Narratives of the week : January 29

$BTC at $43k again after dump, new coins good

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

This week has been a “deviation” from its range week for $BTC. In last week’s edition I wrote that $BTC was at the bottom of its $41k-$44k range. The support broke on January 22, and $BTC hit a local bottom at $38.6k on January 23, but it bounced the same day. Now $BTC is back in its range and stands at $43000.

The current question is : are we going to print a lower high before going down again or are we going back to bullish conditions again ? I am very balanced on the subject. The current price action does not point to “sell the news” but rather “chop”, especially when you look at the weekly chart. The price being close to stable is in itself bullish, because it means that we are absorbing the selling pressure with ease.

In the same time, it feels like the sentiment sentiment was not bearish enough around $39k, so I would be a bit surprised if that was the actual post-ETF launch bottom.

$ETH has completely underperformed during the whole week, and ETHBTC has been red on the daily everyday since January 20. That is a bit concerning for $ETH, but I think that the Dencun upgrade is likely to be bullish for ETH, and buying it at $2300 (current price) will look so attractive in a few months.

New coins good :

• I mentioned last week that I was long $MANTA. It is now up +65% from my entry, and I took partial profits.

• I also said that I was long $ONDO with a target of $0.3-$0.5. $ONDO reached the target in a a day but then dumped (team selling rumors) back to $0.2. Its current price is at $0.27 and it has been printing higher lows constantly. I am still long and did not take profit.

• A new coin launched this week too, it is $ALT (AltLayer). I mentioned it in this tweet a day before :

I ended up longing it too, it is up +50% from its launch, and it probably still has some room to grow if the market remains hot. I have not taken any profit yet.

New coins do always have some sort of pump in the first days after they launch. You just have to get at least an "okay" entry. Once a support or a higher low gets established on price, the risk/reward ratio for longing gets great.

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• Once again, $SUI is among the top performers of the week, with +43% gains. It has a lot of volatility, but manages to always bounce stronger than it dumped. An interesting chart to look at is the pair trade long $SUI / short $APT : basically what we can see is that $SUI underperformed $APT massively in the months after its launch, then they remained more or less on par with each other until 2024, and in a month $SUI doubled versus $APT. In hindsight, it was a very good idea to take the SUI/APT trade in December, because $APT and $SUI are very closely related (2 Move-based chains, high FDV and low float), and $SUI had a lower circulating supply while also being almost the only L1 that had never really pumped. Now that $SUI FDV is $15bn versus $9bn for $APT FDV, it might be a good time for a mean reversion trade on this pair, but in the same time, it is dangerous to bet against the trend (ie the $SUI momentum).

• $CFX is up +36% this week. Chinese New Year + BTC L2 narrative do explain this performance for the “Chinese Ethereum” ?

• Most of the winners of the last 3 months have been performing well this week : $AVAX (+19%), $SOL (+18%), $SEI (+14%), $ICP (+17%), $INJ (+13%), $TIA (+12%). This is not surprising in a context of rebound post local bottom, because people naturally come back to the fastest horses.

• $TAO is one of the strongest coins of the week with +50% gains. $TAO (Bittensor) is the leader of the “decentralized AI” narrative, and if I had to really dumb it down, I would call Bittensor the “decentralized OpenAI”. I always felt that this coin was overvalued, but it has become more and more cultish with time, and pumped a lot. As the leader of a very normie-friendly narrative, with an enormous ambition, and without any ceiling on the potential valuations, I think $TAO could reach insane numbers. It is the type of coin that I really don’t like that much, but I don’t want to miss the train as I see how high it could go. This is why I own some. Below is a good thread about $TAO by ChiefingZa (Bybit leaderboard trader).

• $HNT is up +33% this week. Helium is one of the leading DePIN protocols, and I would say that DePIN is among the top 10 main narratives of the next bull run. The chart of $HNT shows a very strong momentum, and while it has been down only from January 2022 to June 2023, it looks like it could go up only from October 2023 to 2025. It still has a 6-7x to go back to its ATH prices, and then the fun begins.

• $DUSK : +40% this week. You might remember that it was one of the tokens that benefitted from the ZK narrative during the January-February 2023 echo bubble. Here is how Dusk describe themselves on Twitter : “We are an L1 that delivers privacy through ZKPs, and compliance in order to tokenize and natively issue RWAs on-chain”. So basically : ZK + RWA are the buzzwords, and the chart looks very good (close to multi-year breakout). Besides, they have announced staking to go live on February 1 and an incentivized testnet for February 15.

• $LSK is up +45% this week. It is a very OG token launched in 2016 that is very volatile, and it pumped on the news of the Binance futures listing. Lisk announced in December that they were migrating from being an L1 to being an Ethereum L2, as an Optimism Superchain.

• $WHALES is up 25x since its launch 4 weeks ago and 3x this week. Whales Market is an OTC DEX for trading airdrop allocations, points, and tokens. With the strength of the current “points” meta, wasn’t it a very obvious 10x trade to take ? I completely missed it.

Some other altcoin catalysts and things to watch

• The $JUP launch is finally coming on Wednesday this week. $JUP is the token of Jupiter, which is the main dex aggregator on Solana, and the place where most people trade. At the moment, JUP is trading at $0.6 in pre-market on Aevo, which corresponds to a $6bn FDV. Three days ago, the Jupiter team (or adjacent) launched and airdropped a cat memecoin called $WEN, which performed quite well and is currently valued around $100M market cap. I don’t really like when teams launch more than 1 token (as Unibot announced this week too…), so I did not touch $WEN.

• $FXS is planning to launch their “Fractal” L2 very soon. Below you can read the list of all the catalysts for $FXS. I think Frax is a great project in terms of fundamentals, but price wise, it usually never performs as well as it should.

Source (Fabian HD)

• The Klay x Finschia Mainnet merge proposal is now live. $KLAY might benefit from this.

• A new Ohm-esque “superfluid staking” is live : it is called Vector Reserve and the token is $VEC. It is already up 3X from its launch. I am not particularly bullish on it and don’t own any.

• Apple Vision Pro headset will launch on February 2. It could be a good catalyst for $RNDR, as people associate it to Apple, and for metaverse tokens.

• The $AEVO token is set to launch on February 1. Aevo is the perp platform created by the Ribbon team, and they have been impressive with their pre-markets listing, which are very useful to have a good idea of the valuation of a new launch before it is trading. The $RBN token is migrating to $AEVO, and it has been a great catalyst for $RBN which is up +59% in a month.

Some good tweets / threads :

• Chris Burniske bearish tweet :

• Local top is in for $ORDI ?

• The market is a punishing experience :

• Sell the news is science :

• No one is optimistic enough on the ETF flows :

• Down then up ?

• Long form tweet on $PONKE :

• How to get rich in crypto with no money :

• Buy spot and ignore the noise :

• How to play a new thing :

• Eugene is bullish on $RON (thread) :

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