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

Red month across the board !

Jul 08, 2024

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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Red month for the whole market

$BTC opened the month with a new attempt to break its ATH (yeah that was only a month ago, as crazy as it sounds…), but it was rejected at $72k. We did not know it yet, but that’s when the trouble began… Because then the “slow bleed down” began for $BTC, and it was quite painful. Everyday, $BTC was losing 2%, without a single sign of strength, but not of capitulation neither.

In the same time, we had nothing but positive developments on the Ethereum ETF front, and yet the market was unable to react positively. Bullish news with bearish price action is usually the worst combo, and it was indeed announcing some nasty things.

On June 18, we had a massive altcoin capitulation (-10% against $BTC) while $BTC only lost 2% on the day. One week later, it was $BTC’s turn to “capitulate”, as it went from $64k to as low as $58k, before bouncing back to $62k. This happened amidst fear over several sources of FUD :

Mt Gox creditors expected to receive their coins (or some of their coins ?) in July. That’s collectively worth around $9bn $BTC.
The German government started to sell some $BTC that they have seized a few years ago, a total of around 50k BTC.
The US government also sold some $BTC that they had seized in some case, but that was not a very huge amount.

$BTC closed the month at $63k, which was not too bad, but as we know, it finally broke down from its range a few days later, to come as low as $54k on July 5.

Overall, June has been a disaster for many of the “VC coins” launched in 2023 or 2024 and that had low float high FDV : -41% for $STRK, -40% for $ENA, -33% for $SEI, -41% for $TIA, -23% for $APT, -27% for $OP, -49% for $WLD, -50% for $DYM, -51% for $ALT. More generally, it was a very bad month for all altcoins.

Memecoins : $BRETT reaches $2bn, $MOG and $POPCAT are strong

Among large caps, the best performer of the month has been $BRETT, the leading memecoin on Base, and ‘PEPE’s best friend’. The monthly gains for $BRETT are +75%, and it reached $2bn in market cap, which means it flipped $BONK at some point for example. But its supply is completely cornered, which means that even if the market cap is very high, as long as the entity that controls a large part of the supply does not sell significant amounts, the ‘real market cap’ is much lower.

Two other memecoins have been particularly strong and noticeable in June : $MOG and $POPCAT. Both are ‘cat coins’, and both are in the $300M - $700M market cap range. $MOG is on Ethereum and $POPCAT is on Solana. I like both of these coins as longs, they could become ‘the $PEPE and the $WIF’ of the coming months. In June, $POPCAT is up +59% and $MOG is up +31%.

Solana and a potential ETF

VanEck announced a few days ago that they were filing for a $SOL ETF. I think it probably is more a marketing stunt than something they really think will go through, because there is no CME futures market for $SOL, and the SEC has often used the spot-futures correlation as an argument against approving crypto ETFs.

$SOL has been particularly strong in the end of the month, after the June 24 dump, because SOLBTC bottomed there, and then pumped almost +20% until monthly close. As a SOL beta, $WIF also offered a long opportunity on its June 24 capitulation, where it dumped to $1.5 (down more than -50% in 3 weeks) before pumping back to $2.3 (+50% move) in a week.

The new token launches of June

There have been 5 major token launches in June : $IO (Io.net, GPU coin), $ATH (Aethir, another GPU coin), $TAIKO (L2 token), $ZK (zkSync, one of the major L2s that had not launched its token yet), $ZRO (LayerZero), and $BLAST (the famous L2 with native yield). $ZK, $ZRO and $BLAST all launched at what is in my opinion a low valuation on a relative basis, compared to for example $ARB, $OP and $STRK. This seems to be a natural market reaction to the terrible ‘down only’ charts we’ve seen of some recent low float high FDV coins such as $W or $ENA, so now people are not ready to buy these new VC coins at a gigantic valuation when they launch.

Bumpy road for ETH beta coins

June has been a bumpy road for “ETH beta coins”, they sometimes outperformed but overall their performance was mostly mediocre. The best performing one has been $ENS, up +19% over the month, which also makes it the top performing ETH beta since early May.

$LDO has been very strong too against the altcoin market, until the last week of the month. Lido has unfortunately been attacked by the SEC that filed a lawsuit against Consensys over Metamask swaps and staking services, claiming that Lido and Rocket Pool are unregistered securities.

The DeFi 1.0 coins have been slowly outperforming the market in June : $MKR, $AAVE, and $UNI.

BNB new ATH

It is quite rare for top 20 coins to be able to reach new ATH prices from cycle to cycle, but $BNB is one of the coins that has been able to do it. This month it has been able to pump to $720, while its previous ATH in May 2021 was $690. It is still far from doing a new ATH vs BTC because BNB is one of the only coins that was able to outperform BTC during the bear market, and it topped against BTC in December 2022, a bit after the FTX collapse. This new USD ATH ended up being just a sweep of the highs anyway, and $BNB suffered from the overall market downturn too, it closed the month with a tiny -2% performance.

A very short-lived BTC eco resurgence

During the first week fo June, we had a resurgence of a few BTC ecosystem coins, such as $STX, $ORDI, and the Runes ($WZRD, $DOG, $PUPS). This was after a few weeks / months of underperformance and suggested a polarity change, as some of these pumps were really strong ($ORDI up 2x from its bottom, $STX up 40% in a week), but in the end, it was a pure bull trap : all these coins quickly gave back their gains and did not show any relative strength afterwards. $PUPS is now down from almost $100 to $5, brutal dump.

Liquidation cascade for the $CRV founder

The founder of Curve, Michael Egorov, who has been borrowing USD against large amounts of $CRV collateral, has finally been liquidated after months of being at risk of it. Of course, not all of his holdings have been liquidated, but a large chunk of it, and it caused the price of $CRV to dump from $0.36 to $0.22 in one hour. Both $CRV and $CVX bounced very strongly after that (+85% for $CVX and +35% for $CRV) but then gave back their gains with the market dump at the end of the month.

The $DJT TrumpCoin

A new “TrumpCoin” with ticker $DJT has been launched this month, and it was rumored to be an official one, which lead to a strong pump from $50M market cap to $400M market cap in a few hours. “For some reason”, Martin Shkreli started heavily shilling it and defending the idea that it was in fact an official Trump coin. GCR disagreed and was ready to bet $100M that it was not officially endorsed by Trump, and in the end the bet did not happen and zachxbt proved that Shkreli was actually behind the $DJT token. It then quickly dumped back to $80M market cap and it still remains around this level.

The celeb meta

A new ‘meta’ that began in the end of May is the celeb meta, ie some celebrities (mostly d-tier and forgotten) started launching their own coins, usually with the intent to do a quick cash grab. One of the best performers in that category has been $MOTHER, the token of Iggy Azalea, which went from $5M to almost $300M market cap (60x) in a week but has now dumped back under $50M. Andrew Tate also decided to get into this game and first shilled $RNT (Real Nigga Tate) that pumped to $100M in a day and is now below $10M MC, then he switched to $DADDY, which still stands at $100M market cap (down -50% from ATH).

$TON and $KAS are strong

Two of the strongest assets of the month have been $TON and $KAS. They are both alt L1s and have both had low mindshare among CT for a long time. Both reached a new ATH in June. I think the attention around $TON has grown a lot during the last few months. The case for it is that it’s the next major alt L1 and thus can reach $100bn valuation.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in June :

BRETT : +75%
KAS : +38%
TON : +21%
ENS : +19%
NOT : +25%
XMR : +14%
TRX : +11%

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

POPCAT : +59%
SHFL : +51%
MOG : +31%
BANANA : +27%
CVX : +23%
MEW : +8%

And even smaller ones :

WOLF : +1100%
BENJI : +310%
KENDU : +180%
RETARDIO : +179%
BLOCK : +152%
CHOMP : +133%
GME : +128%
NPC : +96%
MOTHER : +88%
BENDOG : +67%
PUFF : +43%

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

Crypto Narratives

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