Narratives of the week : February 7
Farcaster/Base season and new coins (JUP, DYM, MAVIA, PANDORA)
Welcome to this weekly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !
Ref link shill :
My favorite exchange is Bybit, it is where I take most of my perp trades. If you want to start trading there, you can use my referral link by clicking here or use my code 6Y2XOR
If you prefer to trade on a decentralized avenue, you can go to Aevo which has been very responsive to new launches as it even enables trading of pre-launch tokens (JUP, DYM, BLAST…) : https://app.aevo.xyz/r/VIKTOR
$BTC and the market overall
Almost nothing happened on $BTC and $ETH this week, they barely moved. The market is definitely very calm, which is enjoyable in my opinion. In these conditions, you need to spend less time staring at the charts, there are less opportunities (to catch or to miss…) so less stress, and you can have more time for thinking and research.
$BTC stands at $43k, $ETH is close to $2400, and ETHBTC is at 0.055, finally showing some signs of strength again.
The fact that $BTC is going sideways after a massive event that could have been a big sell the news nuke, is actually very bullish. Seeing this makes me think that the <$35K targets are too pessimistic. So many people are waiting for them, and they are likely to not come. Even going back to $38k might not happen, but it remains my main scenario.
However, $COIN (Coinbase stock) opened yesterday with a very nasty -8% red candle. I don’t know if tradfi “knows something”, but it is generally a negative sign for crypto to see crypto stocks sell off.
Farcaster and Base season
One protocol has been skyrocketing in popularity during the last days, and it is Farcaster. Farcaster is a decentralized social network founded by Dan Romero, who is a former Vice President at Coinbase. The team introduced a new feature to Farcaster a few days ago, it is called Frames, and it is a way to integrate new tools into the social network, that are not only tweets (called “casts” on Farcaster by the way), but can enable NFT minting, the integration of blog articles, and potentially even swap features. Adding web3 features to social networking seems like the logical future for these apps, and overall the execution by the Farcaster team has been top-notch. Anyone can create a frontend for Farcaster, and the most used frontend is WarpCast, which is built by the Farcaster core team too.
You can join Farcaster through Warpcast by using my invite link here. The financial incentive to be early is not as important as on Friendtech (that I mostly faded), but I think you definitely won’t regret having joined.
Farcaster contracts are deployed on Optimism, but for some reason, there seems to be a tight link between Base and Farcaster. It looks like any memecoin related to Farcaster is released in priority on Base. One main memecoin is a proxy for Farcaster, and this is $DEGEN, which went from $10M to $100M (peak at $140M) in market cap in week.
My main bet on Base is $TOSHI, it is a cat coin and the main Base memecoin. $TOSHI benefitted massively from the BONK craze because it 10x’d in December. I bought some, and plan to buy more, as it could end up with a BONK-like run.
What happened in the altcoin market this week ?
The best performer among top 100 coins this week is $LINK, despite the team having sent close to $200M of $LINK to CEX that they are presumably selling. I am not sure that there is a specific catalyst, but $LINK is a token that remained stuck in a range for almost 2 years, and it had an explosive move in October / November 2023, to then remain in another small range ($14-$16) for several weeks. Now it broke out of this range, and the chart looks really beautiful for a nice continuation of the move.
Along with $LINK, two of the best performers this week are other oracle-related coins, $PYTH and $FLR. $PYTH is the “Chainlink of Solana”, and it has been listed on Binance this week. $FLR is a very under-discussed token, considering the fact that it is a top 100 coin listed on Coinbase that is up +60% in a month. It seems like it is a kind of “oracle L1” (after my quick research…).
One of the strongest tokens of the month, $PENDLE, keeps pumping. $PENDLE has become the best beta to EigenLayer. Its price action reminds me a lot of $INJ, ie very small drawdowns (especially vs $BTC) and higher lows printed constantly. This is the type of coin that is the easiest to hold. The Ethereum and zkSync dex $MAV is also one of the absolute best-looking charts across all crypto.
Besides $PENDLE and $MAV, the other ETH beta coins are showing strength again too : the main trio $OP, $ARB, $LDO of course, but also $ENS, which is actually the best-performing one. $ENS announced a partnership with GoDaddy, which is one of the main web domain registrars. $ENS was shilled by Vitalik a few weeks ago, and traders seem to have “muscle memory”.
$STRD is absolutely unstoppable : +64% this week, 3x in 2 months. Stride is the liquid staking protocol of Cosmos, and one of the only strong tokens of the Cosmos ecosystem this week. They launched $stTIA a few days ago, a liquid staked version of $TIA.
Jupiter launched its token $JUP a few days ago. The FDV at launch was already very high, around $6 to $7bn, and it was also hit with FUD because the team is criticized for extracting too much money out of this launch. You can read an example of such a FUD tweet below, and you can decide for yourself if it is justified or not. The team has added liquidity in a range between $0.4 and $0.7 and it will pull the liquidity out tomorrow. I would not be shocked if the price pumps after that, and I would actually be surprised if there was not any kind of pump on $JUP in the days / weeks to come.
2 coins launched today : $DYM and $MAVIA. $MAVIA is a crypto gaming token, and it printed the basic airdrop pattern with a strong dump and then reversal. At $2, it looked undervalued, I bought some later around $2.6, and did not sell. As for $DYM, I wrote my opinion on it in a tweet :
The Guild of Guardians game (Immutable X ecosystem) is preparing for global launch. $GOG is up +30% this week.
$DUSK continues to be strong, +25% this week, one of the rare altcoins that has been outperforming in the last 30 days.
Solana has been down today during a few hours. It barely had any impact on the price, insofar as $SOL is now back to the same price as before the outage. It is like if Solana, as the 2nd smart contract L1, was allowed to have outages without much consequences on the price. That is good for me, as a bagholder !
$RON has been listed on Binance spot this week, and it ended up completely selling off right after it. The same thing happened to $PYTH post-Binance listing. A new meta to have in mind for the future Binance listings ?
On-chain coin news :
A new category of token has been launched this week : it is the ERC404 standard. Basically, it is liquid NFTs, so it can be both an NFT collection and an altcoin trading like an ERC20 token. The first token corresponding to this standard is called $PANDORA, and it went from $3M market cap to close to $90M today in a few days. If ERC404 becomes a narrative, $PANDORA will be the leader, this is why I bought a bag around its first local top close to $1200. I think this can go way higher than $100M but don’t forget that it is already up 30x… It might also be a good idea to look for other similar ERC404 tokens.
$TAO has been listed on Bybit perps last week, and it reached a new ATH at $520 today. It’s decentralized AI, bro !
Two new on-chain coins this week are $INS (Inscribe) and $TRESTLE. Trestle is supposed to connect “projects and users of Ethereum to the Celestia ecosystem”. It is down since its launch, but could end up being a $TIA beta ? Inscribe is the first “cross-chain marketplace” for inscriptions (BRC20 and other chains). It might be a good play in the BTC DeFi narrative ?
Some ordinal collections are hot : the floor of Bitcoin Puppets is almost up 2X this week. Same for RSIC Metaprotocol.
I added $MINU to my watchlist : it is Mantle Inu, the current main dog coin on the Mantle L2. Jordi Alexander makes a good advertising job for the chain with $mETH, a liquid staked version of $ETH with double dose of yield (thanks to Mantle/Bybit massive ETH treasury).
I wrote in last week edition that $WHALES was up 3x in a week… and it is up 4x this week again. I did not touch it, and certainly won’t do it now after such a gigantic run. In hindsight, it was quite an obvious long because of the mindshare of the whole “points meta” on CT. Congratulations to everyone that caught it.
A new “$dogwifhat” has been launched on Ethereum, but its price has been a magnificent Burj Khalifa. The $WIF of Solana is also down -35% this week, it looks like the hype is behind us, and the short to medium term top is in. Same for $MYRO, another main dog coin on Solana, which is down -75% from its top, and down only since the Bybit listing.
Binance announced that they would be delisting $XMR and $MULTI, and they both took a significant hit, with more than -30% drawdowns in a day.
“Pepe Fork”, $PORK, has been launched a week ago and is reached a $350M market cap at highs, almost the same as $PEPE. I don’t really know how this is possible, and think that it is quite a shady coin, but it pulled a 10x post-launch.
The $TRUMP memecoin is up 2x this week. The current market cap is $120M. That is another example of “obvious in hindsight” trade that one should have taken, but I am wondering if buying at these prices is still a good idea. Yes, according to Andrew Kang :
Some good tweets / threads :
Shiny new coin meta :
Introduction to volume profiles :
Don’t bid the same thing in 2024 and in 2025 ?
Sell the “dead cat bounce” after sell-the-news ?
The RSS3 thesis :
SOLBTC > ETHBTC ?
ETH leading signals the end of rallies ?
List of still active accounts on FriendTech :
Flagships of hyper verticals :
Bid the Binance Launchpad coins ?
What Joshua does :
Watchlist :
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.
Ref link shill :
My favorite exchange is Bybit, it is where I take most of my perp trades. If you want to start trading there, you can use my referral link by clicking here or use my code 6Y2XOR
If you prefer to trade on a decentralized avenue, you can go to Aevo which has been very responsive to new launches as it even enables trading of pre-launch tokens (JUP, DYM, BLAST…) : https://app.aevo.xyz/r/VIKTOR
pendle