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

New $BTC ATH at $112k, ETHBTC wakes up, Memecoins, ICM narrative, HYPE

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 May :

• Here is the list of the main new coins listed on CEXes in May : Sophon ($SOPH), Huma Finance ($HUMA), Nexpace ($NXPC), Soon ($SOON), $DOOD. Some of them have multi-hundred million FDVs, which is a reminder that there is a never-ending new supply of tokens coming into the market that drags the whole altcoin market down.

• On May 22, Cetus, the main DEX on Sui, has been hacked for $220M. It lead to a dump on all Sui ecosystem coins, but it took a surprisingly long time for $SUI to digest the news, more than 2 hours to lose -10% from top to the bottom of the wick. It turned out that $180M out of the $220M have been frozen because SUI did not even try to larp as decentralized. 5 days later, Sui announced that all the losses from the hack would be covered, which lead to a short-lived pump on Cetus.

• Trump hosted its dinner for its 220 top memecoin holders on May 22. The $TRUMP coin pumped from $12.5 to $16 during the three days before the dinner in anticipation of it, and as expected, it sold off heavily once people realized there would not be any meaningful piece of news getting out of this event, so the coin went back down to $12.5 in two days.

• On May 28, Telegram announced a $1.5bn raise, and then announced that they would be integrating Grok (the AI available on Twitter) into Telegram. This lead to a +25% move up on $TON in just a few hours but then marked a local top.

• On May 21, Worldcoin announced that they raised $135M from a16z and Bain Capital Crypto, and that the funding was (surprisingly!) through a recent direct purchase of liquid, market-priced $WLD. This lead to an insta pump and dump of 10%, but then the coin ran again for a day, to as high as +40%.

• The Fifa announced a partnership with the Avalanche blockchain on May 22, we can clearly see on the chart that the news was frontran by insiders, so it did not lead to a particularly noticeable price action on $AVAX.

• The two memecoins $MOODENG and $MEW both got listed on Robinhood on May 22, which lead to a +30% move on both coins, but it marked the local top for both of them too. $LPT got listed on Upbit near the end of the month and it went up +160% in 11 hours.

• On May 20, Cookiedotfun announced that they were launching Cookie Snaps, which is basically another version of Kaito Yaps, and made Cookie an “InfoFi project”. This gave a good long opportunity as $COOKIE started running, and had +150% gains in 5 days. The trade made sense because the $KAITO token has been strong in May (+200% bottom to top), and with a much higher FDV than $COOKIE (2bn vs $200M).

Main narratives of May :

New $112k ATH for $BTC

$BTC has had a phenomenal month, it opened at $94k, and closed at $104.5k, but reached a new ATH at $112k in between. We basically went up +50% in a straight line from the tariff FUD at $75k, in April to the new ATH on $BTC. Around the end of the month, $BTC sold off back to $103k, but a cool down is not so surprising after such a strong move with barely any dip.

The BTC Las Vegas took place in late May, and we recently had a lot of positive announcements in the BTC treasury world : Trump Media (DJT) announced a $2.5bn raise to buy $BTC, Gamestop (GME) bought $500M worth of $BTC, Strive is planning a $750M raise to buy $BTC, Metaplanet and The Blockchain Group are both gobbling up $BTC on a weekly basis, and Saylor has announced the launch of his 3rd preferred stock, $STRD.

To many people, this sounds like peak euphoria for the BTC treasury playbook, but to me, it’s just the beginning. Most of these companies have a long time horizon, are VERY far from being in trouble, and should be able to deploy billions into $BTC for the months to come, without planning to sell a single token. This is why I am quite bullish on $BTC on a medium timeframe, even though I don’t necessarily hold a bullish view on the altcoin market.

ETH wakes up and almost reaches $2800

One of the most noticeable moves in crypto markets in May has been the significant surge of $ETH, it went from $1800 to $2600 in 3 days, then locally topped at $2730. This corresponded to a +40% move on ETHBTC from 0.019 to 0.026, which is very rare on this chart, and caught a lot of people off-guard.

The ETH move gave life to some of the beaten down ETH beta coins too : $ETHFI went up +225% in 8 days, $EIGEN 2x’d, and $ENA went up +75%. The ETH memecoins pumped too : 2x for $PEPE, +75% for $SPX, and +125% for $MOG.

The 0.026 level was the May top for ETHBTC, but instead of dying down like it has usually done this cycle, this time it just ranged for the next 3 weeks, and $ETH even made a new high at almost $2800 near the end of the month. This is the first time in a year that ETHBTC has a somewhat strong move, and it might indicate that ETH will keep doing okay for the months to come.

I am not particularly convinced of it, but one piece of news that reinforces the ETH bull case is the ‘MicroStrategy for ETH’ has been launched : $SBET. It was a very small cap that got diluted 10x through a $425M raise, with the funds being deployed into ETH to make the company the largest ETH treasury company in the world. It is lead by Joe Lubin who is an Ethereum co-founder. The stock reacted extremely positively as it went up almost 20x at the top, and is still up 8x since the announcement. This means that the funds that have done the deal to get some $SBET shares are up 8x in paper profits, and that the mNAV of SBET is very high, while SBET being a giga low float stock (hence the explosive pump).

2024 memecoins squeezing very hard from bottom

The coins that pumped the most from their bottom have been the memecoins by far. But more specifically, it’s been the dead memecoins from 2024 that lack narrative now but that have dumped so much from their ATH that the positioning of traders was too much skewed on the short side, which lead to a massive short squeeze on these names :

• $MOODENG went up 10x in 5 days, from $40M to almost $400M mcap. This is the biggest mover, and the leader of that move.

• $PNUT went from $150M to almost $500M mcap (+220%) in 5 days. Unipcs (Bonk Guy) has been a vocal shiller of PNUT, and longing it on his first shill was a great idea (the market needs Schelling points and “KOLs” to follow when it’s hot).

• $GOAT : +280% to its top.

• $CHILLGUY : 6x in 20 days.

Among large caps, the best performers have been $PEPE, $WIF, $POPCAT, $MOG, and $SPX. Murad has now become active on TikTok, where he’s trying to converting the masses to join his SPX cult. I think we’re going to see this coin trade higher again. $FARTCOIN went to $1.6bn mcap but closed the month in red.

Other memecoin movers include $FWOG, $NEIRO, $DEGEN, $TOSHI, $KEYCAT, $DOGINME.

Memecoins have yet again been the top performing category of the month, but most of the moves have topped around May 13.

Internet Capital Markets and LAUNCHCOIN

We’ve had a new on-chain narrative in May, the “Internet Capital Markets”. It started exactly a day after the top of the CEX memes, on May 13.

The main coin of the narrative is LAUNCHCOIN, which is the token of the Believe App. Believe is basically a launchpad similar to Pumpfun, but it is supposed to be used to launch “real projects”, with tokens attached to them. Think of them as startups that launch a coin both to gather attention and to raise funds. Obviously we are basically just repeating the same thing over and over again since the ICO era, but one difference is that the projects are usually web2 projects, and they use a token which is basically a memecoin.

Many people have been very excited about the narrative though, and are predicting that this is the new ‘AI agents’ meta, which is why LAUNCHCOIN pumped from $15M to $380M mcap in 3 days. The coin was initially named PASTERNAK (name of the founder) and it immediately topped on day 1 of his launch at $80M mcap, before dumping back to as low as $200K mcap at some point. It has mostly ranged around $200M after its pump, and then dumped back to $100M at the end of the month.

Most of the “ICM coins” have had very low ceilings ($20M mcap), which tends to show that the trenches are still very poor. $JELLYJELLY pumped 2x in a day on the back of this narrative (only ICM coin on CEX), and then lost all of its gains in a few hours.

$HYPE to $40bn FDV

The strongest coin among large caps in May has been $HYPE, it’s been absolutely up only since its sub $10 bottom in early April, and went from $20 to $40 with basically no drawdown in 20 days. It’s definitely the project with the highest mindshare on CT, and it built a very strong cult-like community.

I can very well see it do a similar run as $SOL in 2023, and go to $100, but at the end of the day, this remains a perp DEX for me, so as you can value it based on its P/E ratio, I think this can create a ceiling on its valuation. I also think that $100bn FDV is an extremely strong ceiling for any coin, which means that you are looking at a 3x in an incredibly optimistic scenario. That being said, it remains one of the most investable token in the top 100, which makes it a no-brainer for a lot of people.

Additional comments :

• $VIRTUAL had a phenomenal come-back in April thanks to their Virgen points program flywheel, and the coin remained very strong in May, it even reached a new high locally at almost $2.6 near the end of May. Same thing for $SUI until the Cetus hack, it was one of the strongest large cap during the late April pump, and it remained strong in May, went as high as $42bn FDV again.

• Two coins have had some similar “scammy price action” this month : $LAYER and $WCT. Both have a multi-week run up that ended with a somewhat parabolic move at the top, and both had a double top before completely collapsing in a few hours. And then both had a similar “bleeding down” price action after the crash. Remember that all prices are fake in crypto, but that coins will go to zero through very different paths.

• Keeta ($KTA) is a new alt-L1 trading (the token is trading on Base) that has been pumping like crazy in May, the price literally went up 10x from $40M mcap to almost $500M. Click here to read the long-form article by Zoomer Oracle which gives all details about Keeta.

• Shorting $GORK from $100M mcap to almost zero (-90% lower) was a good idea in May.

• $MASK is up +150% since early May, which was a week away after DWF announced a $5M investment into MASK… Another DWF special coin is $TRB, which recently had a 2x scam pump.

• $ZBCN is one of the top performers in May, it went up close to 5x in two weeks. Apparently it’s a RWA token on Solana…

• Several “coins with good fundamentals that are generating revenue” have been pumping lately : $SYRUP is up almost 3x this month (SYRUP = Maple Finance, a RWA protocol), and $AAVE is up +40% vs the altcoin market.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in May :

• SPX : +80%

• HYPE : +63%

• AAVE : +50%

• QNT : +44%

• ETH : +41%

• PEPE : +31%

• INJ : +26%

• XMR : +17%

• UNI : +15%

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

• KTA : +465%

• ZBCN : +400%

• MOODENG : +385%

• KAITO : +135%

• SYRUP : +124%

• ETHFI : +93%

• LPT : +92%

• MASK : +75%

• DOG : +75%

• SAROS : +61%

• MOG : +55%

• PNUT : +47%

• EIGEN : +45%

• WIF : +35%

And even smaller ones :

• LAUNCHCOIN : +700%

• COLLAT : +400%

• POKT : +400%

• BOB : +366%

• PSTAKE : +222%

• KET : +127%

• LABUBU : $500k → $50M mcap

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

Ref link shill : The sniper I use to trade coins on Solana is Axiom. Very useful, it’s night and day compared to trading on Jupiter. You can access Axiom in one click via this referral link.