My first investment was in 2017 and it was NEM, I kept him all these years, and only sold this year. I did not receive a lot of profit, just returned invested money.
If we talk about the first purchase of cryptocurrency, that it was NEM, then the coin was on the ear of the entire crypto community (it was the summer of 2017). And if we are talking about participating in the ICO, then it was the Tierion (TNT) project.
Looks like you also missed out on the opportunity to sell XEM at ATH in January 2018 for $1.87.
Coincidentally I just bought XEM yesterday, and according to my expectations XEM will hit $4 this year, which is x10 from current $0.4 price. Of course I only invest $20.
I entered in cryptocurrencies market more than three years ago but my first bounty campaign rewards was Twitter campaign (Yahoo62678) managed bounties (35 dollars worth bitcoin). Laterly I invested in matrix al network (MAN).
MAN price has grown 300% in the past 1 year, capitalization is only about $8.5M, if MAN is supported, MAN price will increase very strongly.
My first investment was tronix, got introduced through a friend, just like the OP I have also lost money in ponzi scheme site until I found crypto, 2017 I bought some trx and it did really well but as a newbie I was not expecting to see my wallet fall so hard after such huge profit, I didn't catch out was thinking it will continue but experience thought me real hard.
TRON is really good and TRX has the potential to go up during this bullrun, but its capitalization is quite large so it takes more time for us to see the bull run. Anyway in the past 1 year, the TRX price has increased 450%.
Please stay away from scam projects, just learn a little about the project, you will protect your money easily.
First, let me say you are a great man @poster, for still holding that token from 2017 ICO to this moment, personally, I've never held any token this long except shitcoins which I got from different airdrop when airdrops was still rampant in 2017, and my reason for holding them till now is because there's no way to sell them, and even if there is, the transaction fees will be way higher than what you stand to get from the sell.
I personally didn't invest in ICOs in 2017 cus I've always been afraid of loosing my money in a fake or scam project, but I was very active in bounty campaigns back then, and the first campaign which made almost made me a millionaire in my local currency was peculium, the project is still very much around today but I believe much isn't happening with it, though it was very promising back then.
I still keep tokens in the ICO because I couldn't sell them in time ^^
Currently, IEOs & IDOs are very popular and can bring great profits to investors, with safety many times higher than ICOs.
My first purchased cryptocurrency only Ethereum selling of bitcoin. I got Bitcoin and sold Bitcoin and purchased only second King coin Ethereum. But recently I hate Ethereum due to a huge amounts of Ethereum network fees.
You can transfer ETH to exchanges ready to sell them when needed. If you can choose a good time, you only need to pay a transaction fee of about $3-5.