Narratives of the week : December 7

$BTC green candle, Ordinals, Memecoins, and new coins gud

Welcome to this weekly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !

$BTC and the market overall

$BTC had a significant green weekly candle again this week. It finally had a clean breakout of its $38k resistance, and went almost straight to $44k in a few days, sucking most liquidity out of altcoins. $BTC went as high as $44.5k but has now “dumped” to $43k. $ETH followed $BTC, but with less energy, just as it has done it during the last 2 months. $ETH currently stands at $2250 while ETHBTC is at 0.052, close to its local bottom.

On the 4th of December, $BTC had a -1.5% drawdown and it caused a wick down in a few alts, sometimes of more than -15% (look at $PEPE for example), and then they bounce back up. In that situation, if you have an SL, it might be tapped before the coin rebounds. Same if your SL is “liquidation” : be very careful with leverage, altcoins are volatile and you don’t want to get out of the market because of wick downs that inevitably occur.

I wrote yesterday a tweet about the evolution of BTC dominance during the recent weeks, here it is :

Chart of BTC.D, step by step :

1. Oct 16 - Oct 24 : CoinTelegraph intern tweet wakes up everyone to the fact that the $BTC ETF is coming and that they will be under-allocated. BTC pumps and outperforms (alts simply follow the move), BTC.D goes up.

2. Oct 24 - Nov 16 : $BTC slowly moves up in an ascending range, alts catchup and outperform on the way up, BTC.d goes down.

3. Nov 16 - Early Dec : Both $BTC and altcoins are mostly stable

4. Dec 3 - Nov : $BTC pumps and outperforms the market again, BTC.D goes up. [=> same as step 1.]

5. ? Are we running step 2 again ? Either we do, and $BTC remains stable while altcoins go up (ie BTC.D down)... or BTC dumps and altcoins probably dump even more (ie BTC.D up).

The altcoin narratives :

Ordinals and BTC beta coins

I think the main narrative of the week has been ordinals. The leader of that narrative is $ORDI, its market cap at the beginning of the week was $400M, and it went more than 3x in a week. And this is on top of an initial 5x-8x pump from mid-October.

I have already mentioned $ORDI a few times in the last weekly recap articles, and I am happy to see it rip : $ORDI is one of the coins that you could have caught a 10X with, with a thesis that really made sense. When a coin pulls a 10x and it was sort of “predictable” (BTC beta coin + new coin + volume on ordinals growing + low market cap), you want to write it down somewhere because your goal will be to fine similar bull cases for catching other best-performers.

Naturally, a few other BRC-20 / ordinal coins pumped significantly too, if you want to increase the risk and the potential reward : $SATS $TRAC $MUBI $PIZA.

If you read my weekly article, you also know I mentioned a few times that $STX, the most obvious $BTC beta coin, mostly underperformed $BTC during this whole ETF-driven move, but this week it finally showed strength, and even had a huge and sudden pump, in a very typical crypto manner. In December, between the bottom and top price of $STX, there is a +60% difference, but it has now retraced more than half of its move up. $ALEX is acting as beta to $STX, so it pumped even more, and is still up more than 2x this week despite its dump in the last 3 days. Even $BCH, another breed of BTC beta, caught a sudden +10% hourly green candle this week.

Memecoins

The second main narrative of the week has been memecoins, but more specifically established CEX-available memecoins :

• $DOGE : +15%

• $BONK : +115%

• $PEPE : +35%

• $SHIB : +15%

• $MEME : +45%

• $FLOKI : +24%

• $TOKEN : +60%

• $BITCOIN (hpos10i) : +35%

Memecoins are definitely here to stay, so the best memecoins will always be among the top-performers. It was the 10th anniversary of the launch of $DOGE, and with the $0.10 price confluence, it acted as a catalyst for the $DOGE pump. What’s more, a SpaceX launch called DOGE-1 is expected for January, which is another great catalyst for the doge. I am playing it safe with a long DOGE / short SHIB trade, but I hope that I am not midwitting this one.

The most impressive memecoin pump is $BONK, which has been absolutely ripping, and does not stop. From its October bottom, $BONK is now up 50X. Similarly to $ORDI, $BONK is a mega-pump that makes sense (”Solana is strong + main memecoin on Solana + main SOL beta coin + low market cap”) and that you could have caught. Write this one down too. The BONK beta is probably $MYRO, which is also a dog memecoin on Solana that performed well.

$PEPE usually has 2 days of strong green candles, and then bleeds for days or weeks. We have seen 2 such candles this week.

It is also noticeable that purely on-chain memecoins are way less in the spotlight compared to during the summer of this year for example.

New coins gud

Bidding new coins in a risk-on environment is greatly rewarded. A few of these new coins had a strong week, and being in price discovery remains one of the most bullish setups you can get :

• $BIGTIME : +175%. It did 5x in a week, bottom to top, and is a coin launched in October. I don’t really want to long it because FDV is really massive (even if FDV is a meme in bull markets, I know…)

• $TIA : +57%. Another unstoppable coin, it reached the $10 Schelling point.

• $MEME : +45%. New coin and “memecoin”. What else was it supposed to do instead of pumping ?

• $TAO : +23%. Price discovery, reached $350. The market cap is becoming massive.

• $BEAM : +85%. Not a new coin, but a new ticker and rebranding, new chart in price discovery…

• $ORDI : +150%. Already mentioned but it is a 2023 new coin in price discovery too.

• $OLAS : +110%. On-chain AI coin in price discovery. $TAO vibes with this one, but a massive FDV in my opinion.

• $NTRN : +40%. Cosmos coin in price discovery.

• $SEI : +15%. New alt L1, moderately small market cap, new ATH…

• $MAV : +16%. Launched in 2023, never had its time to shine.

• $TOKEN : +60%. Very recently launched coin, new ATH this week.

Gaming

The major gaming coins ($IMX, $ILV, $GALA) did not outperform $BTC this week, but some of the biggest gainers were from this category again : $BEAM, $BIGTIME which were already mentioned, but also $SUPER (+70%, and 7x in 3 months), $RON (+60%), $SHRAP (+65%), $SIPHER (+50%), $SFUND (+30%), $WILD (+30%), $GODS (+28%).

Strong coins / the winner basket

I like to have an index of strong/winner coins among large caps, and until now I mainly had in this basket : $SOL $RUNE $INJ $LINK. $RNDR is a good candidate too, but it is more volatile. $TIA is a new coin, but I think it will be included in that “index” too.

And now I am thinking if $AVAX should join the basket too, especially given its most recent pump is not a laggard effect to $SOL (but it was in October / November). $AVAX is also primed for benefitting from the gaming narrative.

Maybe $NEAR is an adequate candidate too ? It is grinding higher every week, in complete silence, but consistently.

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• $LUNC is up +75% this week, and $LUNA is up +39%. I don’t know if there is a specific catalyst, but it does not really strike me as surprising, given the fact that Luna still has a lot of mindshare, and yet the market caps are rather low. “Dead” coins tend to pump hard when the market is risk-prone. $FTT also did close to a 5x in a few days in November…

• AI coins that are available on CEX have been down vs BTC this week, but the two on-chain AI winner coins remained strong : $TAO and $OLAS.

• The perp DEX have been overall rather weak during this whole market move. $DYDX has clearly been underperforming since its unlock a week ago. $SNX, a good candidate for a breakout, is retracing most of its pumps too.

• $CFX, the “Chinese Ethereum” and leader of the China narrative back in February-March 2023, is showing some signs of strength again, and is up +30% this week.

• In NFT land, one collection is the winner of this pump : Pudgy Penguins. The floor price went from 5 ETH to 10 ETH in a month, which means price discovery too. It is now standing at 8 ETH. I would rather buy Pudgy Penguins instead of Apes, Azuki, DeGods, Doodles, Clone X, MoonBirds. The other collection that pumped is Milady Maker, which is getting above the 3 ETH floor price again.

• The $TREE token will launch today, it will be a utility token to purchase subscription on Tree News. It will also definitely be a memecoin that will be a kind of bet on “Tree of Alpha”, the news trader that is the creator of Tree News. Read the litepaper of $TREE here.

Main narratives of the whole ETF-driven pump :

• $BTC and Ordinals / BRC-20

• $SOL and its ecosystem

• Basket of strong coins

• Gaming

• AI

• Memecoins

• “New coins”

Check my whole article about the crypto market narrative November recap here.

A noticeable trend of the last 6 weeks is that many of the best performers are from non-EVM environment : $SOL and its ecosystem, $ORDI and the ordinals / BRC-20, $TAO, $KAS. If a coin requires more effort to buy, it usually presents a better R/R.

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

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