Narratives of the week : September 30
VC coins keep pumping, memecoins catch up, $TAO does not stop
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 is at the same price as 10 days ago, but the “vibe shift” that I mentioned in the last edition has been confirmed. This happened mostly through altcoins, which are for the most part up during the last 7 days, with OTHERS/BTC up almost 10% to levels not seen since July.
$BTC has basically been stalling right below $66k, and it has dumped today to below $64k, but it has printed for the first time a higher high on its chart compared to late August. I am very cautiously bullish and ready to buy dips, because it’s clear that we are now trading differently (in a positive way) from the past few months, but I have not entirely switched my mindset to being a giga-bull.
If it’s October 2023 all over again, we are in for a great period of risk-on markets, but there is still a lot of uncertainty with regards to elections, and altcoins are still emitting around $50bn yearly in unlocks, so I have mixed feelings overall. Being bullish $BTC is the safest choice right now, as always.
On the macro side, we have seen that China is sort of copying the USA playbook and is ready to inject liquidity too, which is once again a very positive thing. Global liquidity will go up, and $BTC will go up on any multi-month timeframe. We’ve also seen positive news on the ETF front, with several days of inflows larger than $100M. Overall I am bullish, but in the very short-term, there is a risk that we are going lower after a higher high, and that we have the usual ‘beginning of month dump’ that happened during the past 3 months.
VC coins and the game of rotations between leaders and laggards
Most of the VC coins have remained very strong over the last 10 days, the leaders are still outperforming, but there have also been some catch up from the laggards.
The three main leaders have been $SUI, $SAGA, and $TAO, then $SEI started following SUI, and then we recently had a catch-up trade of $W, $ENA, $STRK and $ZRO.
Whenever you see that some coins of a very defined category are pumping for a sustained period, there is often a catch-up trade to take with the laggards of that category. Usually, sticking to winners is the best thing to do, but the catch-up trades can seem much less risky especially when you are convinced that the laggards has very minimal downside.
$ENA and $W are great examples, since they were clearly lagging despite being ‘major’ VC coin launched in 2024 and down a lot from their ATH prices. Now they are among the best performers over 7 days. $ENA does have its season 2 unlock today, and they also had 2 bullish announcements this week : the launch of a new stablecoin which is a wrapped version of the BlackRock BUILD fund/stablecoin, and the launch of a spot/perp DEX called Ethereal and that will use USDE as collateral. One interesting thing with ENA is that it is a leader in its category (of stablecoin protocols) and that people could compare it to $LUNA (which had USTC) and consider that the target for the cycle top is $100bn FDV (which LUNA reached in 2022).
$SUI, $SEI and $SAGA are among the best performing coins from bottom, and all of them are L1s, VC coins, and ‘s coins’ (lol). They are moving together and don’t seem to be topping, even if at almost $18bn FDV, $SUI seems very expensive to me.
Another L1 coin that seems to follow their strength is $FTM. The Sonic catalyst makes it an interesting long, but I will be short-biased on it as soon as Sonic is out.
$TAO and the AI narrative
One of the most noticeable moves in the last 10 days has been the continued strength of $TAO. I have written a few times that TAO was a cult and that you don’t want to fade cults in crypto, but I have also always been wary about the large FDV it has.
Anyway, TAO seems to have become the #1 bet for crypto x AI, and this sector does not have any ceiling, so if you had to imagine a top target for $TAO, it would be $100bn FDV.
The $TAO pump also ignited an AI bid across the board : $NEAR (main alt L1 x AI), $AR, $ARKM, $PHB (AI x China), $FET, $RNDR, $AGI, $WLD, $MASA (new AI small cap).
No significant winner besides $TAO, I have spread my AI bets among several coins.
Memecoins are catching up
The largest CEX memecoins have been lagging hard vs VC coins up until September 26, but they are basically up +25% since then. $WIF, $BONK and $PEPE are up between +30% and +40% over a week, and $SHIB, $FLOKI and $DOGE also have double digit gains. The new Japan Prime Minister is called Ishiba, and as retarded as it sounds, this could have been a reason for the +30% pump $SHIB had in two days.
$POPCAT has been the strongest ‘large cap’ memecoin in September, but it is currently stalling around $1bn mcap which is also its previous ATH. This was an opportunity for $MOG to partially catch up with a +30% move in 10 days. I like $CAT (Simon’s Cat) as a long too, as I think it has not topped, and it is just consistently printing higher lows so you can size up on it with tight invalidation.
A significant mover in the last ten days has also been $MOTHER, the coin of Iggy Azaela, which is up 2x and went close to $150M market cap. I don’t like this coin too much, but many people are bullish on it, I would not be surprised to see it reach its ATH and beyond. $DADDY which is Andrew Tate coin is also up 2x in a week.
The on-chain mooners of the week : $MOODENG and $SPX
The leading on-chain memecoin of the last 10 days has been $MOODENG, which is based on the now world-famous pygmy hippo called Moo Deng. The chart of the memecoin is really incredible, it has basically been pumping in a straight line from $300K to $320M market cap, and is now stalling in the $200M-$300M region. Some people are expecting it to go to $1bn mcap, personally I don’t find the r/r too attractive right now since the normie mindshare for this meme is at ATH, but I can be totally wrong.
Murad recently shilled $SPX, which is an ‘old’ Ethereum memecoin from the ‘on-chain summer’ 2023 era that has never been able to go higher than $30M mcap but never died either, and this time it pumped extremely strongly from $10M to now more than $100M mcap. $JOE is in the same category and started pumping too, but I expect it to catch up way more, as it’s only $15M right now, and SPX and JOE had similar size for months.
What else happened in the altcoin market ?
As China seems to follow USA path and inject liquidity into the markets too, there has been some talks about the return of the ‘China narrative’, which was hot in early 2023, especially with $CFX which was the leader back then, and is up +35% in 10 days.
$ETHW, the fork of ETH that is still in proof-of-work, had a random 2x pump in a week. The different Luna coins ($USTC, $LUNC, $LUNA) also pumped. These are the kind of moves (shitty coins up 2x) that you see late in a cycle because everything already pumped and people are looking for random sh*t that is not up a lot yet. But if $BTC keeps pumping, this kind of reasoning won’t hold, as altcoins are basically just depending on BTC moves right now.
Aleo is a new ‘zk Alt L1’ that has launched its $ALEO token recently, and despite the fact that it trades on Coinbase and that its FDV was $5bn, almost nobody has been talking about it on CT. I quickly realized that the float was extremely low, which meant that we were dealing with WLD-like tokenomics, which is why I have been expecting it to pump and have a short squeeze, which is exactly what happened, with a +160% move from its bottom.
Two new Ton app coins have been listed recently : $HMSTR (Hamster Kombat) and $CATI (Catizen). Both of them have been trading poorly since launch, and bleeding from $1bn FDV to $500M. Both are still overvalued, but they will probably have a scam pump at some point.
Overall, the gaming sector has been lagging hard, which means that some new coins such as $PIXEL could offer a great risk/reward trade from now on. The only large cap gaming coins that has been consistently strong is $SUPER. Other movers of the week include $NYAN, $KARRAT, and $MYRIA.
$AERO is up +123% since its September bottom, and does not have any dip. Aerodrome is the leading DEX on Base, and it has also been one of the very best performers of this cycle since inception. If you are really bullish on it, the target could be $UNI FDV, as they are competing with each other.
$PUPS is up almost 3x in a week, as well as $WZRD and $DOG which are also up strongly. Are these BTC memecoins finally coming back to life ? I am sidelined on these as I think the UX is too shitty with these BTC ecosystem coins.
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.