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

$BTC +43% candle to $60k, AI narrative, memecoins

Welcome to this weekly 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 February :

• A few mid/large cap coins launched this month : $JUP, $DYM, $MAVIA, $ZETA, $STRK, $PIXEL, $PORTAL. One of the most anticipated launches, $JUP, has been mediocre, there has been no pump and it bled endlessly for days. $STRK was heavily fuded before its launch, but ended up trading above $20bn FDV, and even $30bn for a short period of time, before selling off. $DYM, $MAVIA, and $ZETA have been the ones that profited the most from the “new coins gud” meta, and pumped during their first trading days. Overall, this meta seems to be running out of steam.

• OpenAI shared this months the examples of outputs from its future text-to-video model called Sora. This announcement brought massive attention into the AI sector, and one of the largest winners has been $WLD, which closed the month with +220% gains (3x bottom to top), despite reaching a FDV close to $100bn. The fact that $WLD benefitted so much from Sora makes sense once you know that Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) is a co-founder or Worldcoin.

• Uniswap fee switch : a governance proposal has been posted and shared by the Uniswap Foundation, which sparked a +80% pump on $UNI and a short-lived “DeFi season” (2 days) on the usual DeFi 1.0 coins.

• Blast Mainnet launched on the last day of February. The TVL right now (March 5) is already $350M, but memecoins on CEX got so much attention that Blast is not really the current destination of choice for degens.

• EigenLayer, the famous restaking protocol, opened its gates without caps during a few days in early February. The $TVL increased rapidly from $2bn to $6bn and is now close to $11bn thanks to the $ETH price appreciation. All the liquid restaking protocols are also the fastest increasing TVL protocols this months. Additionally, a16z announced that they invested $100M into EigenLayer. Two examples of EigenLayer beta coins are $PENDLE and $ALT, and they both performed okay this month (+30% for $ALT and +23% for $PENDLE).

• The Ethena protocol launched in February. Their USDe stablecoin provides yield because its collateral is staked $ETH and an $ETH perp short on exchanges. The current supply of USDe is already close to $1bn.

• Solana had an outage in February that lasted a few hours. It barely affected $SOL price, but this kind of event had not happened for more than 1 year and is not great optics for the chain.

• Binance announced that they would be delisting $XMR and $MULTI, and they both took a significant hit, with more than -30% drawdowns in a day.

• Reddit announced that they have been buying $BTC, $ETH and $MATIC : this caused a very small price surge that cas quickly retraced.

Main narratives of February :

• The main narrative of the month has simply been the gigantic $BTC pump, which had one of its largest monthly candle ever with +43% gains. The main reason for that is the huge flows coming in from the $BTC ETF with a few days above $500M inflows. $BTC outperformed most altcoins on the way up, which is very impressive and rare, but it is what you’d expect based on the end of 2020 BTC run. BTC dominance went from 53% to 55%, which is BTC.D 2-year highs.

• As mentioned before, the Open AI Sora teasing sparked a new wave of interest for AI coins, and it is one of the strongest categories in February. I expect AI to remain a major narrative during the whole cycle, it is very normie-friendly, enables people to have wild dreams (’$100bn FDV no problem’), and is a long-standing trend outside of crypto.

  • $ARKM : +300%

  • $WLD : +220%

  • $AR : +216%

  • $AGI : +180%

  • $AGIX : +166%

  • $FET : +160%

  • $GPT : +150%

  • $OCEAN : +100%

  • $ORAI : +100%

  • $GLM : +80%

  • $GRT : +82%

  • $AKT : +75%

  • $RNDR : +75%

  • $NMR : +53%

• Memecoins is by far the category that had the best performance, they went completely ballistic during the last days of the month while $BTC pumped from $51k to $63k in 3 days :

  • $WIF : +230%

  • $PEPE : +200%

  • $BONK : +110%

  • $FLOKI : +95%

  • $DOGE : +50%

  • $SHIB : +40%

  • On-chain memecoins ⇒ $TRUMP : +290% and $MOG : +690%

• ERC404 is a new token standard (it is both an ERC20 and a NFT collection) launched at the beginning of the month. The first token of this standard is $PANDORA and it went from $3M market cap to $270M in a week. A few forks and beta coins launched too, but they did not really take off and only $PANDORA seems to have survived.

• Farcaster was the talk of the town in early February, after they launched their new “Frames” feature, and also after the launch of a memecoin called $DEGEN (it is not an official Farcaster memecoin). It also drove the attention of the market to Base, and there was a short-lived “Base season”.

• Gaming is another category that had strength in the beginning of the month, thanks notably to the $MAVIA meaningful pump from $2.5 to almost $10. Besides $MAVIA, we can cite $BEAM up +90%, $IMX up +65%, $SUPER up +117%, $XAI up +70%, $PRIME up +80%, and $ILV up +55%. Gaming is a narrative like AI that I expect to be dominant across the whole cycle. The 2021 “metaverse” trio also had a notably good performance : +84% for $GALA, +51% for $MANA, and +39% for $SAND.

• Bitcoin Ordinals have been extremely strong this month : the 2 winning collections seem to be NodeMonkes (0.17 BTC → 0.6 BTC in a week for the floor price) and Bitcoin Puppets (0.045 BTC → 0.22 BTC).

• As $BTC pumped so much, the beta coins obviously benefitted from it too. The most direct one, $STX, is up almost 2x in February. The leader of the BRC20, $ORDI, is up +18%, while $BCH is up +28%.

• Despite the incredible monthly performance by $BTC, $ETH managed to outperform it with +46% gains over the month. ETHBTC went from 0.0535 to the 0.06 resistance where it was brutally rejected back to 0.055. It is also noticeable that $ETH outperformed almost all of the “ETH beta coins”, and that these coins underperformed the market in February despite the fact that the Dencun upgrade is programmed for mid-March.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in February :

• $AR : +216%

• $PEPE : +200%

• $AGIX : +166%

• $FET : +160%

• $BONK : +110%

• $STX : +100%

• $FLOKI : +95%

• $BEAM : +90%

• $GALA : +84%

• $GRT : +82%

• $UNI : +80%

• $RNDR : +75%

• $KAS : +73%

• $IMX : +65%

• $ILV : +55%

• $DOGE : +50%

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

• $MOG : +690%

• $ARKM : +300%

• $TRUMP : +290%

• $WHALES : +254%

• $WIF : +230%

• $WLD : +220%

• $SUPER : +117%

• $GF : +110%

• $OCEAN : +100%

• $ONDO : +100%

• $PRIME : +80%

• $AXL : +65%