January 2025 recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch
$TRUMP launch, new ATH for BTC/XRP/SOL/SUI but mixed month for alts
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 January :
The main event of the month has been the combo of the $TRUMP coin launch, followed by the $MELANIA coin launch, followed by the inauguration, but I will cover these topics in more details in the next section.
There have been three main ‘CEX coin’ launches on Binance in January : $BIO (main DeSci protocol), $SONIC (gaming L2 on Solana ?) and $ANIME (the coin of the Azuki ecosystem). All of them are basically down only since their TGE. Same thing for $VVV, and AI project by Erik Voorhees that is down -65% since its Coinbase listing.
On December 31st, Elon changed his Twitter name and pfp to ‘Kekius Maximus’, which pumped the $KEKIUS memecoin from $1M to $400M mcap, before he inevitably switched back to his usual name/pfp on Jan 1st, and $KEKIUS dumped to $80M, and closed the month at $40M mcap.
The Base memecoin $TOSHI has been listed on Base on January 14, it immediately led to a 2x pump, and then a few days later, the price went absolutely crazy, pumping almost 8x in 3 days with very negative funding rates, before dumping -40% from yesterday’s peak price. This move also ignited strong pumps on other Base memecoins, such as $MIGGLES, $BENJI, $KEYCAT, $DOGINME, $MOCHI.
The L2 by the Pudgy Penguins team, Abstract has been launched on January 28, and it resulted it significant news selling on $PENGU, down -44% in two days.
CME is going to launch $XRP and $SOL futures on February 10, and that is a clear advancement on the path towards the launch of ETFs on these two coins. The news got announced on January 22, and it lead to pumps that quickly got retraced, which indicated weakness in the market.
On the ETF news front, Bitwise also filed for a $DOGE ETF on January 21, and for a $LTC ETF on January 24. The news got faded on $DOGE but $LTC has been very strong after the filing.
During the weekend of Jan 26, the whole tech world started freaking out about DeepSeek, a Chinese AI start-up that has launched a cost-effective AI model that's challenging industry giants by achieving comparable performance with significantly less resources. This lead to a significant dump in tradfi when the pre-market opened, and an immediate dump on $BTC (and even more on altcoins) at the CME open. $NVDA dumped -17% on the Monday (Jan 27) while $BTC dumped from $105k to $98k in a few hours.
Thorchain ($RUNE) faced technical insolvency with $200M in BTC/ETH liabilities, leading to a pause on all lending and savings operations. $RUNE is down -52% over the month of January as a consequence, and the community is trying to find solutions for a recovery.
Main narratives of January :
Inauguration and a news-driven / Trump-driven price action for $BTC
The price of $BTC has been very news-driven in January. It started the month with strong price action, and even squeezed up on the first Monday NYO of the year (Jan 6), to $102k. But good job data came out on Jan 7, which suggested that there would be less need for rate cuts, and that immediately lead the price of BTC to collapse below $100k, and even to $92k on January 10. We bottomed for the month on Monday 13 with wick right below $90k before a strong pump to $100k in two days, and then to $106k on Jan 19, a day before the inauguration.
On that day, the $MELANIA coin launched which pushed $BTC down to sub $90k, but we made a new ATH at $109k a few hours before the inauguration. Basically the playbook for that day and the following days has always been the same : $BTC pumps leading to an event as price insensitive buyers think ‘what if a SBR is announced ?’ and then it bleeds down when people realize that no SBR is announced.
What we finally got is a crypto executive order signed on January 23. Basically the EO creates a Digital Working Group that has the task of “recommending regulatory and legislative proposals” about crypto. One of these recommendations specifically is about “the potential creation and maintenance of a national digital asset stockpile”.
The initial knee-jerk reaction from the market was that this was bullish and especially for altcoins, since they could be included in the stockpile, but then the price stalled, as people realized that this was far from being a true SBR, and that now we would have to wait months before having significant advancements on that front.
As I wrote it in the ‘event’ section, $BTC dumped on the DeepSeek news on Monday 27, but then curled back up to $106k, and finally closed the month at $102k, with a +10% green monthly candle (versus a red candle for most altcoins… BTC dominance keeps going up).
The $TRUMP and $MELANIA coin launches
On January 18, Donald Trump shocked everyone by announcing the launch of his official memecoin on Solana. Initially thought to be a hack, it was real, and $TRUMP turned into a liquidity blackhole, skyrocketing from $1bn FDV to nearly $30bn in 12 hours as traders dumped other memecoins to ape in. The tokenomics are terrible—80% insider allocation—yet $TRUMP hit $75bn FDV on January 19, fueled by short sellers.
Then came $MELANIA on January 19 evening, crashing $TRUMP by -50% in 3 hours and tanking the market. $BTC dropped below $100k, and $SOL fell to $230 (from almost $300 just a few hours before…). $MELANIA surged briefly to $13bn FDV but collapsed to under $4 within a day.
Both $TRUMP and $MELANIA kept bleeding until the end of the month ($48 → $21 for TRUMP and $4 → $1.5 for $MELANIA). I don’t recommend holding these coins with terrible tokenomics.
$XRP new ATH at $340bn FDV and the USA coins narrative
On January 16, a NY Post article stated that Trump was potentially interested in making a strategic reserve made of American ‘digital coins’, which was obviously stupid and unlikely, but it pushed up a lot of ‘USA coins’ such as $XRP, $HBAR, $XLM. XRP and HBAR both made new cycle highs on that news. $XRP reached a top at $3.4 which corresponds to $340bn FDV…
XRP has made lower highs since then, but it definitely remains one of the most impressive coins of the market in terms of strength, especially given its size. I think its upside is quite limited now, though.
SOL to a new $295 ATH
The biggest winner of that $TRUMP memecoin saga is Solana and its ecosystem. $SOL pumped massively after the launch, reaching a new ATH price of $295. SOLETH also reached new highs at 0.09. $SOL got back to $230 at the end of the month, but it remains the ecosystem with the most momentum right now. The other coins of the ecosystem that did well after the launch were the DEX coins, $JUP and $RAY.
It was a big month for Jupiter, the DEX aggregator on Solana that is among the most used apps on Solana. They launched their second airdrop campaign (go claim your airdrop if you are eligible!), then announced that they acquired Moonshot (a mobile app where users can buy Solana on-chain memecoins seamlessly), and then they announced that 50% of the fees they collect will be redistributed back to the $JUP token holders.
$SUI new ATH at $54bn FDV before trend reversal
$SUI has been a relentless winner in this market since early August, and that remained true until early January where it reached a new ATH at $54bn FDV. But it started losing stream afterwards, and on January 20 it lost its 50D moving average which had not happened since September, and was suggesting a trend reversal. This was confirmed in the following days, as it kissed $3.5 on the end of month dump (Jan 27).
$FARTCOIN strongest memecoin of the month
FARTCOIN has been the strongest memecoin of the month. When the TRUMP coin launched and every memecoin dumped hard, $FARTCOIN is the one that bounced the most strongly after that. The days that followed completely confirmed this strength, with FARTCOIN pumping from $1.5bn to a top at $2.75bn market cap right before the inauguraution. FARTCOIN is really the volatility coin, it exacerbates every move up or down. It is now massively down from the top and stands around $700M mcap with a -75% drawdown.
$VINE and $JELLYJELLY : new trend ?
The founder of Vine, which is in some way the ancestor of TikTok, has launched his own $VINE memecoin. It quickly attracted a lot of volume and pumped to almost $500M mcap, but then dumped to $100M before pumping back to $400M. One of the reasons for the strength of this coin is that people are speculating that Twitter will revive Vine into the app, which is what Rus has been asking for, and what a few X employees alluded to. I tend to think that it is almost impossible that this happens, and people are buying a bullshit narrative that Rus probably does not believe himself.
The launch of VINE could mark the beginning a new meta which is traditional web2 founders/companies launching memecoins as a way to raise funds and get attention on what they built : this happened a few days ago with the launch of $JELLYJELLY, a memecoin ‘related’ to the Jelly Jelly app that a Venmo co-founder launched. The JELLYJELLY coin reached $250M mcap in a few hours but has been trending down since then and is now -90% lower.
New ATH for Murad coins
The two main Murad coins, $SPX and $GIGA, have made a huge comeback in January. $GIGA reached a new ATH at almost $1bn market cap, while $SPX broke out above the $1bn resistance, and topped at $1.75bn mcap after the $TRUMP launch.
Both $SPX and $GIGA are significantly down from their tops but their drawdowns are actually much more muted compared to most memecoins.
AI agents and memecoins decimated
Most memecoins have been struggling a lot in January, with $WIF going down from $2.2 to $1, or $POPCAT going from $1 to $0.32. Many of the hot memecoins of the past months are down -90% or more (GOAT, PNUT, CHILLGUY, NEIRO, MOODENG, FWOG), the sector has been completely washed out.
AI coins have also gone through a very harsh month with similar drawdowns, after the whole AI agent sector culminated in early Jan (VIRTUAL at $5bn mcap, AI16Z at $2.5bn). They have been consistently the worst performers since that top, even if some other AI coins topped later, such as $ARC ($600M), $GRIFFAIN ($600M), $AVA ($320M) or $PIPPIN ($300M).
Best-performer list :
Best-performers among large caps in January :
XRP : +46%
RAY : +45%
OM : +39%
LDO : +32%
JUP : +27%
LINK : +26%
XLM : +25%
LTC : +24%
XMR : +24%
SOL : +22%
HBAR : +14%
HYPE : +12%
ONDO : +11%
AAVE : +8%
Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in January :
XCN : x14
TOSHI : +720%
DEEP : +175%
GT : +43%
SPX : +38%
KCS : +33%
CULT : +27%
MOCHI : +317%
BENJI : +178%
DOGINME : +171%
USA : $15M → $320M → $20M
UFD : $60M → $400M (at the top)
MUSKIT : $10M → $400M → $25M
MLG : $3M → $160M (top)
LLM : $1M → $120M (top)
BUTTHOLE : $1M → $120M (top)
ALON : $1M → $250M → $6M
PIPPIN : $7M → $320M (top)
SWARMS : $80M → $600M → $60M
BUZZ : $20M → $180M (top)
ANON : $15M → $300M (top)
AVA : $50M → $320M (top)
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.
Ref link shill : You can trade memecoins on perps on OX.fun with this referral link or the code VIKTOR.