Narratives of the week : November 3

BTC.D new cycle highs with BTC topping at $73k, all eyes on the elections

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

The $BTC price was $68k on October 22 when I posted the previous edition of this newsletter. What happened after that is that $BTC dumped back down to a $65.5k local bottom, and then failed to make new LTF lows two days later when Israel attacked Iran. This was actually a good signal to go risk-on for the next days because $BTC pumped almost +10% in 3 days and was very close to make a new ATH but it topped at $73.5k.

This coincided with Trump odds pumping at the same time and peaking at 67% on Polymarket on October 30. Now the Trump odds have gone down significantly (55% on Polymarket at the moment), and the price of BTC went down to $69K too.

The best trade to take over the last 10 days was actually to be long BTC.D ie long BTC and short atlcoins, since BTC.D had a 3% pump and reached now cycle highs at 60.5%. $ETH is also struggling tremendously against BTC and ETHBTC is now below 0.036. The only altcoin that was a great long was $DOGE since it’s a direct Trump proxy and it pumped by +35% when $BTC went to $73k.

What will happen during the days to come is now entirely dependent on the election. $BTC will probably be trading like the Trump odds. If Trump wins, the whole market sends hard, but then might sell-off a few days later if we overshoot on the way up. If Kamala wins, the whole market definitely dumps but BTC.D goes up, and it will probably be a dip to buy. How low could it go if that happens ? Probably not below $60K.

$GOAT top at $900M mcap and the AI meme narrative cool-off

One of the most important narratives in the market during the second half of October was obviously the AI memecoin craze that was ignited by $GOAT and the Terminal of Truth. $GOAT got listed on both Bybit perps and Binance perps, and it reached $900M market cap around these listings, but they ended up marking the top.

Right now $GOAT is worth around $450m MC, and at -50% drawdown and given the hype it generated, that could very well have a mechanical bounce, but I think the top might be in for some time on GOAT.

Most other AI memecoins are down bad, $GNON which was the #2 behind $GOAT at the beginning is literally down -98%. $LUNA stands at $90M mcap after a gigantic pump from $4M to $240M.

$VIRTUAL went up 10x in a month, it is the AI agent protocol that created $LUNA. Other non-meme tokens that are directly related to AI agents include $OLAS, $SPEC and $EMP.

$FARTCOIN stands at $30M mcap, $ACT at $15M, and $ai16z at $12M.

My favorite AI memecoins are $e/acc ($12M) and $OMEGA ($5M).

Noticeable moves on memecoins

Besides $BTC, most of the noticeable moves happened once again on memecoins.

$POPCAT reached a new ATH at $1.8 (ie $1.8bn MC) on October 29, without any kind of ‘top euphoria’ in my opinion. It has gone down a lot since then and had a -30% pullback, but it feels like you can keep longing it on dips.

The other 2 main Murad picks (POPCAT being the first) have also done quite well : $SPX managed to get back to its previous $900M mcap top after a -42% drawdown, and $GIGA reached a new ATH at $675M MC.

Another runner on Solana has been $FWOG, the main frog coin Sol, which has pumped above $300M mcap and is a good candidate to go to $1bn.

I could also mention $KEKEC (a 2023 ETH memecoin from the MOG/SPX/BITCOIN era) and $SELFIE (SelfieDogCoin, a Sol memecoin launched in May 2024) that both reached new ATH this past week.

$RETARDIO has been strong and was stopped at the $200M resistance again, but looks ready for higher. It’s one of my favorite Solana memecoins.

Flavor-of-the-week new memecoins

In the category of the ‘flavor-of-the-week’ memecoins, we have $PNUT which is a memecoin for Peanut the Squirrell, which was euthanized by the Democrats Bureaucracy ! (just kidding… or maybe not.) This story was heavily covered by Elon on Twitter, and the coin went from $3M to $120M in a day. It’s now down -50% and likely to have perma-topped.

The Catholic Church recently unveiled the name and look of their new mascot : Luce. What is very funny is that she looks very much like a Milady-inspired character, so obviously a $LUCE coin has been launched on Solana, and it went to $100M market cap in two days but is already down to $20M MC at the moment.

$ETH and ETH adjacent coins keep struggling

ETHBTC does not stop going down, and has now reached some news lows (for this cycle) below 0.036. In the same time, while $BTC ETFs have been doing some enormous volume days, there is still close to zero tradfi appetite for $ETH given the very low ETF volumes.

This gets reflected on the price of all ETH-adjacent tokens, especially the L2 coins, but also $EIGEN. Two prominent figures from the Ethereum community have announced on the same day that they were resigning from their positions on EigenLayer two days ago, and it lead to a sharp sell-off on the EIGEN token, which found news lows at $2.3, ie below $4bn FDV. This looks quite underpriced but ETH betas are usually so weak that I can understand why one would not want to buy it.

$SCR is the governance coin of the Scroll network, which is a zk-rollup and L2 on Ethereum. It has been going down only since launch two weeks ago, from $1.3bn FDV to $600M FDV right now. I tweeted a few days ago that one of the most consistent trend in this market in 2024 has been the downwards repricing of L2 tokens, which are all looking quite bad in terms of price. $SCR could have reached a $10bn FDV if it had been launched very early in 2024 when the market was hot. Instead, they are almost 20X lower than this right now. I must admit though that on a relative basis, $SCR looks underpriced.

The $TIA unlock

$TIA finally had its very awaited unlock of $1bn worth of tokens. It did not have a very significant impact on price on the exact unlock day, but $TIA is currently down -27% from 10 days ago. Taran wrote a detailed analysis of what happened on the OTC market for TIA in the recent months, you can read it below. No reason for me to buy this at $4.5bn FDV…

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• $VISTA (EtherVista) has gone up 10x in a week ($6M → $60M mcap), after they launched EtherFun, which is the Ethereum equivalent to pumpfun. An obvious trade in hindsight, but I did not take it unfortunately.

• I mentioned in the last edition of this newsletter that the bearish tweet light posted about $SUI marked its picotop, and then SUI went as low as $1.6 (-32% dump), but bounced very strongly afterwards. Overall I don’t like the r/r on $SUI as a long ($18bn FDV right now), but despite this recent pullback, it’s still looking decent versus most altcoins, and remains among top 5 volume traded everyday.

• $MKR has been going down only since early August, and it looks like it had some capitulation on October 26 where the price wicked to almost $1000, which is an expected support, before pumping back above $1330 in 5 days. Right now, the price of $MKR is around $1200 and I don’t think shorting it offers a great r/r.

• $RAY (Raydium) has been one of the strongest tokens lately, it is up +80% since mid-October. It is one of the main DEXes on Solana, and could be benefitting from a ‘pump fun proxy’ effect, since the coins that are launched on pumpfun get a LP on Raydium if they get to the bonding threshold (ie Raydium volume directly depends on pumpfun volume). $RAY has reached new highs for the cycle.

• $RUNE has been particularly strong in late October, I don’t know exactly why but it outperformed the altcoin market by 30% in a week. $RUNE is typically an altcoin that tends to pump hard when it pumps, and it was also one of the best performers in Q4 2023 when $BTC started running hard. An altcoin to keep in your watchlist.

• $GRASS is a new DePiN / AI coin launched last week, and it has been going pretty much up only from $700M FDV to $2bn FDV in a few days, before pulling back -30%. There is a lot of volume and interest on this coin. Have it on your watchlist too !

• The Goblinarinos NFT collection was a collection of a few hundred 1/1s, but they had a mint last week for 3000 new Goblinarinos. The mint price was 0.02 ETH and the current floor is slightly below 0.04 ETH. I think these could easily do a 10X and they have the potential to become a cult collection, I am bullish on Gobs. Do what you want with that piece of information.

• $MOODENG has been listed on Binance perps on October 25. This was unexpected, and it led the coin to pump 3x from $75M mcap to more than $250M in a day. I am not particularly bullish on that coin but a Binance listing means it can get have a lot of flows that it would not have had otherwise.

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.