Narratives of the week : October 22

$BTC to $69k again, $GOAT and the AI narrative, $DOGE as a Trump trade

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

In the last 10 days, $BTC went from a LTF bottom at $59K to almost touching $70K yesterday. It has basically been going up only, and it also sucked all the liquidity out of altcoins too, with the BTC dominance going up only and reaching a 3-year high at 59%.

$BTC has now very clearly made 2 consecutive higher highs and is in an uptrend since September. The main catalyst has probably been a bet on a Trump win during the election, since we’ve seen his odds go up significantly on most betting venues, especially on Polymarket where his odds are at 63% right now. Apparently, a single whale is responsible for having moved this market by something like 5% (read the story here), so take these odds with a grain of salt, but what’s clear is that they have been going up, which logically leads to $BTC price going up too.

The ETFs have been buying a lot of $BTC too, with total daily flows around +$400M for several days. OI has been going up on CEXes overall, as well as on CME where $3bn of $BTC OI has been added in 10 days.

The price of $BTC now seems to mostly be a bet on the outcome of the election, and while I remain long-biased, I am definitely not adding to positions when $BTC is around $70k (right now it’s at $67k). But any significant dip should be welcomed as a great opportunity to buy, especially if you think that Trump is going to win.

The $DOGE narrative

Among CEX coins, I would say that the main narrative of the past week has been $DOGE, which is up +30% in 7 days. This is because Elon has been pushing the D.O.G.E. Department of Government Efficacy ‘meme’ a lot lately, which means that this actually becomes a good proxy for the Trump trade and a way to bet on his victory during the election.

Logically, the main beneficiary from the narrative is $DOGE on CEX, but there is also a $D.O.G.E. memecoin on Ethereum that pumped from $10M to $50M mcap in a week.

Other beta coins to DOGE did well, such as $DOG (the DOGE NFT) up 2x or $OMNOM up 3x which is the main memecoin on DogeChain.

$GOAT and the AI memecoin narrative

But the real main narrative of the week has been the take-off of AI memecoins lead by $GOAT. Here’s a very concise summary of the $GOAT story : Andy Ayrey is an AI developer that created a Twitter account called Truth Terminal that posts tweets generated by his homemade AI. This Terminal of Truths repetitively talked about Goatse which is a very old disgusting internet meme of a man showing his anus. Some anon decided to create a (pumpfun) $GOAT (Goatse Maximus) token based on this obsession of the Truth Terminal, and then Andy created a Phantom wallet for the AI, and people sent a portion of the supply of $GOAT. In one week, the $GOAT token went from $100k mcap to $500M, and the ToT (Terminal of Truths) became the first ‘millionaire AI’.

Of course this ‘AI millionaire’ qualifier is not really correct and we are still far from a real AI agent deploying a token on the blockchain as I explained here :

But the $GOAT success can’t be overlooked, people are genuinely super excited about this whole AI craze, and a lot of other tokens in that ‘sector’ have been launched :

• $GNON reached $180M mcap

• $ACT reached $50M

• $FARTCOIN reached $40M

• $SLOP reached $50M

• $SHOGGOTH reached $30M

• $MEDUSA reached $30M

• $TURBO which is one of the OG ‘AI memecoins’ went up 2x in 10 days.

The hype is huge on this trend, and even if I think that the current iteration of AI memecoin is very shitty, and that $GOAT does not offer a good r/r from here, this is is definitely a sector you should keep watching.

$TAO has not been following this trend in the sense that it’s been flat for 10 days, but I think it remains one of the best coins to buy to play the AI x crypto long thesis.

Cat coins

Cat coins remain very hot. $POPCAT which is now the leading one as well as Murad pick, has reached a new ATH at $1.55bn FDV a week ago, and is now down 15%. It was a good time to then long the 2 next ones which are $MOG and $MEW. $MEW reached a new ATH at almost $1bn mcap after its listing on Upbit, and $MOG is up 3X since its September bottom, and almost at ATH too. $MICHI is another cat coin that did well and is up +50% in October.

Murad Memecoins

Even if the hot topic right now is the AI memecoins, the rotation out of “Murad’s memecoin picks’ has not been that fierce, and some of them have been doing well. The main one, $SPX, has topped at $900M mcap, but does not seem to give a good dip entry, as it’s only down -20% from there now, with a max drawdown around -40%. $GIGA has also been able to reach a new ATH a few days ago, at $600M market cap. $RETARDIO reached $200M and is down -30%. $APU is also on a tear, up 6x from its September lows, and pushing for a new ATH.

In NFT land, Milady Maker and Remilio Babies also benefitted from the “Murad effect” with Milady floor going from 3ETH to 5ETH in less than a month. Sproto Gremlins floor also pumped from 0.5ETH to 3ETH.

Worldcoin event

Worldcoin hosted an event on October 17 on San Francisco with Sam Altman and Alex Blania. They announced the rebranding from Worldcoin to ‘World’, the launch of their super app World App 3.0 that includes mini-apps (similar as the App Store!), and they launched World Chain (an OP chain) on the same day.

It was a clear catalyst that lead to a +50% pump before it, from October 11 to October 15. It then sold off two days before the event and then again during the live stream, but bounced back the day after that. The lesson is : don’t be too greedy when you short a sell the news event, but once again the news was sold, as expected.

$ENA shill and continuation

On October 11, Eugene, who is a top Binance leaderboard trader and who is massively copytrade, shared a long-form piece about his $ENA investment thesis. He thinks that Ethena is going to compete with Tether, which means that the potential bull case for it leads to a gigantic upside. I recommend you to read it :

It did have an immediate impact on the price of $ENA which pumped by +20% in a few hours. As we were in bullish conditions with $BTC pumping too, we did not see any kind of dump afterwards, and $ENA then had another +40% move up.

$SUI top and cool off

$SUI has been the leader of the whole altcoin market since early September, and it reached a new ATH at $2.35 on October 14. Right after this moment, light (a whale / fund manager that is very sharp but does not share many market opinions anymore) posted a bearish tweet about $SUI, that you can read below :

This marked the top, and then $SUI dumped back to$ $2 (ie $20bn FDV) and has been in a range below $2.15 since then. This is the first time since early September that $SUI is showing some relative weakness, and it’s the also the case with most of the leading coins that were strong with SUI, ie $SAGA, $TAO, and $SEI. $APT still has a lot of catch-up to do to $SUI, and I would expect more mean reversion between them. ($10bn FDV for APT vs around $20bn for SUI right now).

ApeChain launch

The ApeChain from Ape Coin ($APE) has been launched two days ago without any form of initial hype, but it lead to a giant +120% pump in a day, and $APE still has not really dumped from there. $APE has historically been a very weak and underperforming coin since early 2023, which means that when it spikes, it can lead to a strong short squeeze. Nevertheless, I believe $APE remains a short vs the market especially after this pump, as long as you are able to stomach any continuation of the move up.

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• Uniswap announced the future launch of Unichain, which is their OP stack L2 “built to be the home for liquidity across chains”. It ‘only’ resulted in a +16% pump that got faded in the following days. I never really liked $UNI as a coin to long, and this news did not change my feeling.

• Maker has made its rebranding into Sky ($MKR → $SKY and $DAI → $USDS) a few weeks ago, and apparently it was a large sell the news event, since $MKR is among the absolute weakest coins in the market since early August.

• $MOODENG has been in a downtrend since its top, and that has not changed in the last 10 days. It is now worth $85M and is not the flavor of the month meme anymore, in the same time as Moodeng is losing relevancy in normie world. I would not like to long this memecoin. But the r/r for a short is not really there anymore either.

• $REEF is an old coin that has had a very strange behaviour since early September that looked like cartel scam pump price action, since it went up literally 20x one month a a half, squeezing a lot of shorts with very negative funding rates (-3%) at some point, but then it collapsed on October 15 and lost -80% in two days. Thanks for playing, I guess.

• Avalanche hosted its Avalanche Summit from October 16 to October 18 in Buenos Aires, it did not really have an effect on $AVAX price besides a +7% outperformance from October 11 to 14, followed by a retrace.

• A few new coins have been launched in the last 10 days : $PUFFER which is a restaking protocol, and immediately had a +200% pump in a day, before retracing all of the move. Also $DEEP (DeepBook) which is a liquidity layer on Sui, and which also benefitted from the listing pump as it’s up almost 3x (it now seems overvalued at almost $1bn FDV). Finally, the token of the Debridge bridge $DBR was also launched, and the price is flat-ish around $300M FDV.

• Two noticeable listings of existing coins happened this week : ticker $BITCOIN has been listed on Bybit perps as $HPOS10I, and it did not really move its price. And $CAT (Simon’s Cat) has been listed on Binance Futures, which had a large effect on price : +45% today.

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.