February 2025 recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch
Red month with uncertain macro, $LIBRA fiasco, BSC szn
Welcome to this monthly 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 Photon. Very useful, it’s night and day compared to trading on Jupiter. You can access Photon in one click via this referral link.
Main events that happened in February :
On February 21st, Bybit got hacked for around $1.5bn in $ETH by the Lasarus Group, which is a North Korean group of hackers that has been behind several of the largest cryptos hacks. It was the biggest hack in crypto history in dollar terms. The good news is that Bybit does have enough cash to fill the hole, which they very quickly announced to reassure everyone. The market sold off on the day of the Bybit hack, but it was at the same time as a dump on equities markets, so it was probably mostly due to that correlation.
The SEC has dropped almost all of its cases against crypto entities in February : Kraken, Coinbase, Robinhood, Uniswap, Consensys, Opensea, Gemini. It is obviously very good news for the all market but has not lead to any price appreciation at all.
Saylor announced a $2bn convertible bond offering on Feb 18, which was completed on Feb 24, with 0% coupon and 35% premium. On the same day, Saylor announced that the $2bn raised had already been used entirely to purchase BTC. This announcement turned out to be a good short signal, since the market has been going down only afterwards. Read my article about MicroStrategy to learn more about their playbook.
HyperLiquid announced the launch of their EVM chain, the HyperEVM, on February 18. The price spiked for a few minutes after the news, which marked the picotop of $HYPE against the altcoin market : it sold the news hard after that.
David Sacks, the new AI and crypto Czar, held a press conference on February 4th, but they announced absolutely nothing new or concrete vs what the market already knew, so it lead to a small ‘sell-the-news’ drawdown, which is what seems to always happen with these crypto events related to Trump (BTC Nashville in July, the Inauguration, the EOs, etc)
Ondo hosted its Ondo Summit on February 6 : Eric Trump has been a speaker there and the main announcement they made is the launch of Ondo Chain. Surprisingly, $ONDO did not sell the news during the event, but it’s been trading weakly vs altcoins since then. Overall, it is still trading at large valuation ($10bn FDV) in my opinion.
It was leaked that pumpfun was working on their own AMM, and this lead to a substantial dump on the price of $RAY, because until now all the bonded pumpfun coins get migrated to Raydium which gets a ton of volume from pump. $RAY went from $7 to $2.5 in a month.
CZ has been announced as a new advisor to the Vana Protocol, which lead to a +50% pump in a day.
Main narratives of February :
Red month for $BTC alongside stocks
The $BTC price action in February can be summarized in three parts : a dump in early February that is related to the tariffs news, then 20 days of a boring tight range, and then a last week of macro-correlated dump.
The main event of the past 10 days in crypto has been the announcement by Donald Trump of tariffs imposed to Canada and Mexico, which lead to a massive liquidation event in the crypto market.
The first tariff announcement was made on January 31st (a Friday) and it pushed $BTC from $105k to $102k. But as usual, the crypto market is very fragile on the weekends when there is turmoil, just like what happened exactly one week before with DeepSeek.
The concerns about tariffs kept growing during the whole weekend, and BTC as well as the whole market kept bleeding relentlessly, and this culminated right after the CME open on Sunday night (February 2), with $BTC dumping in an hour from $97k to $91k at the bottom, while altcoins got completely obliterated.
$ETH got particularly hit, as it dumped -25% in thirty minutes, from $2800 to a wick bottom at $2100. ETHBTC was looking like it marked a bottom at 0.03 in late January but it reached some news lows at… 0.0235 at the bottom of the wick !
According to Coinglass, we’ve seen around $2bn worth of liquidations on that crash, which makes it one of the largest liquidation events since 2021. No coin has been spared from the dump, with for example $XRP wicking to $1.8 (from $3) or $SUI wicking to $2.4 (from $4).
The February 3 crash was particularly bad for altcoins, with for example AI coins and memecoins getting completely destroyed. Capitulation event for altcoins, but not for BTC which was still trading right below $100k for 20 days after this dump.
But then the BTC ‘capitulation’ came during the last week of the month. We got 3 big red days in a row from Monday (Feb 24) to Wednesday (Feb 26), with $BTC dumping from $86k to $84k, alongside a stock market that has been red too. The final dump was on Friday (Feb 28), with $BTC dumping to almost $78k, and making new lows unseen since early November. This was the bottom so far though, as $BTC very quickly got back to $84k in a few hours on the same day.
Surprisingly, the altcoins have been way stronger than BTC on that correction, OTHERS/BTC actually printed 2 green days on Feb 24-25, while BTC had 2 large red candles. In the tweet below, I tried to made sense of that phenomenon : basically the strongest assets capitulate the last, and altcoins had already sold off very hard so there were not that many sellers left.
BSC szn : $TST and the $BROCCOLI pvp
On February 6, CZ posted a tweet directly linking to a token created on Four.meme which is the BSC equivalent of pump.fun : the token is literally called Test, with ticker $TST. It immediately pushed the coin from sub $1M mcap to $50M, then it cooled off to $10M before giga-pumping, first to $200M and then to $500M with a Binance listing. This was hands down one of the best altcoin opportunities in February.
This TST pump igniting a new ‘BSC season’, especially on-chain, with a lot of BSC coins moving double digits after that. The main one has been $CAKE, the token of the main BSC dex, which had +130% gains in 5 days before pulling back. $BNB also moved +25% in 5 days, which is significant for a coin of this size.
CZ teased the fact that he would announce the name of his dog on February 13. He gave an exact timing for the tweet which lead to an extremely PvP event as hundreds of people tried to launch $BROCCOLI coins when that tweet went out…
Now, 3 weeks later, there is still no clear winner, as at least 3 BROCCOLI coins are candidate to be ‘the real one’. Binance Alpha listed the three coins, which means that they might not even choose the winner…
The launch of these BROCCOLI coins was also accompanied by a sell-off on all BNB-related coins, and in my opinion, it probably was not a good move by CZ to tweet that thing. One of the new coins that emerged from this BSC szn has been $CAPTAINBNB, a memecoin that ran from essentially 0 to $65M mcap and has now pulled back to $15M.
Sonic $S strength
One of the large cap coins that has been showing the most strength in February has been $S, the coin of the Sonic Network, which is the rebranded version of $FTM. FTM/S completely sold the news when that migration happened, with the coin drawing down from $1.4 at the top to a bottom below $0.4 post-migration… This bottom was really ‘low’ price-wise in my opinion, and we’ve seen tremendous strength after that, with $S going almost to $1 on Feb 21.
The main new coin of the ‘new’ ecosystem is $SHADOW, the coin of the main DEX on Sonic, and it basically went up 25x over 3 weeks. I have also heard that there was an incentive program on Sonic which means that the yields are interesting there.
New coins gud ?
A category that has been able to do well this month is the very new coins, especially during the second half of the month, where the ‘short every new launch as they are a free lunch’ meta reversed :
$BERA launched on February 6. Berachain is an alt L1 focused on attracting the most liquidity and TVL on its chain, and some people have been shilling it on CT for years now. It took a nosedive after the launch and dumped from $7bn FDV to as low as $2.5bn FDV but it then stabilized and pumped to a top at $4.5bn FDV.
$IP is the coin of the Story Protocol L1, which is the “world’s IP blockchain”. I don’t exactly know that means but they have strong backing and are at least good at marketing. This coin was the most impressive squeeze this month as it went from $1.5 to a top of the wick at $9, and then stabilized around $6 (bn FDV).
$KAITO launched on February 20, and it barely dumped before immediately squeezing higher. In a week, it went from $1bn FDV to $3bn FDV.
$LAYER (the coin of Solayer, which is a Solana VM chain) immediately dumped -50% post launch and then reversed the whole dump to squeeze the shorts to $1.5bn FDV, before slow bleeding down to $600M, where it bottomed out. It has been slowly grinding up higher since then.
The $LIBRA fiasco, the deathblow for the Solana trenches
One of the infamous main events of February on-chain has been the launch of $LIBRA, a ‘country memecoin’ for Argentina, which was announced by Javier Milei himself on Twitter. It went from $1bn FDV to $4.5bn FDV in around 45 minutes, but then dumped straight back down to sub $1bn FDV in one hour. I don’t even remember what was the exact catalyst that lead everyone to realize that this coin was a complete grift, but I think something like the team pulling out a lot of liquidity out at the top.
Milei deleted the tweet where he announced the launch of $LIBRA, and it was later revealed that the team behind the launch of LIBRA was ‘Kelsier Ventures’, which extracted $100M out of this LIBRA launch (they sniped their own token) and which is the same team that launched MELANIA.
This LIBRA launch was the icing on the cake of the overall sentiment in crypto towards the trenches and memecoins, which was going worse and worse, as people are having the feeling that there is now nothing else besides extraction going on. Teams of grifters, insiders, and snipers eat, everyone else loses all their money very quickly, and the game is rigged.
On February 4, the $ENRON coin launched, and it has basically been going down only since launch. On February 10, the Central African Republic announced the launch of their official memecoin $CAR, it went to $900M mcap and then down to $30M in a day. Dave Portnoy also became involved in memecoins in February, and he pumped ‘his’ $JAILSTOOL meme to $200M. He pumped-and-dumped several memes to his millions of followers, becoming a clear embodiment of the disgust people have had towards the trenches.
This sentiment lead to a very bearish reaction towards the whole Solana ecosystem (which is where all these memecoin launches / extraction events happen), and it was reflected on $SOL price, which went down from $200 to $130 in two weeks.
What else happened in the market ?
The $TRUMP coin has been essentially down only since its top, it started February at $24 and then went to $15 but squeezed hard to $24 on February 14… before heading back down to a low at $11.
$MKR has been underperforming severely since the Sky rebranding, and is down only vs OTHERS since late July. But this has finally stopped in February, as MKR has been showing strength lately, with a bottoming below $1000 that resulted in a pump to $1800 in ten days. There is a significant buyback program going on on $MKR, so the P/E enjoyoors are currently hyped about $MKR. Some people are also betting on the fact that people will go back to ‘fundamentals’ now that the memecoin craze seems tired.
$GRASS is one of the few AI coins that seems to have strong fundamentals, and it has been performing spectacularly well vs the market, as it went up more than 2x from bottom to top in February.
$TNSR has been a very silent outperformer, but it went up 2x vs the market in a month. The reason for this strength is that the Tensor team also develops Vector .fun, which is a social trading app that is generating significant revenue.
$OM (Mantra, a RWA coin) has been completely defying gravity. It is up +40% in February, while the market has been going down. It is also up an astonishing 400x since its 2023 bottom prices, one of the greatest liquid returns in the market. I can’t explain how they managed to do that, but there is definitely some manipulation going on on that coin.
Best-performer list :
Best-performers among large caps in February :
OM : +41%
MKR : +38%
GRASS : +33%
S : +19%
CAKE : 0%
LTC : 0%
TIA : -6%
XMR : -8%
TRX : -8%
Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in February :
BNX : +364%
TNSR : +18%
ACT : +12%
GLM : +9%
OHM : +5%
PNUT : +4%
ALEO : +2%
And even smaller ones :
TST : $10M → $500M (at the top)
SHADOW : $2M → $50M mcap (at the top)
KET : +200%
CLANKER : +170%
BAN : +80%
TARA : +35%
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.
Ref link shill : The sniper I use to trade coins on Solana is Photon. Very useful, it’s night and day compared to trading on Jupiter. You can access Photon in one click via this referral link.