January 2024 recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch

BTC ETF approved / New coin launches / SUI

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 January :

• In January we’ve had the first huge liquidation event, on Jan 3, a few days before the ETF approval. Around $4bn of open interest have been evaporated in one hour. One interesting lesson is that the funding rate was actually a very good indicator to “predict” a liquidation cascade, because it reached its local top on January 2, where it was close to 100% annualized on $BTC. Altcoins took on average a -30% hit between their local top right before the dump and the bottom of the dump, and then they immediately bounced back to “only” a -15% dump. Have limit buy orders set to buy these liquidations, especially when the market is getting super frothy with high funding rates.

• January 9 fake ETF approval : On January 9, the SEC tweeted that the BTC ETF was approved, but Gary Gensler tweeted 15 minutes later that it was not, and that the SEC account had been compromised. This fake news let people see “a glimpse of the future”, because ETHBTC started pumping right after it, and that strength continued in the hours later, signaling that the market was finally ready to rotate from BTC into ETH.

• January 10 approval day : this was the day of the ETF approval, and basically the same thing as the day before happened, with continued strength on ETHBTC, and a very small move on $BTC on the daily chart. It looked like the ETF was fairly priced in by the market.

• January 11 : first day of trading for the ETF, immediately after the day of the approval. It was a pump-and-dump day, because $BTC reached new highs in the first 20 minutes of ETF trading (almost kissed $49k) before retracing the whole move up.

• December was very calm in terms of new launches, but January was massive. We’ve had a lot of >$1bn FDV token launches : $AI, $XAI, $ONDO, $MANTA, $ALT, and finally $JUP. Besides $JUP, they did all exhibit a similar behavior, ie a pump in the first few days of trading. Bidding new coins is usually a good strategy, but you want to take profit rather quickly, especially if a major new launch is coming, such as the $JUP one (all the “new” coins sold off before $JUP launch).

• $MKR rebranding : Maker announced that they were going to have a token migration to a new ticker, with a 1:24,000 unit redenomination, which pushed very quickly the price from $1660 to $1900 on January 2.

• The Twitter “XPayments” got set up on January 20, and it pumped the price of $DOGE by +10% in a few hours, but bled back to its initial price after 2 days. One Twitter account, ekataCT, has been posting all the news about the progress on the XPayments front by the way.

• On January 3, right after the huge market-wide liquidation event, Vitalik posted a tweet shilling ENS, and it quickly pushed $ENS +50% higher. A few days later, while all the ETH beta coins caught the attention of the market, $ENS doubled in price again, probably because it was still on everyone’s mind after Vitalik’s tweet. Don’t fade Vitalik tweets or mentions, he almost “bottom ticked” Solana around $10 in the last days of 2022 with a bullish/encouragement tweet.

• $UMA had a +165% pump in 2 days following the announcement about a MEV solution (”OEV”) for lending protocols. $UMA quickly reached a very negative funding rate (-3%/8hr!) that remained as low for around 3 days, which suggests that there was some sort of market “inefficiency” or manipulation.

Main narratives of January :

• As the month has been flat to down overall, and all the attention of the market was focused on the $BTC ETF, we have not see many major narratives. Most pumps did not last long : around 1 week instead of several weeks like during the 2023 last quarter.

• ETH beta coins had a window of strong outperformance at the beginning of the month and around the ETF approval. $ARB had a +13% month and reached a new all time high at $2.4. $LDO managed to kiss the $4 mark too. But most of the ETH beta coins severely underperformed during the second half of the month, along with the ETHBTC downtrend. As mentioned before, the best performer among ETH beta coins has been $ENS, with an almost 2X in a month. The restaking / Eigenlayer narrative also helped $PENDLE a lot (best liquid exposure to Eigenlayer in my opinion), it closed the month with an impressive +115% performance. Another Eigenlayer beta is $RSTK, up +77% in January. Finally, the last coins that can be considered as a pure Ethereum ecosystem coin is $MAV. This is probably one of the cleanest CEX coin chart you can find, and it went up +75% last month too.

• The alt L1 of the month has been $SUI. $SUI has almost doubled in a month, going from $0.78 to $1.53 at close. Sui is a Move-based blockchain like Aptos, a “high throughput low latency” new generation blockchain with the usual low float / high FDV characteristics. It definitely was one of the only top alt L1s (in FDV terms) that had not pumped during the whole last quarter ETF pump, until the first days of January. Now there is no L1 left “un-pumped”.

• $RON is up +50% this months, which is impressive in a context where most altcoins are down -10%. There are currently two main competing ecosystems in the gaming space : Ronin (Axie), and Immutable X (the token is $IMX). They are the two largest tokens in terms of FDV. I don’t really know if there was a specific catalyst for the price appreciation this month, but you can read the great thread by Eugene on $RON to know the bull case.

• $TAO, the most cultish AI coin, is up +77% this month. It is the leader of the decentralized AI narrative. I don’t really like this coin because it looks already so overvalued, but there is no ceiling on a new narrative like that with no comp. With very few major CEX listings as of now (besides Bybit perps this month!), I think $TAO is destined to go even higher. You can read this thread by ChiefingZa to have the $TAO full bullish thesis.

• Solana memecoins have been hot again this month, despite $BONK topping mid-December. The two main winners have been $WIF (+60% monthly) and $MYRO (+360%). $BONK also had a +60% dead cat bounce at the beginning of the month. Solana has now definitely become the place to be for memecoins/shitcoins, which is impressive when you know that no alt L1 was able to defeat Ethereum on this matter during the last bull run, except maybe the Binance Smart Chain at some point.

• January was a great month for Pudgy Penguins, which saw their floor price almost double from 10 ETH to 20 ETH, but is now around 16 ETH. Overall it was a fairly good month for most of the Ethereum NFT collections. The main fungible proxy for NFTs, which is $BLUR, performed very well too, with a +30% monthly candle. Its pump was also ignited by the Blast catalyst, because Blast is supposed to unlock its TVL in February.

• Did winners remain winners this month ? $SOL, $INJ, and $AVAX did all close the month in red but did not particularly underperform the altcoin market. The hot new coins managed to have another green month though : +36% for $TIA and +16% for $SEI.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers in the top 100 in January :

• $SUI : +96%

• $ENS : +84%

• $TAO : +81%

• $MAV : +76%

• $RON : +52%

• $TIA : +37%

• $FLR : +35%

• $BLUR : +31%

• $PYTH : +24%

• $CHZ : +16%

• $MKR : +16%

• $FXS : +13%

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

• $PENDLE : +115%

• $UMA : +100%

• $GEL : +66%

• $SYN : +56%

• $API3 : +35%

• $RBN : +34%

• $RLC : +33%

• $DUSK : +32%

• $SC : +29%

• $STRD : +28%

• $AKT : +14%

A few additional comments about some coins and narratives :

• $JTO and $PYTH both had a similar launch in terms of price, with first an initial push during 2 days and then continuous dumping. They also both reversed the trend in January. $JTO went from $1.5 to $2.8 and now retraced back to $1.8. $PYTH performed way better because it managed to get back to a new $ATH at $0.6 on the Binance listing news.

• $RBN went up +33% in January, probably because of the upcoming RBN → AEVO token migration. Aevo is a perp DEX platform and it will also become a full L2 on Ethereum.

• Silently, $STRD is up +30%. It is one of the best-performers of the last few months and I see it barely mentioned on my TL. Stride is a liquid staking protocol on the Cosmos ecosystem.

• Trump is now the favorite for the White House, according to prediction markets such as Polymarket. So the $TRUMP memecoin is up 6x in January !

• $DUSK, an OG ZK coin, is getting close to a multi-year breakout on its chart and it pumped +33% in January. They have announced staking to go live on February 1 and an incentivized testnet for February 15.

• One of the best-performers for January is definitely $WHALES, the token of Whales Market, an OTC DEX for trading airdrop allocations, points, and tokens. With all the protocols using points, it makes sense that $WHALES had to do well.

• Farcaster is a SocialFi protocol which is a kind of direct competitor to Twitter. It is built by Dan Romero, who was a Vice President at Coinbase and is an absolute chad. A memecoin on Base was airdropped to (some) Farcaster users, and it is called $DEGEN. It is now the de facto proxy exposure to Farcaster, and it 50x’ed in January.

• Now that the dust has settled, it is a good time to accumulate the hot projects that were pumping over the 2023 last quarter and that you did not want to fomo in while they were going vertical. The main sectors I would look at are those that have shown strength during the ETF pump : Gaming / AI / BRC20 and BTCfi / Solana ecosystem / Memecoins on new chains. You can also potentially dig into these narratives that have a lot of mindshare : DePIN / RWA / Restaking.