-billion-dollar volume across futures and spot), featured in the AFR, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Channel 9 · Crypto Research Australia · Updated June 2026

The short answer

If you came here hoping for a list of coins to buy, here's the honest truth that almost no one in crypto will tell you: no one should be telling you what to buy, and anyone who confidently does is usually selling something. Influencers are often paid to promote tokens, exchanges profit when you trade, and "buy this now" content is a prediction dressed up as advice. The most valuable thing we can give you isn't a shopping list. It's the ability to decide for yourself.

Choosing what crypto to buy well comes down to a repeatable process:

1. Start with you, not the coin, your goals, time horizon, risk tolerance, and how much you can afford to allocate.
2. Understand the risk tiers, from foundational assets to pure speculation, risk rises sharply as you go down the scale.
3. Research before you buy, assess the use case, adoption, team, tokenomics, liquidity, and valuation of anything you're considering.
4. Size every position to its risk, never bet more than you can afford to lose on any one asset.
5. Buy and hold it safely, a regulated Australian exchange to transact, self-custody to hold, and clean records from day one for tax.

Get the process right and you'll make better decisions across every market condition than someone chasing tips ever will. This article teaches the process, not the picks.

Note: This is general educational information, not personal financial advice and not a recommendation to buy any particular cryptocurrency. We deliberately do not tell you what to buy. What crypto (if any) suits you depends entirely on your circumstances, for personal financial product advice, consult an ASIC-licensed financial adviser, and for tax, a registered tax agent. Crypto is high-risk and you can lose your entire investment.

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Why no one should tell you what to buy (and why everyone tries)

Let's start with the uncomfortable part, because it reframes everything else. The crypto information ecosystem is riddled with conflicts of interest, and once you see them, you'll never read "buy this coin" content the same way again.

• Influencers are frequently paid. Many crypto personalities are compensated, directly or in tokens, to promote projects. The enthusiastic "this is the next big thing" video may be a paid placement, and the person making it may be selling their own holdings to the audience they're hyping.
• Exchanges profit from your activity. Platforms make money when you trade and when you buy. Their "trending coins" and featured listings are not neutral recommendations; they're aligned with their revenue, not your outcome.
• "Buy now" is a prediction, not advice. Anyone telling a general audience to buy a specific asset at a specific time is making a forecast about the market, and no one forecasts crypto prices reliably. When they're right, it looks like genius; when they're wrong (often), the audience holds the bag.
• Projects market themselves. Every token has a team, a community, and often a treasury that benefits from the price going up. Their messaging is marketing, however technical it sounds.

This is precisely why independence matters, and why we won't hand you a list of coins. We hold no tokens, we're paid by no projects, and we have nothing to sell you except clarity. The honest position, we can't and won't tell you what to buy, but we can teach you how to decide, isn't a cop-out. It's the only trustworthy stance in a market full of conflicted voices. Treat anyone who offers you confident picks with the scepticism that conflict of interest deserves.

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The mindset shift: from "what to buy" to "how to choose"

The investors who do well in crypto over time aren't the ones who got handed a winning tip. They're the ones who developed judgment, a repeatable way of evaluating any asset and any opportunity, so they don't need to rely on anyone else's say-so.

A tip makes you dependent and gives you no way to know when to sell, how much to buy, or whether the thesis has changed. A process makes you self-sufficient: you can evaluate the thousands of assets that exist, ignore the noise, and make decisions you actually understand and can defend. The goal of this article is to give you that process. It's more work than copying a shopping list, and it's the only thing that actually compounds.

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Step 1: Start with you, not the coin

Here's the counterintuitive part: the first step in deciding what to buy has nothing to do with any specific cryptocurrency. It starts with you. Before you can sensibly choose an asset, you need to know what you're trying to achieve and how much risk you can carry.

Work through these first:

• What are your goals? Long-term wealth building over a decade? Exposure to an emerging asset class? Something else? Your goal shapes everything that follows.
• What's your time horizon? Money you won't need for ten years can sit through multiple volatile cycles. Money you'll need in two years has no business in assets that can halve. Be honest about when you'll want this capital back.
• What's your risk tolerance? Crypto is extraordinarily volatile, even established assets can fall 50% or more. If a large drop would force you to sell, or keep you awake at night, your tolerance is lower than the asset demands, and you should size accordingly.
• How much can you afford to allocate? This is the foundational question. Only ever invest money you can genuinely afford to lose, never your emergency fund, money for essential expenses, or borrowed funds. How much of your overall wealth belongs in crypto at all is a question worth answering deliberately. (Our guide on how much of your money should be in crypto walks through this.)

Notice the logic: you decide how much to allocate and what risk you can carry before you choose specific assets. Most people do it backwards, they get excited about a coin, then work out how much to put in. That's how portfolios end up overexposed to assets that are wrong for the person holding them. Start with you.

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Step 2: Understand the risk tiers

Not all crypto carries the same risk, and understanding the rough tiers is essential to choosing sensibly. Think of crypto assets as sitting on a spectrum, where potential reward and, far more importantly, risk both increase as you move down:

Foundational assets. The largest, most established, most liquid cryptocurrencies with the longest track records and widest adoption. Bitcoin is the reference point for this tier, the original, most recognised crypto asset. These are still volatile and can fall heavily, but they carry the lowest risk within an inherently high-risk asset class, and the deepest liquidity.

Large-cap established assets. Major, well-known platforms and protocols with significant adoption, large developer ecosystems, and substantial market value. Ethereum is the reference point here, a large, established smart-contract platform. Higher risk than foundational assets, with more volatility, but generally more established than the long tail below.

Mid-cap assets. Smaller, less proven projects that may have real usage but carry meaningfully more risk, lower liquidity, less track record, greater chance of failure, and sharper price swings in both directions.

Small-cap and speculative assets. Smaller, newer, often unproven tokens. Some may succeed spectacularly; the large majority underperform, fade, or fail entirely. High potential volatility, high risk of significant or total loss, and often thin liquidity that makes exiting difficult.

Micro-cap and "degenerate" tokens. The far end, tiny, often anonymous projects, meme coins, and the like. These are closer to lottery tickets than investments. The occasional one delivers enormous returns, which is exactly what makes them so heavily promoted, but the overwhelming majority go to zero, and the space is riddled with scams, rug pulls, and pump-and-dumps.

The point of the tiers isn't to tell you which to buy, it's to make you conscious of the risk you're taking. A common and sensible structure is a core-and-satellite approach: a larger allocation to the more established lower-risk tiers (your "core"), and only a small, deliberately-sized allocation to higher-risk speculative assets (your "satellites"), money you've explicitly accepted you could lose entirely. Naming references like Bitcoin and Ethereum here are illustrations of the categories, not recommendations to buy them.

Here's the spectrum at a glance:

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Step 3: Research before you buy

Once you know your own parameters and the risk tiers, the next step is learning to evaluate any asset you're considering, so you're judging it on substance rather than hype. This is the genuine skill, and it applies to any token, forever. A proper assessment looks at:

• The use case. What does this actually do? What problem does it solve, and does it solve it better than alternatives? Is there real demand, or just a narrative? Be sceptical of projects that sound revolutionary but have no actual adoption.
• Adoption and traction. Are real people and applications using it? Usage, active users, and genuine activity matter far more than promises and roadmaps.
• The team. Who's building it? Are they credible, public, and experienced, or anonymous with a history of abandoned projects? Anonymous teams aren't automatically bad, but they remove a layer of accountability.
• Tokenomics. How does the token's supply work? How many exist, how many are yet to be released, and who holds them? A token where a huge supply is yet to hit the market, or where insiders hold most of it, carries dilution and dumping risk. This is where understanding the difference between market cap and fully diluted valuation is essential, a token can look "cheap" by market cap while being expensive once its full supply is accounted for. (Our guide on market cap vs FDV covers this.)
• Liquidity. Can you actually buy and sell it at a fair price? Thin liquidity means large spreads and difficulty exiting, a real risk in smaller assets.
• Security and track record. Has the project been hacked or exploited? How long has it survived? Longevity in crypto is itself a signal.

This is deliberately the same rigour you'd apply whether the asset is foundational or speculative, though the smaller and newer the asset, the more it matters and the harder reliable information is to find. (Our full guide on how to research a crypto token before you buy lays out this process step by step.) The discipline of doing your own research is what separates investing from gambling on someone else's tip.

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Step 4: Size every position to its risk

Choosing a good asset is only half the decision; how much you put in is the other half, and it matters more than people think. A sound asset in a reckless size can hurt you badly; a speculative asset in a tiny size can't do real damage. Position sizing is your primary defence against being wrong, and in crypto, you will sometimes be wrong.

Principles:

• Size inversely to risk. The more speculative the asset, the smaller the position. Your foundational holdings can be larger; your speculative satellites should be small enough that losing them entirely wouldn't derail you.
• Diversify, but don't over-diversify. Spreading across a sensible number of quality assets reduces the impact of any single one failing. But holding dozens of tiny positions you can't track is its own problem, it's hard to research and manage, and dilutes your attention.
• Never let one position dominate. A single asset growing to represent the bulk of your portfolio, whether by your choice or through price appreciation, is concentration risk, and it's one of the most common mistakes. Decide your maximum comfortable allocation to any one asset in advance.
• Keep crypto sized appropriately within your whole financial life. Crypto is one part of a broader picture that may include cash, super, property, and shares. How much of your total wealth sits in crypto is the biggest sizing decision of all.

(Our position-sizing guide and our guide on how much crypto to own go deeper on all of this. Sizing is unglamorous, but it's the discipline that keeps you in the game.)

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Step 5: Buy and hold it safely in Australia

Once you've decided what and how much, the practical "how" matters, especially in Australia, where there are specific things to get right.

Choose a regulated exchange. Buy through an exchange registered with AUSTRAC (verifiable on AUSTRAC's public register), and increasingly one engaging with Australia's newer licensing framework for crypto platforms. Regulation isn't a guarantee, but an unregulated or offshore platform leaves you with no protections. Compare the all-in cost (including spreads, not just headline fees), the AUD deposit and withdrawal options, and the platform's security and track record. (Our full guide on how to choose a crypto exchange in Australia covers this.)

Don't store long-term holdings on the exchange. Crypto on an exchange has no government guarantee in Australia, if the platform is hacked or fails, you can lose your funds. Use an exchange to transact, but move meaningful long-term holdings into self-custody (a hardware wallet) where only you control the keys. (Our custody and security guide explains how.)

Keep records from day one. Every purchase, sale, and swap is relevant for tax. Disposing of crypto, including swapping one coin for another, is a capital gains tax event in Australia, and the ATO's data-matching program means your records need to hold up. Starting clean records from your very first transaction saves enormous pain later. (Our crypto tax guide covers what's required.)

These practical steps are where good intentions either become a sound investment or an expensive mistake. The asset you chose matters less than people think; how you buy, hold, and account for it matters more than they realise.

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The honest truth about chasing "the next big thing"

A word on the dream that drives most "what should I buy?" searches: finding the small coin that turns a modest sum into a fortune. It's a powerful fantasy, and the entire speculative end of crypto is built on selling it to you. Here's the reality, plainly:

• For every coin that delivered enormous returns, thousands didn't. You hear about the winners precisely because they won, this is survivorship bias. The graveyard of failed, faded, and fraudulent tokens vastly outnumbers the lottery winners, and it's invisible because no one makes videos about the coins that went to zero.
• The promotion intensity is inversely related to the quality. The harder a small token is being pushed at you, the more sceptical you should be, heavy promotion of obscure tokens is often a sign of a pump-and-dump or a project relying on hype rather than substance.
• You can absolutely have a speculative allocation, a small, deliberately-sized portion of money you've accepted you could lose entirely, placed after real research. That's legitimate. What's dangerous is treating speculation as a strategy, betting amounts you can't afford to lose, or chasing the dream with the bulk of your portfolio.

The mature approach isn't to never speculate, it's to speculate small, consciously, and only with money you can lose, while building the core of your portfolio on the more established, better-researched end of the spectrum. Anyone promising you life-changing returns from a coin you've never heard of is, once again, selling something.

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A decision checklist

Bringing the process together, before buying any crypto, you should be able to answer:

• Have I decided how much of my total wealth belongs in crypto, and is this within it?
• Is this money I can genuinely afford to lose?
• Which risk tier does this asset sit in, and am I conscious of that risk?
• Have I actually researched it, use case, adoption, team, tokenomics, liquidity, rather than acting on a tip?
• Is my position size appropriate to the asset's risk, and does it avoid over-concentration?
• Am I buying on a real thesis, not on FOMO or hype?
• Will I buy it through a regulated exchange and store it safely?
• Am I keeping records for tax from the first transaction?

If you can answer those honestly, you're making an investment decision. If you can't, if the real answer to "why this coin?" is "someone said it would go up", then you're gambling, and you should pause until you can.

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How independent research and a review help

You don't have to develop all of this judgment alone, and you don't have to act on conflicted sources. Independent research, analysis from a source with no token holdings and nothing to sell you, gives you a starting point free of the conflicts that pervade the space. And a structured portfolio review applies exactly this kind of evaluation to what you already hold: assessing your concentration, your risk, the quality of your assets, and your security and record-keeping, so you can see clearly where you stand.

What a review won't do is tell you which specific coins to buy, that's personal financial advice requiring a licensed adviser, and we won't pretend otherwise. What it does is give you an objective, plain-English read on your portfolio and the frameworks to make your own informed decisions, from a base of clarity rather than hype. In a market designed to sell you certainty, an honest second opinion is rare and valuable.

Not sure whether what you're holding actually stacks up, or whether you're dangerously concentrated? Get an independent, expert second opinion on your crypto. No token holdings, no conflicts, just clarity. Book a free portfolio review call.

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Common mistakes

• Buying on tips and hype instead of your own research, outsourcing your judgment to conflicted sources.
• Choosing the coin before deciding how much to allocate, getting it backwards, and ending up overexposed.
• Ignoring the risk tiers, putting serious money into speculative micro-caps without realising the risk.
• Investing money you can't afford to lose, or worse, borrowing to invest.
• Over-concentrating in a single asset, by choice or by letting a winner balloon unchecked.
• Chasing "the next 100x" with the bulk of your portfolio, fooled by survivorship bias.
• Trusting heavily-promoted obscure tokens, the promotion intensity is often a warning sign.
• Storing everything on an exchange rather than self-custodying long-term holdings.
• Neglecting records from the start, then facing a tax nightmare later.
• Believing anyone who offers confident "buy this now" calls, in a conflicted market, certainty is a red flag.

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Frequently asked questions

What's the best cryptocurrency to buy in Australia right now? There's no responsible answer to this, and that's the honest truth, the "best" crypto for you depends entirely on your goals, time horizon, and risk tolerance, and anyone giving a general audience confident "buy this now" picks is making a prediction or has something to sell. Rather than chasing a specific coin, the durable approach is to learn how to evaluate assets yourself: decide your allocation and risk tolerance, understand the risk tiers, research anything you're considering, and size positions appropriately. For advice tailored to you, see an ASIC-licensed financial adviser.

Should I buy Bitcoin or Ethereum or an altcoin? This depends on your risk tolerance and goals, not on which one is "better." Broadly, foundational assets like Bitcoin sit at the lower-risk end of the crypto spectrum (still highly volatile), large established platforms like Ethereum carry more risk, and smaller altcoins carry substantially more, with the smallest and newest being closest to speculation. A common structure is a core of more established assets with a small, deliberately-sized allocation to higher-risk ones you've researched. We're describing the categories, not recommending specific purchases, your mix should reflect your circumstances.

How do I know if a crypto is a good investment? Evaluate it on substance, not hype: its use case and whether there's real demand, its actual adoption and usage, the credibility of its team, its tokenomics (supply, dilution, who holds it), its liquidity, and its security track record. Crucially, understand the difference between a token's market cap and its fully diluted valuation, since a token can look cheap while being expensive once its full future supply is counted. If you can't assess these things, or the only reason to buy is that someone said it would rise, that's a sign to pause and research properly rather than to buy.

How much should I invest in cryptocurrency as a beginner? Only ever an amount you can genuinely afford to lose, never your emergency fund, money for essential expenses, or borrowed money. Beyond that, how much of your total wealth belongs in crypto is a personal decision based on your risk tolerance and goals; crypto is one volatile part of a broader financial picture. Many people start small while they learn, and size their crypto allocation conservatively given the volatility. The biggest beginner mistake is putting in more than you can afford because a coin seems exciting, decide your allocation first, dispassionately, before choosing assets.

Where is the safest place to buy crypto in Australia? Buy through an exchange registered with AUSTRAC (which you can verify on AUSTRAC's public register) and engaging with Australia's newer crypto licensing framework, comparing security, all-in costs (including spreads), and AUD options. But "safe to buy on" doesn't mean "safe to store on", crypto on an exchange has no government guarantee in Australia, so move long-term holdings into self-custody, such as a hardware wallet, where only you hold the keys. Our guides on choosing an exchange and on custody and security cover both sides in detail.

Is it too late to invest in crypto? No one can tell you where prices go next, so "too late" framed as market timing is unanswerable, and trying to time entry perfectly is a common mistake. The more useful framing is your own: whether crypto suits your goals and risk tolerance, how much (if any) you should allocate, and approaching it as a long-term position rather than a bet on short-term price moves. Strategies like investing gradually over time (rather than all at once) reduce the pressure of timing. Whether crypto belongs in your portfolio at all is a personal question best discussed with a licensed adviser.

Should I just copy what a crypto influencer recommends? Be very cautious. Many influencers are paid, in cash or tokens, to promote projects, and may be selling their own holdings to the audience they're hyping; their incentives are frequently not aligned with your outcome. A recommendation also gives you no way to know how much to buy, when to sell, or whether the thesis has changed. Far better to learn to evaluate assets yourself so you're not dependent on conflicted sources. The fact that a recommendation is confident and enthusiastic tells you nothing about whether it's right, or whose interests it serves.

Do I need to pay tax on crypto I buy in Australia? Buying and holding crypto isn't itself a taxable event, but disposing of it is, selling for Australian dollars, swapping one crypto for another, or spending it all trigger capital gains tax, even crypto-to-crypto swaps where no AUD changes hands. So while the purchase itself doesn't create a tax bill, you need to keep records from your first transaction, because they'll matter when you eventually sell or swap. The ATO's data-matching program means accurate records are essential. Our crypto tax guide explains the rules, and a registered tax agent can advise on your situation.