December recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch

$100k BTC break, AI agents, HYPE, FARTCOIN

Welcome to this monthly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !

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Main events that happened in December :

• There have been a few liquidation cascades in December : the first one was on December 5 and it was very much BTC-centric. $BTC dumped in a few minutes from $98K to $91k and the immediately bounced very strongly. The altcoins barely dumped on that move, which cemented the false idea that they were strong, but they were actually just lagging, since they also suffered a liquidation cascade a few days later, on December 9.

• The FOMC on December 18 was another bearish event : Powell announced a 25bps rate cut as expected by the market, but he also said that they would decrease the pace of rate cuts for 2025, which was interpreted as short-term risk-off signal by the market on both equities and crypto. $BTC sold off on that evening from $105k to $100k and then to $92k on December 20.

• The launch of the Sonic Network (= Fantom rebranding) and the announcement by CEXes of the delisting of $FTM (but $S will be listed 3 days after the delisting) were a very strong sell the news event, with $FTM going from $1.4 to $1 and then to $0.66 where it bounced.

• Coinbase went on a memecoin listing spree in December, as they announced on December 3 the listing of $MOODENG, followed one day later by $MOG, and then $GIGA and $TURBO. Obviously the strongest impact has been on $MOODENG with a +120% pump in 2 hours, but it has been killed after the GIGA/TURBO listing because MOODENG had nothing special after that. A few days later, they also announced the listing of $PNUT.

• On December 13, it was announced that $MSTR would join the Nasdaq index. It sparked a small pump on BTC and MSTR, but it’s especially bullish on a longer timeframe, as it means that a part of the passive cash flows coming into the stock ETFs in the US will now be used to buy MSTR, ie BTC indirectly.

• The CEO of Aptos, Mo Shaikh, announced on December 20 that he was stepping down to work on something else. It was a good short signal for $APT which went down -20% vs BTC in two days.

• In early December, Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Paul Atkins as the next chairman of the SEC. Given the fact that Atkins was an advisor to the Reserve Protocol, the rumours and then the nomination pushed the $RSR token to 3x in two days.

• The most anticipated launch of December has been $PENGU, which is the memecoin related to the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection. It did not move too much price wise, but seems to have bottomed around $2bn FDV and has been making higher lows since then.

• The other coin launches of December have been $MOVE, $USUAL, $FUEL, $XION and $VANA. Movement is a Move-VM L2, it bottomed at $0.6 before 2x’ing. Usual is a stablecoin project that leverages RWA to get a high yield, $USUAL immediately pumped after launch but has been ranging since then. Fuel Network is a Fuel-VM L2, it bottomed at $0.4 before 2x’ing, and I think it is still undervalued.

• $UXLINK is a strange coin that seems to be very traded in Korea, and that has one of the scammiest price actions I have ever seen. It had a gigantic squeeze on December 25 as it went up +140% in a day before retracing most of the move in a day again.

Main narratives of December :

$BTC and the market overall

$BTC was right below $100k at the beginning of the month ($97k), and it broke the $100k resistance on December 5, immediately pumped to $105k but then retraced below $100k before reaching a new ATH at $108k. Then we had the FOMC on December 18 and a strong dump on the whole market during 3 days, before a period of consolidation between Christmas and NYE. The altcoins have been very bullish during the first 10 days of the month, but then struggled as well in the second half.

AI agents

AI agents have been by far the most dominant narrative of the month, with the infrastructure projects taking the lead instead of $GOAT which started struggling.

The leader of the category in terms of market cap is now $VIRTUAL, which is an infrastructure project on Base that enables people to launch AI agents. $VIRTUAL pumped from $1.5bn mcap to $5bn. Virtuals is now a whole ecosystem, and the biggest AI agent in that ecosystem is $AIXBT, a Twitter shitposter that shills crypto projects, that also 3x’d from $300M to more than $600M mcap. The second largest is $GAME which almost reached $400M, then there are also $LUNA ($150M top), $VADER ($120M), $AIXCB, $CONVO, etc.

On Solana, the main competitor to Virtuals is $AI16Z, and it also had an impressive run from $300M to $2.5bn mcap. There are now 10s of AI agent projects, but let me just mention the other large ones and their market cap top : $ZEREBRO ($800M), $GRIFFAIN ($480M), $ARC ($430M).

$FARTCOIN

One token that appeared with the AI agent meta but that mostly became a pure memecoin is $FARTCOIN. It pumped from $200bn to $1.3bn market cap.

Fartcoin has been mentioned a lot by tradfi and media accounts because it usually generates a lot of engagement. The absurdity of such a coin reaching a very large market cap makes it very prone to have media coverage, which of course fuels the pump.

It was listed on Binance Futures and that marked a top, it then dumped to $0.6 but bounced very strongly to get back to its previous $1.3 ATH again.

HyperLiquid

$HYPE has been one of the most important single coin this month, it started the month at $9 and reached $35 on December 21, after a linear uptrend without relief. $35 means $35bn FDV, so $HYPE went from $3bn to $35bn FDV in less than a month after its launch, one of the most impressive moves I have ever seen on a new coin.

The corresponding market cap at its top was almost $12bn, and it’s not surprising that it slowly went down during the remaining of the month, closing the year at $24bn FDV.

Most of the other Hyperliquid ecosystem plays did very well in December too : $PURR reached $400M mcap, $PIP reached $80M mcap, $HFUN pumped from $30M to $300M, $VAPOR from $5M to $150M, etc.

Dino coins and $XRP to almost $300bn FDV

The month of December began with the final leg of the dino coins pump which started in November and was absolutely massive.

$XRP opened the month at $2 and peaked at $2.9 on December 3. This corresponds to the absurd FDV of almost $300bn… $HBAR pumped in early December from $6.5bn Mcap to $15bn.

The other dino coins that pumped in early December are $ADA, $ALGO, $VET (+80% in 4 days), $IOTA (+140% in 3 days).

$TRX also had an absolutely insane move with an almost 2x move from $20bn to $40bn market cap in a single day, which was followed by a sharp decline.

DeFi coins and the Trump trade

The rotation that immediately followed the dino pump was the DeFi coins : $CRV 6X’d from earl November to early December, $UNI 3x’d, $COMP almost 4x’d, $FXS 3x’d, $CVX almost 6X’d.

$ONDO also pumped massively on December 3, from $1.2 to $1.8, before reaching an ATH at $2.1 a few days later. It is not too surprising given the fact that RWA is a great candidate to be a normie-friendly narrative.

There was another batch of ‘DeFi coins’ that have been strong over the month partly thanks to their association with WorldLibertyFi, the RWA project of Donald Trump : the protocol has been accumulating directly on-chain $AAVE, $ENA, and $LINK tokens. And that made them all pump. $SCR also benefitted from the Trump trade because WLFI will apparently only launch on mainnet and on Scroll.

Metaverse

The metaverse coins got a strong pump in early December, which was the second leg of the pump that began in November. The multiples bottom to top have been quite impressive despite low mindshare : 5X for $SAND, +230% for $MANA, 4x for $GALA, +140% for $AXS.

NFTs

The NFTs have been revived by the $PENGU airdrop, with the Pudgy Penguins price pumping hard before the drop, and all the other major collections following that strength. The Pudgy Penguins pumped from 13 ETH to 35 ETH right before the launch (closing the month at 22ETH), BAYC pumped from 12 ETH to 23 ETH at the top, Azuki from 5 ETH to 12 ETH.

$SUI

$SUI remained unstoppable in December. Each time you think it has topped, it will surprise you with a huge green candle. $SUI has been rejected a few times right below the $5 resistance, but it started the month at $3.5. $5 corresponds to $50bn FDV, which seems very very high, but SUI has been defying gravity for months now.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in December :

• AI16Z : +510%

• BGB : +270%

• HYPE : +180%

• VIRTUAL : +120%

• HBAR : +58%

• GT : +46%

• AAVE : +46%

• MNT : +38%

• PEAQ : +34%

• CRV : +31%

• RSR : +34%

• SUI : +18%

Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in December :

• WOULD : 300X

• FAI : +950%

• GAME : +600%

• FARTCOIN : +250%

• AIXBT : +217%

• MOCA : +195%

• SUPRA : +194%

• MORPHO : +130%

• PHA : +125%

• UXLINK : +120%

• ZEREBRO : +73%

• SPX : +22%

• GIGA : +20%

And even smaller ones :

• TRISIG : +3900%

• SEND : +3700%

• AKUMA : +2600%

• APW : +1000%

• KEKIUS : $1M → $400M MC

• REI : +828%

• ELIZA : +493%

• FXN : +466%

• DEGENAI : +375%

• GNON : +370%

• HFUN : +360%

• COOKIE : +333%

• LOFI : +258%

• SKI : +224%

• VADER : +207%

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.