March 2025 recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch

A very choppy month driven by bearishness in macro

Apr 07, 2025

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 March :

There have been a lot of new coins launched in March : $RED, $ELX, $BMT, $NIL, $WAL, $GUN. Most of them are clearly getting no bid, and end up with an endless bleed kind of price action. $BMT is the token of Bubblemaps, it short squeezed a few days after launch (almost 4x). $NIL (Nillion) is an AI related coin, a lot of people have been trying to buy the dip, and at around $400m FDV now it could be a good buying opportunity. $GUN is the coin of Gunzilla, one of the largest crypto game, it launched on the last day of March at $1bn FDV and immediately went down. $WAL is the Arweave of SUI, and it’s been holding impressively between $2bn and $3bn FDV. I would not long it here.
There has also been a launch on-chain : KabosuMama adopted a new dog called $COCORO. She worked with the Own the Doge DAO to launch an official coin on Base. That is way better than what happened with Neiro where there was infinite PvP to know which NEIRO coin was the best one. But it did not lead to an impressive PA on COCORO, which basically pumped to $100M mcap in two hours before dumping -90%.
Pavel Durov has been released from France on March 15, it lead to a +20% pump in a few hours, and then $TON kept outperforming for 2 weeks with an additional +20% move up.
Aave has announced an updated Aavenomics proposal on March 4 that includes revenue distribution / fee switch. The price of $AAVE initially reacted very well, with a +40% pump in 2 days, but it quickly retraced the entire move up.
Movement has accused a market maker of ‘going rogue’ and selling a lot of $MOVE without being allowed too, and they came up with a buyback plan of $38M. This announcement on March 25 lead to a +30% delayed pump, but it’s been bleeding since then. The valuation of MOVE never made sense to me as it seems overvalued at $5bn FDV here.
Donald Trump’s media company Trump Media, parent company of Truth Social, has announced a partnership with Crypto .com to launch a series of ETFs and ETPs “comprised of digital assets as well as securities with a Made in America focus spanning diverse industries such as energy,” according to a company press release. This lead to a +30% pump on $CRO, the token of cryptodotcom.

Main narratives of March :

The White House Crypto Summit

One of the main events in crypto in March happened at the very beginning of the month : on March 2, Trump made a tweet (on Truth Social) where he talked about having a SOL XRP ADA U.S. crypto reserve, which catapulted the market from $85k $BTC to $95k in a few hours.

The US stock market spent the whole Monday session going down, and it erased all the BTC gains in one day, to the point that $BTC even reached lower prices than before the announcement, as it reached a local low at $82k on March 4.

$BTC bounced from there and started grinding up in anticipation of the Crypto Summit. In the night between March 6 and March 7, David Sacks (AI and Crypto Czar) tweeted that the President just signed an EO to establish a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. The TLDR on it is :

The BTC that the US government currently holds will be put into the SBR and WON’T be sold.
They are looking at ways to acquire more bitcoin in a ‘budget-neutral’ way
The other crypto assets that the US government already holds will be added into a ‘digital asset stockpile’. From there, they could very well be sold, contrarily to the BTC.

The market pumped for one minute on the news, before selling off from $90k to $85k, as people realized that there was no plan to buy BTC in the short-term. In the end, the Crypto Summit has been an absolute nothingburger but it did not lead to a substantial ‘news-selling’.

Macro-driven bearish month

Overall, March has been a very bearish month, which was very macro-driven, as the concerns about tariffs have become very important in tradfi and have pushed the S&P 500 down significantly, from 6000 to 5600 at the end of the month. Crypto has been completely dependent on the moves in the equities market, and $BTC made new lows (since November) on March 10 below $77k. It bounced right after that, and managed to spend most of the month ranging with an average price around $84k.

BSC season

BSC season continued with ups and downs in March, but overall CZ seems committed to keep giving energy to the BNB chain and the memecoins that people are trading there. Usually when you opened DexScreener in the past 6 months, it was filled with Solana coins, but recently there have been a lot of BSC coins on some days.

The coin that benefitted the most from this was $CAKE, as it’s the token of the main DEX of the BNB chain, and it had a 2x pump in 10 days in March.

Binance has also listed a lot of BSC native coins on perps, such as $MUBARAK, $TUT, or the two $BROCCOLI coins. They have also opened a new feature that lets people vote for spot listing, and this resulted in the listings of 4 memecoins in the spot market. All of these listings tend to offers some good shorting opportunities, as memecoins are not able to sustain any pumps in the current market environment.

Strategy : STRF is launched + the ATM is back

Saylor announced the launch of a new preferred stock product called $STRF, which is basically a perpetual stock yielding around 10%. This comes in addition to $STRK, which was a similar product, but STRK can be converted into MSTR over a certain price, and that does not exist for STRF.

Strategy raised $700M from the initial STRF offering, and they immediately bought $BTC with that cash. Saylor has also started to use the ATM on the MSTR common stock again, which enabled him to accumulate a total of 530K $BTC now. He also started to use the ATM on STRK, but the daily volumes are too low right now to represent a material amount.

GameStop will buy $BTC

GameStop announced on March 25 an update to their investment policy, and that they were adding BTC as a treasury reserve asset. The stock pumped +16% after the news. One day later, they announced that they would issue a $1.3bn zero-coupon convertible bond, which is a bit surprising given the fact that they hold more than $4bn in cash. The stock also dumped on the convertible news, and they completely retraced the pump. In the end, it turns out they raised $1.5 from their convertible bond, and are likely to buy BTC with the proceeds.

Rough month for $HYPE

It has been a rough month for HyperLiquid. In early March, one HyperLiquid whale has been taking several trades with very large leverage, and one of these trades has lead to a $4M loss on HLP, the HyperLiquid Liquidity Provider Vault. This sparked a lot of FUD on HyperLiquid, especially in the context of a slow grind down PA. $HYPE opened the month around $20 and bottomed at $12 on March 13.

On March 26 there has was another ‘attack’ on HyperLiquid : the attacker opened a huge long on $JELLYJELLY and made sure that he would get liquidated, which meant that the HyperLiquid Liquidity Provider vault (HLP) would then be short $5M worth of JELLYJELLY, which at the time was a $15M market cap coin. The attacker also had other huge long positions opened, and what obviously happened is that JELLYJELLY immediately started to squeeze hard, and went up roughly 4x. This lead HLP to be down almost $10M in unrealized losses, and also lead $HYPE to sell off from $16 to $13 at the worst.

HyperLiquid ended up deciding to delist JELLYJELLY and settle the trade at the ‘pre-exploit’ price, which means that the HLP vault did not take any losses. All the people that were in profit on a JELLYJELLY long after the exploit (except the attacker) have been paid back, only the people that withdrew their money from HLP during the attack took a loss.

Additional comments :

ETHBTC has had its 9th red monthly candle out of its last 10 monthly candles. People have been capitulating one by one, and all the buying pressure seems to be concentrated on BTC (Saylor, ETFs) rather than on ETH. ETHBTC closed the month at 0.022. Altcoins overall have also had a very rough month, most of them are bleeding endlessly versus BTC.
The AI agent coins, which have been one of the strongest narratives in late 2024, have now become a consistent underperforming category, with most of the AI tokens taking a huge hit week after week, even with they sometimes rebound strongly in between.
Berachain Proof-of-Liquidity finally went live on March 24. It acted as a strong catalyst for the price, as $BERA went up by more than +35% in a week. There has not been an immediate sell-the-news effect, but kissing its deadly $9 resistance turned out to be deadly once again for BERA which sold off hard afterwards.
A few other “recent” coins have been holding very well, such as $IP and $LAYER (Solayer). $IP has been trading between $5bn and $6bn FDV during the whole month, outperforming the altcoin market as a result. $LAYER has also been incredibly strong, and kept making new highs during the month, until it reached an ATH at $1.5bn FDV.
$FARTCOIN has been down only since its top around the $TRUMP coin launch, until its bottom at $0.2 ($200M MC) on March 10. This was a perfect entry, as it’s a coin with a lot of mindshare and volume, that has become a Schelling point for memecoin exposure. It pumped 3x to $0.6 in two weeks.
$DOGINME and $KEYCAT are two Base memecoins that got listed on Coinbase this month. They pumped (especially DOGINME) in anticipation of the listing (when they got added to the CB roadmap), but did not sustain a pump after their listing.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in March :

LAYER : +74%
CRO : +34%
TON : +24%
PLUME : +19%
CRV : +12%
MNT : +11%
ZRO : +5%
BNB : +3%

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

CHEEMS : +95%
SQD : +90%
FARTCOIN : +53%
DBR : +32%
XION : +28%
APX : +21%
OHM : +18%
FXS : +18%
SAFE : +7%

And even smaller ones :

TUT : +2200%
MUBARAK : $1M → $220M → $50M
DOGINME : +354%
KEYCAT : +214%
BANANAS : +177%
MAVIA : +91%
BROCCOLI : +76%

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

Crypto Narratives

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