October recap : narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch
Uptober for BTC, DOGE, Murad coins (SPX, POPCAT), and the birth of GOAT
Welcome to this monthly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !
Main events that happened in October :
The $EIGEN token finally launched on October 1st and it has been mostly a disappointment price wise. It ranged for 20 days and at the end of the month started to even make new lows. On November it hit $2.3 ie around $4bn FDV, almost -50% lower from its ATH. EIGEN seems so dependent on $ETH, and with ETHBTC trending down non-stop, it’s not so surprising that the EIGEN price action is lackluster.
$SCR falls into a similar category. It has been launched in October, and 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, 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.
Other newly launched coins include : $PUFFER (liquid restaking token, pumped 3x in a day and then down only), $DEEP (’liquidity layer’ on Sui, it pumped 7x after the launch before selling off) and $CARV (this one also 3x’d in the days after the listing before dumping).
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 for $WLD before it, from October 11 to October 15. It then sold off two days before the event and then again during the live stream, but bounced back the day after that… before dumping again over the second-half of October.
The ApeChain from Ape Coin ($APE) has been launched on October 20 without any form of initial hype, but it lead to a giant +120% pump in a day. $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. Not surprisingly, $APE has been selling off since its pump.
On October 11, Eugene, who is a top Binance leaderboard trader and who is massively copytraded, 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. 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, $ENA then had another +40% move up in the following days.
Uniswap announced on October 10 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.
$TIA finally had its very awaited unlock of $1bn worth of tokens on October 30. It did not have a very significant impact on price on the exact unlock day, but $TIA went down -30% during the second half of October.
One of the prevalent themes for FUD over the month has been the conflict between Israel and Iran, it lead to the sell-off on October 1st (when Iran attacked Israel) and a small one on October 25 (when Israel attacked Iran).
Main narratives of October :
Uptober for $BTC and BTC.D
October was a good month for $BTC, and the ‘Uptober’ meme was true once again. We had the usual ‘early month dump’ where $BTC dumped from $64K to $60K on the first day, and then reached a monthly bottom at $59k on October 10, but then it spend the whole rest of the month ripping, and went close to making a new ATH on October 29 when it went above $73k.
A lot of this pump can be explained as a ‘Trump trade’ since a Trump victory would be massively bullish for crypto and the Trump odds on prediction markets have gone up and topped on the same time as $BTC at almost 67%.
$BTC closed the month at $70K with +10% monthly gains, and its price will now entirely depend on the outcome of the US presidential elections.
October has not been a particularly good month for altcoins though, with OTHERS/BTC down -15% and BTC.D reaching new cycle highs at more than 60%. Long BTC.D was a great trade for October, and to be precise, the best portfolio for October would have been : long BTC / short ETH / long SOL / short most CEX altcoins / long hot on-chain memecoins.
The Murad mania : $SPX, $POPCAT, $GIGA
The first half of October has been a full blown Murad mania on-chain.
Murad is an investor (fund manager ?) that has been pushing the memecoin supercycle narrative a lot, while focusing on a small selection of memecoins that he’s constantly bullposting.
The 3 main ones have been : $POPCAT, $GIGA, and $SPX. He only started bullposting $SPX in mid-September but it was the perfect catalyst for this coin since it had a tremendous effect on the price : it went from $10M mcap to more than $900M in a month. In the same time, Murad recently gave a talk at Token2049 where he explains his memecoin thesis.
This means that a very reflexive loop has begun where Murad’s favorite memecoins pumping implies that people get increasingly interested in his thesis, and then increasingly interested in buying his picks, which pushes the price up more, etc. This is why we’ve seen $GIGA pump from $200M to almost $700M mcap too.
$POPCAT is one of the rare Murad picks that is available on CEXes, and it spent a considerable time consolidating at its previous ATH around $1bn market cap, but then pumped by +45% in early October, and then kept making new ATHs during the whole month until it topped at $1.8bn MC in the last days of October.
Other Murad picks that did very well in October include : $APU (+83%), $MOG (+35%), $SIGMA (10x), $USA (+250%), $MINI (+230%), $RETARDIO (+140%), $BITCOIN (+65%).
Coins that were hot during the same period as $SPX also benefitted a lot from this narrative : $JOE (2x), $KEKEC (+350%), $SMURFCAT.
Basically all of the microcap memecoins on Solana that were not dead (active socials, etc) went up 5x-10x from their bottom. Buying memecoins that are a few months old, down a lot from their top, and consolidating seems to be a great strategy in terms of R/R. Read my recent article about this trading strategy to maximize profits on-chain here.
$STFX which is a ‘tech project’ lead by Murad also pumped 6x in October, as Murad has sort of become the new Ansem.
$SUI and its peers : strong first half, weak second half
The first half of the month on CEX altcoins has been dominated by the same coins that have been strong over September ie mostly : $SUI, $SAGA, $TAO, $SEI, $SUPER, $FTM.
$SUI has really been the leader of the whole crowd, and it managed to get to a new ATH at $2.35 ie more than $23bn FDV 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 and it marked the top for the month.
It marked the top for $SUI but basically also marked the top for the other coins that moved with it, especially $TAO, $SAGA and $SEI. $TAO went down -30% from that moment to the end of the month, and $SAGA even worse with a -45% drawdown. $APT on the other hand was a good catch-up trade to SUI in October.
Keep all these coins on your checklist though, because the market will have muscle memory with them.
The $DOGE narrative
Among CEX coins, I would say that one of the main narratives of October has been $DOGE, which closed the month with +41% gains. 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 became a great proxy for the Trump trade and a way to bet on his victory during the election.
Logically, the main beneficiary from the narrative has been $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 which is the main memecoin on DogeChain.
$GOAT and the AI ‘sentient’ memecoin narrative
Another very important narrative of the month 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 $900M (+ got Bybit and Binance perps listing which marked the top), 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… 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 went to $200M (before dumping -97%), $LUNA by Virtuals pumped from $3M mcap to $240M, $FARTCOIN pumped to $85M, $ai16z to almost $100M, $ACT to $70M, etc. The main ‘tech coin’ directly related to AI agents is $VIRTUAL and it had +550% gains in October. $OLAS, $SPEC and $EMP also benefitted from the narrative.
The hype is huge on this trend, and even if I think that the current iteration of AI memecoin is very shitty, this is is definitely a sector you should keep watching.
A few additional comments about some coins and narratives :
October has been another month of severe underperformance of $ETH versus both $BTC and $SOL. ETHBTC is down -13% in October and went below 0.036 (new cycle lows) while SOLETH went up +14% and reached a new high at 0.071. Being short (on a relative basis) ETH and all the ETH-adjacent coins has been mostly rewarded during the last few months.
$SOL had a great performance during the second half of October, when it went up +20% in two weeks. This makes sense as most of the memecoin mania happens on Solana, and all the ‘AI memes’ have been deployed on Solana too. $PYTH, $JUP, $RAY and $KMNO, which are Solana ecosystem coins, have all been outperforming. $RAY in particular has gone up +75%, as a side effect of the volume it gets from pumpfun and the fact that it can be considered as a liquid proxy for pumpfun.
$NEIRO CTO has been crowned as ‘the real Neiro’ by Binance after its spot listing on Binance, and that coin had a +130% pump in a week in mid-October, before being slightly forgotten after $GOAT took all the attention. It’s closing the month with +41% gains anyway, and went as high as $930M mcap at its top. A lot of people remain very bullish on it, including DefiSquared (read his thesis here).
$FWOG is the main frog coin on Solana and had +260% gains in October. Some people have been shilling it as the leader of a new ‘art meta’, which is possible, as $FWOG stands out compared to most other memes with a very unique vibe and visual identity. I like the fact that it’s new and different. Good candidate to go to $1bn ? I don’t own any because this thing does not give good entries to sidelined people.
$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.
$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, after a steady downtrend from its $300M top.
$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 $1300 in 5 days. The rebranding from Maker to Sky has been such a failure that they are planning to literally roll back the rebranding. That’s probably not a bad idea…
Best-performer list :
Best-performers among large caps in October :
POPCAT : +65%
DOGE : +41%
SUPER : +23%
APT : +19%
JUP : +11%
RUNE : +11%
ARKM : +11%
PYTH : +10%
SOL : +10%
BTC : +11%
SUI : +11%
Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in October :
SPX : +380%
GOAT : $1M → $900M MC at its top
GIGA : +113%
DEGEN : +111%
APU : +83%
RAY : +74%
MEW : +57%
TURBO : +46%
NEIROCTO : +41%
PONKE : +43%
BIGTIME : +30%
APE : +32%
ZEC : +32%
SAFE : +25%
KMNO : +25%
MOG : +35%
GNO : +18%
And even smaller ones :
DOLAN : +2600%
SIGMA : +850%
VISTA : +550%
STFX : +500%
VIRTUAL : +554%
LUNA : $3M → $240M MC at its top
KEKEC : +350%
FWOG : +261%
SKBDI : +268%
USA : +245%
MINI : +231%
SELFIE : +199%
RETARDIO : +139%
D.O.G.E. : +131%
JOE : +107%
BITCOIN : +65%
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.