Welcome to this weekly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !
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$BTC and the market overall
In last week’s edition, I wrote that $59k-$60k looked like a good place to bottom, but that zone ended up not being reached. $BTC bottomed on March 20 at $60.8k, and then immediately strongly bounced to $68k, and then printed a higher low around $63k. Right now it is back at $70.9K, and the 2021 ATH on BTC seems to act like a support.
I don’t have strong views with regards to what the price is going to do for the weeks to come. One possibility is that we are currently printing a lower high and will find a local bottom between $52k and $62k, but I don’t consider this scenario very likely. Gun to my head, I would say ‘more chop, more ranging, and then up’.
There has been yesterday some piece of news about Coinbase losing a first round in legal fight with SEC, and the market slightly dumped afterwards, but I think it is rather unimportant. The funding rates have rapidly increased during the last 3 days, after around a week of relief and neutral funding. ETF flows were negative everyday last week but are positive again this week.
ETHBTC remains very weak (it is now down to 0.0504) and this is congruent with the fact that the market is less and less optimistic about a potential $ETH ETF approval in May. $ETH currently stands right below $3600 at the moment.
BlackRock, $ONDO and the RWA narrative
One of the main narratives of the week (or past 10 days) has been RWA (”real-world assets”). The catalyst was on March 19 when BlackRock announced that they were launching a new tokenized fund called “BUIDL”, which would naturally be focused on RWA.
$ONDO immediately reacted to the news with a +20% spike, and remained very strong during the days after that, with an overall move from $0.4 to almost $1. $ONDO has become the de factor leader of the RWA narrative, but it is also closely linked to BlackRock, which implies that basically any positive development from BlackRock with regards to RWA will pump $ONDO.
Interestingly, this week was the first time that almost all the tokens related to RWA moved together with strength. Until recently, I have not been very convinced by the “RWA trade” specifically because there were not many runners in this category, but I have been proven wrong by this move. Some people are comparing it to November 2021 for metaverse coins when Facebook rebranded to Meta. I don’t exactly agree. During one month, metaverse coins went completely crazy, but then they topped. Whereas this BlackRock news was rather the “first impulse” for the RWA narrative in my opinion. And now RWA might become very important during the whole cycle, a bit like the AI narrative.
Here are the performances of a few RWA coins :
$MKR : +15%
$OM : +22%
$RSR : +100%
$CFG : +40%
$TOKEN : +175%
$POLYX : +200%
$CTC : +25%
$DUSK : +100%
$NXRA : +110%
$TRU : +90%
$GFI : +100%
$MPL : +80%
Base season
The second main narrative of the week has been Base season. Solana season seems to have peaked with $BOME, $SLERF, and the whole presale meta, and degens have then rotated to Base. Maybe the EIP-4844 has been a catalyst too, because the fees on Base post-Dencun have been initially reduced, but currently they are quite high again (a few dollars for a swap sometimes).
As you know, there is no $BASE token (yet ?), so the most direct exposure for it seems to be $AERO, which is the token of Aerodrome Finance, the leading protocol (TVL-wise) on the Base chain. Aerodrome Finance is fork of Velodrome (which was a fork of Solidly) that is founded by the Velodrome team too. The $AERO token is up 2x in one week and almost 8x in a month. $VELO benefitted greatly from this move too, it is up +250% in one week.
$OP can be considered as a Base proxy too, and it had a few days of strength along with other ETH beta coins like $LDO, but this move was not sustained for ETH bet coins.
Another “large” coin on Base is $DEGEN, which is up a whopping +530% in 10 days. It started as a memecoin launched on Farcaster, that could represent a proxy for Farcaster, but it seems to evolve into the central coin of a whole ecosystem :
Most of the other major coins on Base are memecoins : $TOSHI (2x in a week, the OG Base memecoin that was launched very quickly after Base opened its gates), $DOGINME (the dog coin of Base), $BRETT (”PEPE’s best friend” on Base, already at almost $500M market cap), $NORMIE, $TYBG (Thank You Base God).
$DOGE, dog coins, and cat coins
Speaking of memecoins, the father of memecoins, $DOGE, has been outperforming almost all the major ones this week, and is already up +65% from its March 20 bottom. CBS (ColdBloodedShiller) and DonAlt (2 crypto influencers with huge following, and great content) both seem to have a spot position in DOGE, and the thesis “$DOGE is going to $1 this cycle, which means that the r/r is great” has become more and more prominent among CT in my opinion.
$FLOKI seems to act like the best beta to $DOGE, it is up +45%, and the same is true for $WIF, up around +50%.
Despite $DOGE being back full force, “cat coins” seem to catch a bid too, with people referring more and more to GCR tweet about them.
Some of the cat memecoins are : $WEN, $MOG, $TOSHI, $POPCAT, $LMEOW, $MOCHI, $MEW (new Solana one), $OMNI. (Why the fuck am I even typing this as a grown man ? lol)
$PEPECOIN (another PEPE… coin…) is absolutely unstoppable with +230% gains in a week. $BODEN (5x) is going up steadily too, and flipped the $MAGA/TRUMP coin in market cap. Many people see them as some for of prediction markets for the election, but through memecoins.
What else happened in the altcoin market ?
$BCH is one of the top performers this week in the top 50, it is already up +60% from its March 20 bottom. What are the potential catalysts ? $BCH has its halving on April 5 in a few days, Roger Ver ($BCH proponent during the bitcoin block wars) appeared on the “Bitcoin Takeover” podcast, and Coinbase announced that they were launching futures contracts on BCH (and also on $DOGE and $LTC).
The US government has accused crypto exchange KuCoin and two founders of violating anti-money laundering laws. KuCoin experienced almost $1bn in outflows after the news, but all the withdrawals have been processed, just with some delay. Get your money off the exchange if you want to really be safe.
One of the main protocols on Blast, Munchables, has been hacked for more than $60M this week, by a North Korean hacker. I don’t know how Pacman, zachxbt and the team managed to get it back, but the hacker surprisingly gave back the money to Munchables… That must have been a huge relief for them, considering the fact that a lot of people were wondering if they were going to “rollback the Blast chain”.
Three of the “OG AI coins”, $FET, $AGIX and $OCEAN, announced that they were planning to merge and become a new token called $ASI. They did all pump when the news got out, and they outperformed the market overall this week.
One of the liquid restaking protocols, EtherFi, launched its token $ETHFI last week. Having this first mover advantage seems to have been a good idea, since the token is already up +140% in 10 days. The current FDV of $ETHFI is $7bn, which you can compare to $LDO’s FDV at only $3bn. This suggests that ETHFI is clearly overvalued or that LDO is undervalued, but that is only true in the long-run, and it illustrates the “high FDV new coin” premium. Maybe the spread will get even larger in the weeks to come, but I am sure it will be way reduced at some point.
In the L1 category, $FTM run has been relatively stopped, as it is one of the worst-performers over one week. Maybe that was it for FTM, or round 2 will begin soon ? One of the top performers among alt L1s has been $ICP (AI or RWA bid?). $APT and $SUI, the two Move-based L1s have been strong this week too. Aptos has been benefitting from the RWA wave, since Ondo announced that they would deploy on Aptos, and Aptos seems to have become another “BlackRock coin” for some reason (actually the reason is “degens want a narrative to pump it”).
$MNT (Mantle) token pumped massively (+50%) on the Upbit listing news.
TON Foundation Launched $115M Community Rewards Initiative, and the $TON coin remains very strong, with a move from $4 to $5 despite an already huge market cap.
Angle Protocol announced the launch of their $USDA stablecoin. I am very bullish on the team, but until now their protocol was centered around a euro stablecoin, and most people in the market are not really interested by €, so this is very good news.
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
Well detailed sir, you are among the best
Thank you for providing all the details, and it seems like you haven’t missed any news, which is great. Thank you mate 😉