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

$ETH ETF approved, $PEPE at ATH, Trump makes news

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 :

• The main event of the month was of course the unexpected $ETH ETF approval, which seems to have happened due to political pressure. But I will expand the discussion around $ETH and the ETF in the next section about narratives.

• FriendTech finally launched its token $FRIEND, as well as its V2. The main change on the app is that there is a new feature called “Clubs”, where people can gather and talk to each other (and invest in clubs as if they were memecoins ?). The launch has mostly been a disaster which lead to the price of $FRIEND going down only for a few hours. It bottomed around $0.8, ie $80M market cap, which was a great buying opportunity considering the mindshare around this app, and the price pumped to $3 in 3 days. Now it has gotten back down to $1, and buying it at $1 after it had already pumped is way less interesting than after its launch.

• $GALA has been hacked and the hacker has been able to mint 5bn $GALA tokens, which was worth around $200M. He managed to sell around $20M worth of tokens into ETH, but then was blacklisted by $GALA team. He then even gave back the $20M ETH and the remaining of the 5bn tokens, and the GALA team proceeded to a buyback and burn of $GALA with that ETH.

• OpenAI has been teasing an announcement early this month, and it lead to a +40% price appreciation for $WLD during the first week of May. Their announcement ended up being a ‘sell the news’ event (at least on very low timeframes) since they basically just announced a new version of GPT-4 called GPT-4o and a desktop app. Add a bearish DeFiSquared tweet to the mix, and you get a -25% price dump.

• Two major (in terms of size) unlock events happened in May : $SUI and $PYTH. $SUI had an unlock of more than $1bn tokens on May 1st, and we can see that it has underperformed the altcoin market since then. $PYTH also had an unlock worth around $1bn on May 20, and it went down significantly right before the unlock but then squeezed the shorts with a +40% pump in a day.

• One of the main token launches of the month has been $NOT (NotCoin). It is the main ‘ecosystem coin’ in the Ton ecosystem (behind TON). It’s a coin that people could farm by tapping their screen or something like that, and it managed to have a huge following and community, with almost 2M followers on their Twitter account. $NOT price exhibited the usual airdrop pattern with an initial dump, bottoming, and then strong pump. It closed the month of May with a +160% pump bottom to top, but then continued pumping and squeezed shorts to an almost $3bn market cap on June 2, ie 6x from its bottom.

• Other somewhat important token launches include : $BB (BounceBit, restaking on bitcoin ?), $DRIFT (Perp DEX on Solana), $MON (Mon Protocol, the token behind the Polkamon ecosystem), $NYAN (Nyan Heroes, a crypto game).

• Arweave announced the launch of their new $AO token on June 13 and $AR almost instantly gained +20%. However, I really don’t like when a team launches 2 tokens, so I don’t really know what to do with that : I have been bullish $AR for a while and it looks like one of the most attractive ‘AI coin’, but with a new token, I might flip bearish AR.

• Roaring Kitty (one of the main characters behind the GME pump by redditors in 2021) came back on Twitter this month with cryptic memecoin videos. It caused a massive short squeeze on $GME that went from less than $20 to almost $80 at some point, before printing the usual Burj Khalifa pattern on the chart. This could potentially have been bullish for memecoin prices too, but it’s hard to find a clear causation.

Main narratives of May :

$ETH ETF approved :

The main event of the month happened on May 20. May 23 was the final deadline for the SEC to approve or reject VanEck $ETH ETF, and this means that the SEC had to make a decision regarding the $ETH ETFs overall.

The odds of an $ETH ETF approval in May have been going down only since the approval of the $BTC ETF, going from more than 60% in January to less than 10% at some point in May. This downtrend was also visible in the ETHBTC ratio, that reached a new low at 0.045 on May 16. The accelerated dump from 0.047 to 0.045, as well as $LDO (arguably the most direct beta to ETH?) reaching almost $1.5 on the same day had a smell of final capitulation for ETH and ETH beta holders, and it turns out that it was true.

One very unexpected tweet by Eric Balchunas, one of the Bloomberg ETF experts, has completely shaken things up with regards to the $ETH ETFs, as he announced that he drastically revised the likelihood of approval after new information appeared :

$ETH immediately pumped +10% in 10 minutes, and then kept going up to close that day at $3660 with an impressive +20% daily candle. ETHBTC pumped from 0.046 to 0.057 in a few days.

Balchunas and James Seyffart were right and the $ETH ETF has indeed been approved a few days later. It seems quite obvious that the SEC acted under political pressure, probably because someone at the White House told them what to do, maybe after Trump came out so strongly in favor of crypto. $ETH closed the month with +25% gains, and reached almost $4k.

Naturally, the month of May was a rather good one for the “ETH beta coins”, especially :

• $ENS : +77% in May.

• $PENDLE : +46%.

• $UNI : +41%.

• $LDO : +35%. The more pristine beta in my opinion, but the price action has been painful over the last months.

• $PEPE : +132%. Is a memecoin the best ETH beta ? More about memecoins in the next section.

• $ONDO : +67%. RWA reacted well to the ETH ETF news, more about that below.

Memecoins

The best performing category of the month was memecoins, once again. The strongest one by far has been $PEPE. It was already outperforming the market since the April dump, but the ETH ETF news has been very bullish for $PEPE. It gained $3bn in market cap in a few days, and overall closed the month with +132% gains. $PEPE is the main ETH memecoin behind $SHIB, and treated as an ETH beta by some traders. I think it will end up flipping SHIB.

The other main memecoins also had a good month : $FLOKI up +63%, $BONK up +52% and was close to reaching a new ATH, and $WIF up +32% (lagging ?).

Other top-performing memecoins in May include :

• TURBO : +1360%. Memecoin made after the instructions of ChatGPT. Memecoin X AI ?

• PONKE : +277%

• WOJAK : +271%

• PENG : +203%

• ANDY : +175%

• MOG : +165%. One of my favorite ETH memecoins, also a good candidate to reach $1bn+ MC in my opinion.

• BRETT : +145%. Leading memecoin on Base, one of the first to reach $1bn market cap, but the supply is probably cornered so it is not a very ‘organic’ memecoin so to say.

• KEYCAT : +125%

• PEPECOIN : +63%

We’ve also seen a resurgence of some of the ETH on-chain memecoins that were hot around the summer 2023 and after, such as $BITCOIN, $JOE, $KEKEC, or $SPX.

$ONDO and RWA tokens

Another category that seemed to react very well after the $ETH ETF approval is RWA (real worlds assets), and especially the leader of the sector, $ONDO. $ONDO has been one of the best performers among large caps in 2024, and it has finally broke out of its range broke the $1 resistance right after the approval, and went as high as $1.3. I have been long $ONDO for quite some time and have not taken profit yet. It is the leading RWA coin, and also the de facto “Larry Fink / BlackRock” coin. That is a very compelling narrative that makes $ONDO a great Schelling point. I have talked a few times about $20bn FDV being some kind of ceiling for most projects, so I plan to take profit on ONDO between $1.5 and $2.5 if we get there.

The other top-performing RWA coins of the month have been $DUSK (+49%) and $TOKEN (+41%), $RSR (+46%), and $TRU (+73%).

AI coins

The AI category started the month with good strength, especially after one tweet by Eugene (Binance leaderboard trader) seems to have ignited a pump.

Other catalysts were the announcement by OpenAI, as well as the Nvidia earnings. These ended up being a sell the news event (even if the earnings were good and NVIDIA pumped as a result), but $RNDR closed the month with +38% gains anyway.

The other top performers in AI have been $AR (+50%, I mentioned it above), $ARKM (+36%), and $NEAR (+17%). The ASI trio ($FET, $AGIX, $OCEAN) closed the month with a moderate +8% gains, and their merge happens on June 13. The vibes feel a bit off with regards to AI coins right now, I don’t know exactly what to do with it. I still have a bullish bias for them overall, but it’s hard to have conviction in single names.

Trump and the “Politifi” narrative

Trump got a lot of attention this month. The first time was when he came out in favor of crypto at an even in Mar A Lago with its NFT holders, and this kickstarted a pump on the $MAGA/TRUMP coin (which was at $4 ie $200M market cap before that), and it seems to have made crypto a political issue with regards to the election in November.

A few days later, Trump made another announcement that was clearly pro-crypto, and at the end of the month he was found guilty in his whatever trial. Overall, the month was very bullish for the main $MAGA memecoin that went as high as $800M market cap.

There is also a new Trump memecoin called Maga Hat with ticker $MAGA, and it pumped from $1M to $300M in around 2 weeks. $BODEN is consolidating around $200M and is probably a good buy here when you consider that it was at some point twice bigger than the TRUMP memecoin, and it is now almost 4 times smaller. There’s also the $TREMP memecoin on Solana around ATH at $120M, but I’d rather buy $BODEN.

Green month for BTC

$BTC opened the month almost at picobottom because we reached $56.5k on $BTC on May 1st, but then we very quickly pumped back into the range (reclaiming $62k on May 3). $BTC touched the upper bound of the range at $72k after the bullish ETF news, and it closed the month at $67.5k with +11% monthly gains.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in May :

• PEPE : +132%

• ENS : +77%

• ONDO : +67%

• FLOKI : +63%

• AR : +50%

• BONK : +52%

• PENDLE : +46%

• UNI : +41%

• LINK : +40%

• RNDR : +38%

• TON : +23%

• BEAM : +22%

• LDO : +35%

• BGB : +23%

• WIF : +32%

• ETH : +25%

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

• TURBO : +1360%

• CEL : +777%

• PEOPLE : +274%

• PONKE : +277%

• MAGA : +239%

• BRETT : +145%

• MOG : +165%

• TRB : +120%

• HIGH : +110%

• DMT : +107%

• JASMY : +100%

• LPT : +84%

• EDU : +67%

• PEPECOIN : +63%

• GMX : +50%

• DUSK : +49%

• TOKEN : +41%

• ARKM : +36%

A few additional comments about some coins and narratives :

• $CHZ is up +32% this month, and the catalyst for it is probably the football Euro that begins in around 2 weeks. The last time this happened was in November 2022 when $CHZ pumped before the football World Cup, and then sold the news exactly when it started.

• One of the noticeable stories of the month has been that some celebrities have been launching memecoins on Solana, for example Caitlyn Jenner and Iggy Azalea (her token $MOTHER is reaching ATH at $100M market cap right now). These are d-tier celebrities looking for attention and easy money, but it is very much a nothingburger for me. It’s definitely not a top signal, because it’s obvious to me that the market is not topping here.

• The Fantom Foundation has announced that they were planning to launch a whole new L1 named Sonic Network, and that is supposed to have better performances than the new generation alt L1s. The other new information is that they are going to launch a new token with ticker $S, and that $FTM holders will be able to migrate 1:1 their $FTM to $S. $FTM closed the month with +23% gains, it was the hot coin in the market before the ETF news took all the attention and $FTM slightly sold off after that.

• $TON is up +23% this month, which is noticeable for a top 20 coin. The weekly and monthly charts for TON are bullish, but I still think the r/r is not so interesting at these valuations…

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

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