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

$BTC new ATH / Memecoins / Solana and Base seasons / RWA pump

Apr 04, 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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Main events that happened in March :

The EIP-4844 (Dencun) update happened on March 13. One of the goals of the upgrade was to reduce the cost of data availability for L2s, and thus reduce the gas fees on L2s, which is what happened. In terms of price, it has been a complete nothingburger.
On March 19, BlackRock announced that they were launching a new tokenized fund called “BUIDL”, which would naturally be focused on RWA. This announcement kickstarted a strong RWA token pump.
Two massive presales happened on Solana, and ignited a short-lived ‘presale meta’ : $BOME and $SLERF. $BOME (Book of Memes) was the first one, it is a memecoin launched by the NFT artist DarkFarms, and it had one of the craziest runs I have ever witnessed : from $5M to $1.5bn market cap in a bit more than 2 days, with tier-1 CEX listings (Binance/Bybit) in 2 days. $SLERF became a legendary meme because the dev burned $10M worth of presalers allocations.
Telegram announced (on March 11) it was considering an IPO, and the TON Foundation announced the launch of a community rewards initiative called "The Open League," which involves the distribution of 30 million Toncoin, valued at over $115 million. $TON closed the month as one of the best top performers among the top 50 coins, with +118% gains.
The original picture of Achi, the dog in the “dogwithhat” picture, has been auctioned off as an NFT, and the legendary trader GCR won the auction with a price of 1210 ETH, ie $4.3M. $WIF immediately pumped by +30% after that.
The Nvidia GTC conference in 2024 took place from March 18 to March 21, and acted as a catalyst for all the AI coins, but especially for $NEAR and $RNDR, because their cofounders were invited to speak at the conference.
Three of the “OG AI coins”, $FET, $AGIX and $OCEAN, announced that they were planning to merge and become a new token called $ASI. They did all pump when the news got out.
One of the main protocols on Blast, Munchables, has been hacked for more than $60M on March 26, by a (supposedly) North Korean hacker. I don’t know how Pacman, zachxbt and the team managed to get it back, but the hacker surprisingly gave back the money to Munchables… Maybe he was not North Korean and they had ID information on him ?
The US government has accused crypto exchange KuCoin and two founders of violating anti-money laundering laws. KuCoin experienced almost $1bn in outflows after the news, but all the withdrawals have been processed, just with some delay.
The main token launches of March have been : $ETHFI, $APRS, $GMRX, and $ZK. $ZK is the token of Polyhedra which is ZK/interoperability project, and it launched very quietly, without any very remarkable price action. $APRS (Apeiron) and $GMRX (Gaimin) are both gaming projects, and they both initially pumped in the first hours after launch, before bleeding for days. $ETHFI is the token of EtherFi, a liquid restaking project, and the launch has been a success since it’s pumped from $3 to $8.5, which corresponds to a $8bn+ FDV.

Main narratives of March :

Solana season, again

One of the main narratives of the month has been the resurgence of Solana season. $SOL had an explosive burst in December when it topped at $125, and it also marked a local top for SOLETH, that went down -40% during the following weeks in 2 months after that. But in 5 days, SOLETH pumped by +55% in mid-March, and reached a new ATH. $SOL crossed the $200 mark, and its performance in March is an impressive +61%.

One of the reasons for this pump is that Solana has become the main playground for memecoins/shitcoins, and this corresponds to a lot of volume and activity. The UX is without a doubt way better on Solana than on any other EVM chain, even though the number of failed transactions has definitely been going way up with all of this activity. It was also announced this month that Pantera (a crypto fund) was raising funds to buy locked $SOL from FTX at a discounted price.

One of the best performers of this Solana season has been $JUP (Jupiter), the main dapp on Solana that is a DEX aggregator. $JUP showed a nice round bottoming pattern in February and early March, and it pumped +220% overall this month. This means that $JUP FDV is now $16bn, compared to $11bn for $UNI. I think $JUP is a bit overvalued on a relative basis, but this can continue to pump anyway.

Here are other Solana token performances :

$JTO : +64%
$PYTH : +53%
$RAY : +100%
$SCS : +380%
$SHDW : +84%

Memecoins keep running

Memecoins have probably been the best-performing category price-wise. As they closed the month of February very strongly, most of the performance on memecoins has been during the first week of the month, especially for $PEPE (+220% in March), $FLOKI (+365%), and $SHIB (+145%).

$WIF has been unstoppable during the whole month, and managed to become the largest memecoin behind $DOGE and $SHIB, with +450% monthly gains. $DOGE bounced strongly from the March 20 market bottom, and reached $0.2. The monthly performance of $DOGE is +88%, which is enormous for a coin now valued at $26bn market cap. $SHIB got very close to flipping $DOGE in market cap in early March, and just as in 2021, it was a very good time to take a long $DOGE / short $SHIB pair trade. An obvious beta for $DOGE is $DOG (the fractionalized Kabosu NFT), up +260% on the month.

As I wrote, we have also had a Solana presale meta, with 2 massive winners that were $BOME and $SLERF. I can also mention the launch of $BODEN, which corresponds to “Biden” misspelled, and it almost 1000x’d to reach a $200M market cap at the end of the month. After the $MAGA run, are political memes going to be a huge thing that grows before the 2024 election ?

Another noticeable trend in memecoin land, is the “cat coins”. Historically, dog coins have always been the winners, and no cat coin managed to get a lot of mindshare. This month we’ve had a gigantic pump of $POPCAT, which basically 30x’d. The other cat coins to have in mind are : $TOSHI (+320%), $WEN, $MOG, $MEW (new cat coin on Solana with thick liquidity), $MOCHI, $LMEOW.

Finally, let’s also mention the performances of $MYRO (+263%), $LADYS (+176%), and $pepecoin (+1300% !, yes another “PEPE coin”).

BlackRock ignites the RWA narrative pump

As I mentioned previously, the BlackRock tokenized fund announcement was exactly the catalyst that RWA tokens needed.

$ONDO immediately reacted to the news with a +20% spike, and remained very strong during the days after that, with an overall move from $0.4 to almost $1. $ONDO has become the de factor leader of the RWA narrative, but it is also closely linked to BlackRock, which implies that basically any positive development from BlackRock with regards to RWA will pump $ONDO.

RWA closed the month as one of the best-performing category, and it is the first time that all the RWA tokens pumped together. We are very likely to have other RWA-related news during the months to come, so I would not be surprised if RWA continues to perform very well, now that we’ve had a real category-wide pump. Remember that this is pure hype-driven pumps, just like AI, so you should not marry your bags but be aware that this could push way higher.

Here are some of the RWA monthly performances :

$ONDO : +128%
$TOKEN : +360%
$RSR : +158%
$OM : +176%
$DUSK : +78%
$GFI : +300%
$RIO : +193%
$POLYX : +223%
$CPOOL : +120%

Base season

The last main narrative of the month has definitely been Base season. Solana season seems to have peaked with $BOME, $SLERF, and the whole presale meta, and degens have then rotated to Base. Maybe the EIP-4844 has been a catalyst too, because the fees on Base post-Dencun have been initially reduced, but currently they are quite high again (a few dollars for a swap sometimes).

As you know, there is no $BASE token (yet ?), so the most direct exposure for it seems to be $AERO, which is the token of Aerodrome Finance, the leading protocol (TVL-wise) on the Base chain. Aerodrome Finance is fork of Velodrome (which was a fork of Solidly) that is founded by the Velodrome team too. The $AERO token monthly performance has been an astounding +350%. $VELO benefitted greatly from this move too, it is up +270% in March.

The other main Base runner has been $DEGEN. It started as a memecoin launched on Farcaster, that could represent a proxy for Farcaster and even Base, but it has evolved into an L3 over Base. The performance of the token in March has been gigantic, it literally 50x’d from a $15M to a $750M market cap coin. $DMT which will be another L3 (over Arbitrum) benefitted from this narrative and had a +250% pump too.

Most of the other top-performers on Base have all been memecoins : $TOSHI (+320%), $BRETT (75x !), $DOGINME (15x), $NORMIE (0 → $150M MC).

AI coins : a conference and a potential merger…

As I mentioned before, AI coins had a catalyst this month which was the Nvidia GTC conference, as stupid as this catalyst feels. We also had an announcement about a potential merger between $FET, $AGIX and $OCEAN, which have become leaders of the AI narrative since January 2023.

I am very bullish on AI coins because they tend to be ‘memecoins for serious people’, and have no ceiling on their valuations, that can go absolutely stupid. Most AI coins are abolute vaporware and you must be aware of this, but I think this narrative will remain strong during the whole cycle.

Here are the performance of the major AI coins this month :

$FET : +108%
$NEAR : +88%
$AGIX : +80%
$OCEAN : +53%
$RNDR : +42%
$AR : +45%
$AGI : +62%

Additional comments about some coins and narratives :

The first half of the month for $BTC has simply been the continuation of the last month performance, with a push to new all time highs at almost $74k, but the market sold off after that, and reached a local bottom at $61k, before printing a lower higher around $71k. Overall, we can say that it was a month of chop, but $BTC still managed to be up +16%.

Besides $SOL, the alt L1 that got the most traction in March was $FTM, which is up +118% over the month despite selling off during the last days of the month. The main catalyst is that there will be a massive upgrade on $FTM called Sonic, and Andre Cronje has been pushing its project recently. All the ecosystem coins pumped too : $LQDR $BOO $EQUAL $SPIRIT.
The other top performers among alt L1s include : $NEAR (+88%, AI bid and Nvidia conference), $APT (+46%, RWA narrative among other things), $ICP (+50%), $BNB (+52%).
It is not a sector I follow too closely, but BTCfi remains an important trend of this bull run. The number of “BTC L2s” that have popped or that will launch in the coming months is larger than I would have thought, and you can follow it here : L2.watch. A few $BTCfi projects had good gains in March : $CORE (4x), $COVAL (+110%), $CFX (+82%).
Gaming as a category did not really outperform in March, but a few outliers had a very strong month though : $YGG (+154%), $PRIME (+49%), $RON (+45%), $GALA (+73%), $PIXEL (+52%), $SIDUS (+120%), $WILD (+176%).
Maker seems to have greatly benefitted from the Ethena launch, their revenue keeps growing, they are having a (controversial) partnership with Ethena, and overall Ethena pushes all the DeFi yields up. Maker is also going to have its whole rebranding + token denomination + launch of new tokens for the subDAOs, so there are a lot of catalysts for $MKR, which is up +87% in March.
$RUNE also had a good month with +51% performance. Thorchain lending is a 0% interest lending protocol, which is attractive because you can deposit the borrowed USD into Ethena to get the USDe yield. This mechanism actually creates ponzinomics for $RUNE overall (go read about the way this lending works), which means reflexivity on the way up and then probably… on the way down.
$BCH is one of the top performers this month in the top 50, with +128% gains. The main catalysts were that $BCH had its halving yesterday, Coinbase announced that they were launching futures contracts on BCH (and also on $DOGE and $LTC), and it is also one of the few coins that could potentially get an ETF because it is clearly not a security while being a very large cap coin.
$ETH performed rather poorly over this month, with ETHBTC being down -6.4%. The odds of seeing the $ETH ETF approved in May are decreasing on Polymarket, they are now down to 20%. Most of the ETH beta coins and L2 coins are down or flat over the month, and the only good performers have been $PENDLE (+74%, unstoppable coin!), $MNT (+47%, pumped on the Upbit news listing), $SSV (+71%), and… $ETHW (+56%).

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in March :

$WIF : +450%
$FLOKI : +365%
$PEPE : +220%
$JUP : +220%
$SHIB : +145%
$BCH : +128%
$ONDO : +128%
$FTM : +118%
$TON : +118%
$FET : +108%
$NEAR : +88%
$DOGE : +88%
$MKR : +87%
$AGIX : +80%
$GALA : +73%
$SOL : +61%

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

$DEGEN : +5000%
$POPCAT : +2800%
$pepecoin : +1300%
$TOKEN : +360%
$AERO : +350%
$TOSHI : +322%
$CORE : +300%
$GFI : +300%
$VELO : +270%
$MYRO : +263%
$DOG : +257%
$DMT : +250%
$POLYX : +223%
$RIO : +193%
$LADYS : +176%
$WILD : +176%
$YGG : +154%
$SIDUS : +120%
$BOME : $3M → $1.5bn MC
$BODEN : 0 → $200M MC

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

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