October recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch

Don't fight the trend

Note : most of the figures used in the article (such as the percentage gains over the month) were taken before the small $BTC dump from $35.6k to $34.6k, but this does not change anything in terms of relative performance.

Main events that happened in October :

• Stars Arena, one of the main competitors of Friendtech, on Avalanche, took off during the first days of October but then was quickly exploited.

• On October 16, CoinTelegraph posted a fake BTC ETF approval news which triggered a 15-minute pump-and-dump of 10% on $BTC. And it also initiated the uptrend of $BTC during the following weeks. My interpretation is that people realized that they were under-allocated to $BTC and that the ETF approval would be coming, and rather soon. So everyone decided to anticipate this by frontrunning the ETF approval, hence the pump.

• The speculation on BTC ETF increased when an $IBTC ticker for BlackRock ETF was noticed on the DTCC website. At some point it disappeared, and then reappeared, but overall, the market took this as a sign that the approval was almost “imminent”.

• Uniswap announced that they were adding a 0.15% fee on swaps that are going through their frontend (which is by far the main Uniswap frontend in terms of volume).

• A new router contract of the Telegram bot Unibot was exploited for around $600k

• PEPE team burnt $6M worth of $PEPE tokens, which ignited a pump on $PEPE (one of the best performers of the month).

• Thorchain stopped their ThorSwap bridge/swapper because of its use by FTX exploiter. They reopened it after a few days, and $RUNE is among the top-performers this month.

• The crypto game Big Time launched their $BIGTIME token. Very low float and high FDV (around $30M MC for $800M FDV).

• The Celestia network (Cosmos modular blockchain network) launched its $TIA token, and mainnet went live. Current FDV is “only” $2.5bn, which is less than $SUI ($4.7bn) and $APT ($7.4bn) for example.

• Floki launched their staking feature, with a new reward token called TokenFi, with ticker $TOKEN.

Main narratives of October :

• Bitcoin : By far the most important narrative is the spot BTC ETF approval, it is probably the origin of the overall pump on the market. BTC dominance went from 50% to 54% in a month, and ETHBTC dumped from 0.062 to 0.052. Strangely, the most obvious beta-to-BTC coins, $STX and $BCH, are down versus BTC this month.

• Solana : $SOL had very impressive price action throughout all of October. It went from around $20 to currently $44, squeezing all the short sellers that were convinced that Galaxy selling FTX $SOL tokens could massively impact the price to the downside. If you add this to the Solana Breakpoint catalyst (the conference is taking place right now), and to the general reflexivity we usually witness in crypto markets (token goes up and leads momentum traders to buy it which pumps it even more, etc), you get a solid 2X in a month on a coin that has a market cap higher than $15bn now.

• RWA : $MKR has emerged as the leader of the RWA narrative in recent months, increasing from $650 to $1500. Even though MKRBTC has been down throughout October, the RWA narrative is potentially a long-term narrative that will continually resurface. The other two main tokens of the narrative are: $FXS, but its price doesn't seem to react like MKR, and $CANTO, which has already increased by +240% since the beginning of September.

• Memecoins : $PEPE and $BITCOIN have massively outperformed the market, which cemented their status of most established and promising memecoins for the next cycle. There is also a new trio of hot memecoins during this run : $JOE, $SPX and smurf cat. We could also add $MOG that did a 3X during this run. Go to my TG channel to read more about my opinion on these new memecoins.

• AI coins ($RNDR, $AGIX, $FET, $OCEAN) have show significant strength during the last week of October, even versus BTC, but they have slightly dump since then. One of the potential catalyst is the OpenAI conference on November 6. $WLD, whose co-founder is Sam Altman (co-founder of OpenAI) should act in sync with that narrative too, and it went from $1.5 to $2 this month. It currently stands at $1.88, but moves very slowly in both directions. It think it is generally a good idea to keep an eye on AI coins, because AI is here to stay, and many people like this narrative ($TAO is very well positioned to benefit from this too, but not on CEXes).

Best-performer list :

Best-performers in the top 100 over 30 days :

• $INJ : +102%

• $SOL : +75%

• $MINA : +55%

• $PEPE : +53%

• $LINK : +48%

• $RLB : +47%

• $RUNE : +44%

• $TWT : +42%

• $AAVE : +41%

• $ROSE : +40%

• $RNDR : +38%

• $CAKE : +36%

• $BLUR : +35%

• $NEO : +24%

• $WOO : +33%

• $NEAR : +32%

Best-performers in the top 100 over 90 days :

• $RUNE : +210%

• $RLB : +93%

• $TON : +88%

• $INJ : +87%

• $SOL : +86%

• $LINK : +57%

• $AAVE : +44%

• $RNDR : +35%

Best-performers in the top 100 from their 2022 (rough) lows :

• $KAS : x250

• $RLB : x200

• $INJ : +1200%

• $CFX : +640%

• $RNDR : +640%

• $SOL : +350%

• $LDO : +300%

• $GMX : +250%

• $OCEAN : +240%

• $STX : +220%

• $OP : +210%

• $RUNE : +180%

• $TON : +180%

• $BCH : +170%

• $MKR : +170%

Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance over 30 days :

• $TRB : +124%

• $KUJI : +112%

• $ATOR : +110%

• $BLZ : +89%

• $SUSHI : +83%

• $FLOKI : +75%

• $FET : +62%

• $LQTY : +54%

• $BITCOIN : +51%

• $AR : +48%

A few comments about some coins and narratives :

• The winners of the October run : $SOL, $PEPE, $INJ, $LINK, $RUNE, $RNDR. These coins have been the winners that kept winning. I like to be exposed to these momentum trades, and I clearly would NOT short them. $SOL might be close to a local top against $ETH though. $INJ, $RUNE, and $RNDR are up a lot vs BTC in 2023 (or during the last 6 months for $RUNE), and I don’t want to fade this, because crypto markets are so reflexive. $PEPE is my favorite “DOGE of the next bull run” candidate, and I am happy to see it outperform in this period.

• $NEAR : it underperformed BTC by 25% this month before retracing it all the (relative) dump in the last week vs BTC, and it is now up more than +30% over a month. The catalyst here was NEARCON, their conference, that takes place on November 7-10.

• $APE : has a strong support at the $1 mark (good round number), and it bounced there, and had an overall good performance this month. ApeFest starts tomorrow, so this probably acted as positive catalyst too. The performance of $APE in 2023 is horrendous, I would not be very confident buying it, but if Bored Apes shine again, it should pump with them.

• $BLUR : it is up +30%, performing on par with $BTC, after relentlessly dumping all year long. At the current price, considering that it can be a proxy for the NFT market, it could be a good r/r long opportunity, but I won’t take that trade. The second $BLUR airdrop season is supposed to end on November 20.

• $MKR : if the whole market keeps pumping, $MKR will probably underperform, but if the market dumps, it is possible that $MKR continues to trend up, so it could be clever to add it in a portfolio to dampen volatility.

• Arbitrum $ARB and Optimism $OP : these tokens have mimicked $ETH price so they underperformed $BTC this month, which is not surprising because the focus of the market is on BTC because of the ETF. But $SOL has been able to be one of the top altcoins of the month, so in the alt L1 vs L2 competition, L1s had more attention… maybe now that $SOL has had several weeks of pump, a rotation to L2s is likely ? $ARB would be my choice versus $OP, because Arbitrum incentives are going to start soon, and $ARB has a huge unlock in March, so they might want to pump it before this unlock.

• There were 3 dominant “on-chain summer” runners : $RLB, $BITCOIN and $UNIBOT. $RLB is now above its ATH price of August. $BITCOIN reached prices very close to its ATH again. I would say these are very good coins, and I own a significant chunk of both. $UNIBOT is the outlier here, down more than -80% from its ATH, and not showing much sign of strength. Now I would be more skewed towards buying more $BANANA than $UNIBOT.

• DeFi 1.0 coins ($AAVE, $UNI, $SNX, $CRV, $SUSHI) : they have been underperforming $BTC during the whole month of October (and more generally all year long) until yesterday, when $SUSHI pulled a massive green candle. $AAVE is the best-performer of the basket this year (+75%), followed closely by $SNX (+60%), while $CRV and $UNI are slightly down this year. ($SUSHI was down even more but had such a huge pump this week that it is up in 2023.) My favorite coin of the basket is $AAVE, I hold it and it is a comfortable long-term spot position.

• Crypto gaming : two gaming tokens have shown significant strength during recent months : $MC (migrating to $BEAM) and $PRIME. I would keep an eye on them to gauge the overall strength of this sector, along with coins like $ILV, $PYR, and the new $BIGTIME.

• Metaverse coins ($SAND, $MANA, $GALA) are flat against $BTC over one month. I have a hard time being bullish on these coins on any meaningful timeframe, but in the same time, I think it is dangerous to short them because they usually have some spikes at random times, and at their current valuations, the r/r of being bearish on them, even against BTC, is not so great.