Should You Buy Polkadot While It's Under $4?

The crypto market has calmed down after a couple of months characterized by price-cutting volatility. Bitcoin (BTC 5.83%) is down 8% year-to-date on April 21. That’s comparable to the stock market, as the S&P 500 (^GSPC 2.51%) index fell 13% over the same period. If anything, Bitcoin has been more stable than stocks amid the tariff drama, rising 3% since the end of March while the leading stock index dropped 9% lower.

But if you’re planning to buy into the crypto sector in this period of stable prices, you have other options than Bitcoin. The largest crypto’s market-beating stability hasn’t rubbed off on the entire sector, and many altcoins are available at dramatically lower prices nowadays.

In particular, I recommend taking a closer look at Polkadot (DOT 9.20%) right now. The cross-chain app development coin, managed by the Web3 Foundation, has also outperformed the S&P 500 in April with a smaller 4% price drop. But it’s down 42% since the end of 2024, even though a stack of bullish growth drivers is piling up.

I’ll give you the lowdown on Polkadot’s transformation. If you’re still not excited about this promising Web3 investment by the end of this page, you should probably stick to more traditional ideas like Bitcoin and value-oriented stocks. That’s OK — Polkadot is just one of many perfectly reasonable investment ideas in this dynamic market.

Polkadot’s special place in the crypto world

Polkadot has two main purposes, and they are tightly related to each other:

• As the official coin and blockchain network of the Web3 Foundation, Polkadot was explicitly designed to support the next generation of the internet. It facilitates privacy, personal data control, and a financial system of peer-to-peer transactions. Getting this dotted ball rolling could disrupt everything from personal finance and media publishing to medical records and social media.
• The Polkadot blockchain network doesn’t stand alone. Instead, it can connect to many of the leading blockchains out there, sending and receiving data from one to another. Let’s say your Web3 decentralized finance app needs to manage money transfers with the Cosmos (ATOM 6.57%) network and store the user’s wealth in the form of Bitcoins. The process is handled by Ethereum (ETH 10.61%) smart contracts, based on real-world data provided by Chainlink (LINK 11.22%). Letting these components talk to each other can be complicated, but Polkadot’s integrated development tools make it easy. And that’s how you build an advanced Web3 app.

Where are all the Polkadot apps?

So Polkadot’s purpose is pretty clear, and I’m looking forward to Web3 ideas making an impact on mainstream culture. I’m not aware of any game-changing examples so far, though the Subsocial content monetization platform and Polkamarkets data forecasting community are off to a good start.

If those early hopefuls don’t get the party started, the first Polkadot killer app might be a decentralized game or a mobile network management system. The first big Polkadot apps might not have the cryptocurrency’s logo plastered all over it, but it can do the heavy cross-chain communications lifting behind the scenes. The resulting torrent of Polkadot usage will still build real-world value, one microscopic transaction fee at a time.

Polkadot’s impressive technical makeover

On top of the incoming Web3 future, Polkadot is upgrading is technical platform at the moment. The original collection of parachains and crowdfunding auctions was powerful but also confusing in many ways. The new Polkadot 2.0 design simplifies everything into a single computing hub, running a massively scalable supercomputer on the blockchain. This platform can execute perfectly ordinary computer programs, such as a playable version of the classic ID Games game DOOM . That’s a pretty silly example, but also a colorful demonstration of the next-generation Polkadot ecosystem’s flexibility.

Putting this upgraded system in the hands of a global developer community could very well create that long-awaited first Web3 killer app. If this isn’t the right market for any of these disruptive ideas, the stage will be set for a longer waiting game. So I can’t promise that Polkadot will skyrocket in 2025, or the foreseeable future.

But I don’t mind buying coins on the cheap and waiting for the sea change to come — even if it takes several years. Investing is a marathon, not a sprint.