April 2025 recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch
Liberation Day, $75K double bottom, $94k reclaim, AI agents / SUI / TRUMP pumps
Welcome to this weekly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !
Ref link shill : The sniper I use to trade coins on Solana is Axiom. Very useful, it’s night and day compared to trading on Jupiter. You can access Axiom in one click via this referral link.
Main events that happened in April :
On April 23, the Trump memecoin team has announced that there would be a private dinner with Trump organized on May 22 for the 220 largest holders of $TRUMP tokens. It lead to a very huge pump on $TRUMP from $9 to around $15. A few days later, it topped at $16.5bn FDV, but has been going down since then. I have a bearish view on that token.
A lot of new coins keep getting launched each month. In April, we’ve had : $PROMPT (Wayfinder, AI coin), $BABY (Babylon, Bitcoin restaking project), $WCT (Wallet Connect Token), $INIT (Initia, a new alt L1), $ZORA (a Base SocialFi project / memecoin launchpad), $SIGN. A few of them squeezed right after launch, but overall they did not have very noticeable moves.
$ALPACA is a micro cap ($6M MC one month ago) which got delisted from Binance and Bybit perps on April 24 and instead of dumping, it started squeezing shorts very aggressively, it pumped 8x in two days, then had a -75% dump before 16x’ing again. It basically went up 30x between the time it got delisted and its top a few days later, this is the absolute ruthless illustration of the PvP situations that can get you rekt on perps. Write down this example somewhere to remember what a “worst case short squeeze” can look like.
$OM (Mantra) is a RWA token that reached an insanely high valuation ($16bn FDV at the top), and was a bubble waiting to burst, which is exactly what happened with a -90% dump in two hours on April 13. You can watch the interview of the CEO of OM with CoffeeZilla to learn more about this.
On April 25, $BONK announced the launch of their memecoin launchpad called letsbonkfun, and it had a sizable impact on price, with a +20% pump in a day, and overall +73% monthly gains for the token.
$AERGO is a dead small cap from 2018 which had a short squeeze and pumped 13x ($25M → $300M mcap) in ten days, before dumping -75% in six hours.
On April 28, $XMR started pumping very hard to more than +40% gains in a few hours, and it turns out that a whale got hacked for $300M worth of $BTC and the hacker quickly swapped it all to $XMR.
Main narratives of April :
Liberation Day and trade tariffs crippled the market
The most important topic in crypto in April has been the macro picture and traditional markets, and more specifically the trade tariffs by Trump and their impact.
Donald Trump announced its tariff list for every country on Liberation Day on April 2, and as they were way higher than people expected, it immediately lead to a market sell-off (this announcement was a great short), which culminated for $BTC with a $75k double bottom on April 7 and April 9 (down -15% in a few days), and an SPX bottom at almost 4800, down more than -20% from the top.
On April 9, Trump announced a 90-day pause on all tariffs for all countries (reduced to 10% baseline) except China, and it had a very strong impact on the S&P 500, which pumped around +10% on that day. $BTC almost pumped from $77k to $83k in a few hours, and then ranged around $84k for about 10 days, before ending the month with significant strength, as it pumped to another range around $95k. The S&P has also been slowly grinding up during the second half of April, as a consequence of the market perception that the tariff talk went softer and that negotiations were going on.
Given the fact that the tariff situation is far from resolved and will probably have an impact on the economy, I think buying the S&P around 5600 does not offer a good r/r and I expect it a the very least to chop. This implies a headwind for $BTC, but it has been showing an interesting behaviour in April that makes me constructive on BTC : it has been having a very noticeable relative strength vs the SPX, and the BTC/SPX ratio keeps making higher lows since late February. BTC is now trading like a mix between equities and gold, and gold has been on an absolute tear lately, as it pumped to 3500 after having opened the year at 2600. Very impressive growth for an international neutral store of value asset, just like $BTC.
Saylor and the MSTR playbook are bullish for BTC
$BTC also benefits from the fact that Saylor keeps buying weekly. He bought $2.3bn worth of BTC in April, and the mNAV premium is now chilling at 2, which is impressive. As long as the mNAV remains this elevated, Saylor can keep buying through the ATM, ie selling MSTR to buy BTC. They announced a new $21bn ATM program during their last earnings call, and they also seem determined to keep growing their fixed income products such as the two preferred stocks $STRK and $STRF.
In the same time, there are more and more companies adopting the “Saylor playbook”, not only on $BTC but also on $SOL or other assets (no comments…), and I think this trend will simply keep growing. Cantor announced that it would partner with Softbank, Tether and Bitfinex to create a multibillion-dollar bitcoin acquisition vehicle, that will be name Twenty One and that will basically do the same thing as (Micro)Strategy. You might consider that all of this sounds like a bubble and is bearish, I very much disagree with this point of view, at least in the short-term : there is still a lot of room for the BTC treasury companies to grow, and the first step is more BTC being purchased in the month to come.
The BTC ETFs have also been net buyers in April, especially during the second half where there were several days with $500M+ inflows.
Bear market PvP conditions
The first third of April was marked by the tariff concerns and market bottom, then the second third has been pure bear market conditions : altcoins were mostly bleeding vs BTC, and there were absolutely no altcoin “narratives” showing life in the market. The only thing that happened were several PvP short squeezes from irrelevant dead coins and small caps, such as what happened with AERGO, or the pumps we had on MANEKI, AIDOGE, LUCE which all dumped together at the same exact minute on April 18. Or the -90% dump we had on $OM… That is typical of a market that is not healthy at all.
Uptrend at the end of the month
But the third third of the month has been surprisingly strong for the markets despite these conditions, as the BTC pump from $84k to $95k gave some juice to altcoins again.
Three categories seem to have profited the most from this pump :
AI agent coins : Many of these coins went up between 2x and 4x, and this happened after the conviction of everyone holding them has been destroyed with gigantic drawdowns. $AI16Z went up 3x from its bottom, 5x for $AVA, +150% for $ARC, and 5x for $ZEREBRO after a massive short squeeze. The most noticeable one is probably $VIRTUAL though, which managed to pump from $450M to $1.8bn mcap, thanks to its new genesis points system, which adds a new “flywheel” element into the token. I think the r/r is quite bad on the long side here now, but this strength has been impressive.
Memecoins : the second category that pumped the most is memecoins, especially some specific ones like $SPX (one of the smallest drawdowns from top among all memecoins), $BRETT (up 3x), $TURBO (up 4x bottom to top) and $NEIROETH (up 5x). Among larger ones, $POPCAT, $PENGU and $WIF have all been strong.
$SUI and its ecosystem : $SUI pumped almost 2x in a week from $2 to almost $4, which brought it to almost $40bn FDV again. One of the reasons for this strength could be the rumors about Pokemon launching on Sui. I would never long this coin at this valuation, but trading it on low timeframe can be great when it’s showing strength in an uptrend. Other Sui ecosystem coins pumped a lot too, such as $DEEP or $WAL.
Additional comments :
The altcoin that has been shining the most in April has been $FARTCOIN. It opened the month at $400M mcap, and pumped to $1.2bn. It is one of the coins with the most mindshare, and this tells you a lot about the complete lack of narratives and hope in the altcoin market. It has also become a very consensus position, so the r/r on the long side has decreased now.
One of the recently launched coins that has been defying gravity is Solayer, a restaking protocol based on the SVM. It went from $1.5bn FDV to $3.2bn FDV over April, by just permanently grinding up and trapping shorts.
An altcoin that has been consistently strong and considered as one of the only investable tokens in the market is $HYPE : it basically 2x’d from its bottom below $10 in early April, to more than $20. Personally I don’t think the r/r is interesting now above $20bn FDV for HYPE, but at least you know that you are definitely not buying vaporware with this asset.
$SOL has been surprisingly strong in April, it bottomed at $95 on the April 7 bottom, and then went as high as $156 three weeks later. This lead SOLETH to pump almost +40% in 20 days, reaching new highs on the ratio in terms of daily closes (ie excluding the TRUMP launch wick on the chart).
Another major altcoin that has been noticeably strong in April is $TAO (Bittensor), up +130% bottom to top in April. I am not deep into the weeds on TAO, but it’s pretty clear that they are one of the rare projects that managed to gather a cult-like community. The market cap of the Tao subnets has been in a bull market recently, which can explain the positive feedback loop leading to a $TAO pump.
ETHBTC broke the 0.02 level in early April, and then reached new lows below 0.018 in April, but it only lasted a few hours, and overall the ratio has stabilized around 0.019.
Best-performer list :
Best-performers among large caps in April :
VIRTUAL : +167%
FARTCOIN : +175%
TAO : +59%
HYPE : +54%
BONK : +73%
FET : +63%
KAS : +39%
CRV : +42%
SUI : +55%
RNDR : +31%
WLD : +47%
STX : +35%
TRUMP : +32%
Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in April :
DEEP : +213%
TURBO : +134%
POPCAT : +110%
LAYER : +110%
BRETT : +107%
PENGU : +105%
XCN : +95%
AIOZ : +71%
AI16Z : +68%
DOG : +63%
KDA : +59%
And even smaller ones :
HOUSE : +2200%
ALPACA : +970%
VADER : +518%
MEMEFI : +295%
REI : +270%
GAME : +257%
AERGO : +200%
LOFI : +176%
JELLYJELLY : +130%
AVA : +66%
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.
Ref link shill : The sniper I use to trade coins on Solana is Axiom. Very useful, it’s night and day compared to trading on Jupiter. You can access Axiom in one click via this referral link.