Narratives of the week : November 26
Saylor pumps $BTC to $99.6k, $XRP $ADA $XLM giga pump, memes are weak
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 was around $90k on October 15, and the strength that started right after Trump victory kept going, on November 21, BTC reached $99K for the first time, and on Friday evening (Nov 22), it failed to reach $100K.
Now, a few days later, we are seeing the first real dip since the 74k breakout, and BTC went as low as $91k today.
Yesterday, Saylor announced that MicroStrategy 55,500 BTC for ~$5.4 billion when it was almost at ATH, which means that MicroStrategy inflows into BTC over 20 days are about $15bn.
This is a bit concerning because it means that we’ve been extremely reliant on Saylor to go up during the past 20 days, and it’s hard to know how much ammo he is still going to have. Anyway, I think the easiest framework to have is to believe that we are in a bull market (similar as 4 years earlier in November/December 2020) and that dips are for buying.
So far, BTC.D topped at 61.8% on November 21 when ETHBTC pumped very strongly off its 0.032 bottom, but I expect it to pump again when $BTC breaks the $100k resistance.
Dino coins violently outperformed the market
The largest movers of the past 2 weeks have been a very surprising category : the dino coins, and, more precisely the largest ones like $XRP, $ADA, $XLM.
I was extremely surprised that these have been leading the market and outperforming almost everything :
$ADA : +258% from $12bn market cap (around Trump victory) to $40bn at the top
$XRP : +220% from $30bn MC to $90bn
$XLM : +530% from $3bn to $18bn
These are absolutely massive pumps for coins that are already so large, which also means that they sucked up most of the liquidity in the market, and it was very hard for other coins to keep up, several of them barely moved or were even bleeding during the same period.
If we had to explain this performance, we could say that :
$XRP and $ADA are retail-heavy coins, so it makes sense that retail coming back pump them
These coins are listed on Robinhood, which is an important platform during the bull run since it’s retail-heavy too.
They benefit a lot from the fact that Trump won. $ADA because it was deemed as a security by the current SEC and because Charles Hoskinson is telling everyone that he might be advising the Trump team on crypto. Ripple because they are in a long-lasting lawsuit against the current SEC, and Gary Gensler announced last week that he would resign in January.
They are 2017 coins, and it looks like the coins from the 2017 cycle got more love than the ones from the 2021 cycle, maybe because their supply is extremely cornered ?
Other similar coins that performed well and are ‘dino coins’ include $VET (2x), $HBAR (+230%), and $XTZ (+150%).
Short-lived rotations into different narratives
The rotation that happened (roughly) after the 2017 coins were short-lived, but we’ve seen successively :
2021 alt L1s : $DOT (pumped 2x in a week), $AVAX (2x from its November bottom), $FTM (+60% in 5 days), $ALGO (+120%)
2021 metaverse coins : $SAND (+160% in 4 days), $MANA (2x), $GALA
ETH beta coins : $LDO (+60% in 4 days), $ARB (2x from November bottom), $OP (+80% from Nov bottom), $ENS, $SSV.
A few of the new VC coins : $TIA (+70% in 3 days), $SEI (2x from Nov bottom), $ENA, $MAVIA. $SUI is a special case because it was very strong until mid-November where it almost reached $4 (ie $40bn FDV) but has been underperforming since then.
As usual, the ETH beta coins rotation was the last one before the market took a hit, and that ETH beta pump was accompanied by an ETHBTC +15% pump.
Memecoins have been reported missing
Surprisingly, the worst-performing category since mid-November has been memecoins. $PEPE and $WIF both got listed on November 14 on Coinbase, but both have been bleeding down since then. $POPCAT topped above $2 on November 17 and is now down to $1.25, even $BONK which was the strongest one topped on November 20 and is down -30% from there.
$DOGE has been ranging between $0.36 and $0.42, it had a deviation to $0.48 but has now dumped back down to the range.
Finally, even the new hot CEX memecoins have been obliterated recently : $GOAT (-45% drawdown), $NEIRO CTO (-45% drawdown), $MOODENG (-53%), $PNUT (-57%), $ACT (-57%).
It’s a bit of a ‘pendulum swinging back’ case, with some weak and forgotten categories (dino coins) taking all the spotlight after years of underperformance, and sucking attention away from memecoins which have overall been a hot sector for several weeks.
On-chain memes
In the category of on-chain memecoins, we’ve seen some large winners though :
$CHILLGUY is a ‘TikTok meme’, it basically went from $1M mcap to $500M without any drawdown in 4 days.
The AI agent meme sector remains a very strong category : $ZEREBRO went from $200M to $600M mcap, $FARTCOIN went from $200M to $450M MC at the top, $AI16Z pumped from $150M to $600M at its ATH.
The Solana trenches have been very weird for the past 2 weeks since pumpfun launched the live-streaming feature, which very very quickly brought an episode of Black Mirror into reality, with people doing all sort of stupid / dangerous / wicked things on livestream. The logical resolution to that situation was the shutdown of the streaming feature by pumpfun, which happened yesterday.
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.
memes are dying out?