July recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch
Breakdown of range, reclaim, and higher low at $70K, $ETH underperformed while ETFs launched
Welcome to this monthly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !
BTC : 4-month range breakdown then reclaim, and final spike to the $70k resistance
$BTC opened the month with 5 brutal days of down trend, that ended with range breakdown and a capitulation (on altcoins and on BTC) on July 5 to as low as $53.5k. It is likely that this dump had to happen simply because of the off-positioning of market participants, but the main FUD at the time was that the German government was selling the 50k $BTC that they had seized a few years before.
$BTC then ranged for a few days between $54k and $58k, and on July 13, Donald Trump got shot at one of his meetings, which ignited a strong pump on $BTC for a few days, along with the odds of Trump winning the election. In one week, $BTC basically pumped to $68k with not many dips. This happened while Mt. Gox was starting to distribute $BTC to creditors, and this represented a few billion dollar worth of $BTC. It did not substantially affect the price of BTC, which was considered as very bullish.
On July 27, Trump made a speech at the bitcoin conference in Nashville, and there were rumors about him announcing the launch of BTC strategic reserve if he gets elected again. This caused a lot of FOMO in the market, and BTC went above 69K a few hours before the speech. It sort of sold the news during the speech, but Trump ended up mentioning a “strategic stockpile”, which was seen as quite bullish.
What happened after that is that OI went up non-stop while $BTC was approaching $70k (textbook recipe for disaster but what if ‘this time was different ?’ heh), it tapped $70k during literally a second before selling off back to $66K in a few hours. It closed the month at $65K, and we now know that the dump continued to below $50k in early August, but that will be covered in the next monthly recap.
ETH ETFs launched, a flop in terms of price
$ETH mostly followed $BTC during the first half of July, while also slightly underperforming it. The ETH ETFs launched on July 23, and while volumes have not been particularly disappointing compared to expectations, we’ve had a lot of ETHE outflows everyday after launch, and ETHBTC plunged to 0.048 on the second and third day of ETF trading. $ETH closed the month at $3230 after an overall disappointing ETF launch.
Most of the direct ETH beta coins have been underperforming the market too in July.
$SOL and its ecosystem outperforming
While ETH performance has been meh, $SOL has been the exact opposite. It outperformed the market during the whole month, it went up more than +50% from bottom to the $193 near the end of July.
SOLETH got close to ATH and reached the resistance where it had already been rejected 3 times, in March, April and then May. $JUP seems to be the most direct beta to $SOL, and the other best performers in that ecosystem included : $PYTH, $JTO, $RAY, $HNT.
3 cat coins leading : $POPCAT, $MOG and $MEW
Cat coins have become the highest beta coins in the market in July : $MOG and $POPCAT have become the new ‘PEPE and WIF’ and were always the best performers on the moves up. They both reached a new ATH and went close to $1bn market cap. $MEW also joined the party to become the 3rd most important cat coin with an almost 3x pump bottom to top.
Dino coins among the strongest coins, $XRP leading
One unexpected category has been among the best performing one in July : dino coins ! $XRP massively outperformed the market and closed July with +31% gains. One of the catalysts for this move is that there are rumors about a potential settlement with the SEC on the Ripple case. The other strong dino coins in July have been : $TRX, $BCH, $XMR, $XLM, $ZEC.
DeFi 1.0 behemoths $MKR and $AAVE outperformed
One coin has been very much impacted by some piece of news in July, and that’s $MKR. The news was that BlackRock planned to apply for MakerDAO's $1B tokenized treasury plan, and it lead $MKR to pump by +10% in a few hours, and it overall pumped +50% from bottom to top.
$MKR is in the category of the DeFi 1.0 coins that are generating A LOT of revenue while being not so large in terms of valuations. Another similar one is $AAVE, which has strongly outperformed the market since May 2024. They have also announced new Aavenomics that would include a fee switch for the $AAVE token holders.
Altcoin capitulation and bounce, $WLD short squeeze
As I mentioned before, July 5 was a day of capitulation for altcoins, with a lot of liquidations, and what usually follows after that is a strong bounce. The bounce happened on a lot of those high FDV low float VC coins, with some down -80% to -90% from ATH bouncing between +40% and 2x.
A strong squeeze particularly happened on $WLD, because they announced that they would increase the duration of the vesting for some tokens. $WLD had a +85% short squeeze in 2 days before selling off again. Altcoins overall underperformed BTC again during the second half of July.
Ordinals silently outperformed
The ordinals have been among the best performers from after the early July capitulation to the end of the month : $SATS, $ORDI and $RATS mainly. The Runes tokens, that were supposed to be the next evolution of ordinals, did not shine though.
Among new coins, only $ZRO performed really well
There have not been many major coin launches in July. $AVAIL launched, it’s a dat availability solution that is a competitor to Celestia.
Among the very recent coins, the one that got the most attention was $ZRO, which pumped from $2.5 to $5.5 during the month. $TAIKO also outperformed the market until late Juley
$NEIRO, the new DOGE ?
The ‘mother of Kabosu’, who is the original $DOGE dog from the meme, posted a picture of her new Shiba Inu, called Neiro. Naturally, people rushed to create the “DOGE #2” memecoin, and three $NEIRO memecoins emerged : 2 on Solana, and 1 on Ethereum.
During the first days, the two ones on Solana were the clear leaders and they flipped each other a few times, but surprisingly, it is ETH $NEIRO that ended up becoming the true winner and it closed the month at almost $200M market cap.
Best-performer list :
Best-performers among large caps in July :
XRP : +31%
ZRO : +28%
JTO : +23%
JUP : +22%
SOL : +17%
TAO : +11%
TAIKO : +11%
ICP : +10%
AAVE : +10%
MKR : +10%
PYTH : +9%
KAS : +8%
Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in July :
NEIRO : 50X (approximately if one bought during the first days)
BNX : +70%
ZEC : +61%
DSYNC : +67%
OM : +49%
MEW : +47%
HONEY : +46%
ALPH : +46%
ZEN : +44%
HNT : +41%
SATS : +39%
KMNO : +30%
GAL : +25%
And even smaller ones :
SCF : 100X if caught early
ZKML : +282%
MUMU : +277%
Y2K : +256%
AZUR : +97%
RETARDIO : +72%
STMX : +72%
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.