Narrative matters in crypto, and we all love to track narratives.
Before we dive into the juicy bits, here’s a short of recap of
@_kaitoai
's narrative mindshare methodology. To put it simply, our narrative mindshare indicator measures the social dominance of narrative relative
Mega-thread on projects in the Solana ecosystem 🚀
Solana is gaining momentum with developments like the Firedancer upgrade, growing institutional adoption, state compression tech, isolated fee markets, protocols launching tokens, and many more.
Let's dive in, manlets.
$SEI
- Shiny new coin; undergoing price discovery on low vol weekend
- No unlocks till Aug '24
- Parallelized EVM chain w/ a token + could be a huge catalyst leading up to the launch of Sei v2
- $SEIYAN meme, cult-ish community like BONK + levered bet on SEI
- Price action
Market thoughts and upcoming plays:
- $ETH season - everything is aligned for ETH to pump respectfully. Should likely consolidate at 2.6-2.8k and sends to $3.4-3.5k+ in the near term
- Dencun upgrade on 13th March, $ETH betas like $OP $ARB $METIS $BLUR should continue to run-up
Some scrambled thoughts/ predictions for 2024:
- L2s will lead in Q1, with anticipated competition among them (yes, they will become more silo-ed). EIP-4844 will be a catalyst causing L2 tokens (ARB/ OP/ METIS) to run leading up to the event.
- ARB is poised for a resurgence,
The Curve OTC War updates:
17.5M CRV to 0xf51
5M CRV to Justin Sun
4.25M CRV to DCFGod
2.5M CRV to Ox4d3
2.5M CRV to DWF Labs
2.5M CRV to Cream: Multisig
1.25M CRV to 0xcb5
3.75M CRV to machibigbrother.eth
250k CRV to 0x9bf
Speedrun narratives (Q1 2024)
Jan
- LSDs taking off with ~37% staked ETH in liquid staking protocols
- $SEI run + SEIYAN
- ARB price discovery w/ EIP-4844 catalyst
- ETH related coins moving up w/ initial Eigen + EIP4844/ ETH ETF narrative: LDO, ARB, OP, RSTK, SSV
- $AI ticker
-
ZK-EVMs could be the endgame for blockchain infrastructure.
Although none of the ZK-EVMs is live on mainnet, we are already starting to see interesting applications and infrastructure in the ZK-space.
Spent the holidays reading up on ZK-EVMs, here's a 🧵 on some findings:
Some personal news:
Today marks my last day in
@nansen_ai
. It has been a crazy two-year journey here and I am grateful to have been part of the crew.
It is bittersweet, but I am ready to take this leap in the next stage of my career.
NFT projects are starting to adopt utility token cash flows in their project strategies to give yield/passive income to NFT owners.
🧵 This is a deep dive + analysis on current projects with utility tokens attached to them:
Last week
@dYdX
announced that they are moving to the Cosmos ecosystem.
🧵 Here's a recap on their decision to leverage the Cosmos SDK, product focus, some risks, and trade-offs from building on Ethereum.
$PICA (Composable Finance)
- “Restaking on Solana” - PICA will be deployed on Solana as SPL; proposal has been passed
- In 2023, they connected Polkadot, Kusama, and Cosmos via IBC
- In 2024, they aim to expand IBC to Ethereum, Solana, and NEAR
- Raised $32m in Series A by
What were some of the on-chain findings from the Alameda <> FTX situation?
Did the de-pegging of TerraUSD, Luna’s failure, and the bankruptcy of 3AC all lead to FTX and Alameda’s fall from grace?
Our research house at
@nansen_ai
dug deep into the roots of FTX <> Alameda's ties:
a very simple yet concise framework on crypto x AI from
@balajis
's talk in
@superai_conf
:
- crypto and AI are both trillion-dollar technologies
- AI is top-down, came from prestigious research labs and eventually by openAI. crypto is bottoms up, started with relatively low
Longed $SOL -
- $JUP stimmy in 2 weeks, capital should rotate within SOL ecosystem tokens + attention will be on $SOL
- Triple-bottomed on 3/8/12 Jan
Sned it.
Wintermute Trading has officially joined the Curve OTC deals, acquiring 12.5M CRV ($5m USDT).
To date, Curve Founder has sold 84.5M CRV, in exchange for $33.8M.
a very normal week in crypto:
- $DJT saga involving trumps son, token ran to >300m in 24h
- CT found out that shkreli was behind the token this whole time
- martin and GCR $100M bet about $DJT, cobie the escrow gcr
- zachxbt calls out shkreli w/ twitter DM receipts
- ansem
Spent some time reading up on
@CelestiaOrg
as a pluggable consensus and data availability layer.
🧵 Here are some of my findings and breakdowns on the Celestia design:
1/x
Crazy how quickly tables turn in crypto
Friendtech was all the hype and doing 12k ETH (~$26M!) in daily volume at its peak last September
Today, it's doing about 76 ETH (~$160k) in daily volume...
Study strength - $APT was one of the only tokens that showed relative strength to the rest of the bloodbath. Something is clearly brewing.
A coin that is still majorly undervalued is THE backbone of Aptos DeFi $THL, sitting at 65M market cap.
Thala is singlehandedly doing the
Over the past year, Solana has experienced significant developments, though it has largely gone under the radar.
We've released a report on Solana's development over the past year and what's next for their ecosystem👇
Rough day, lots of great and talented friends in Nansen were laid off today.
Please let me know if there’s any job openings for analyst/ fund/ VC positions that I can refer them to - would greatly appreciate it 🙏
Next meta will probably be an influx of projects being built atop of Bittensor ( $TAO).
Some that are in the market now:
@TensorplexLabs
- introduced $stTAO (liquid staking TAO)
@taobnk
- first project launching from
@TaoPadX
, lending protocol w/ an over-collateralized
Podcast notes
@mrjasonchoi
@theBlockcrunch
w/
@gametheorizing
on:
• Stages of a crypto market
• Why 2022 is unlikely to be bear market, but...
• Opportunities Jordi is paying attention to
• Positioning into 2022
… and so much alpha 🤯
1/x
Watching $NTRN
-First consumer chain secured by Cosmos Hub
- Offers settlement for Celestia rollups $TIA (can ride the Celestia narrative)
- Deflationary tokenomics (75% of network fees in NTRN are permanently burnt, hard cap 1B)
- Strong backers (The team behind Lido)
bought $NTRN as a trickle-down play from $TIA pump
> great synergies with Celestia as a LST liquidity layer
> main beneficiary of ATOM 2.0 interchain security narrative
> potential to overthrow $OSMO
> connections to $LIDO, P2P both seed backers of both
The next stage of crypto will be sticky applications that improves user experience of interacting with different dApps - DreamOS is a really good example so far with portfolio tracker, wallet browsers, defi dapps, bridging, all in one interface.
$METIS is potentially an undervalued play leading up to Dencun. Upcoming catalysts:
- Dencun Upgrade on 13th March
- Decentralized sequencer alpha mainnet launch mid March, external nodes early-mid april. Community Testing is over, but users will now be able to keep earning
BRC20s moon bag:
$TRAC: Infrastructure play for BRC20s
$MUBI: Main ERC20 <> BRC20 bridge
$BSSB: Enables creation of stablecoins using collateral from Bitcoin eco
Best reads on Crypto x AI
- Galaxy's Understanding the Intersection of Crypto and AI
@galaxyhq
- Vitalik's Promises and Challenges of AI
@VitalikButerin
- AI and Crypto: Countering Centralization | Casey Caruso & Daniel Shorr
some things I'll be looking at over the week:
- ragnarok ronin zero drop
- redacted hidden hands
- stepN
- thorchain
- layerzero/ stargate
- pokt v2
what else
$RSTK -
- First LRT protocol w/ native token; first-movers, no direct competitor with token (yet)
- 47.5M circ marketcap, 251m FDV
- Direct bet on Eigenlayer = currently at $1.7B TVL
- Beneficiary of ETH pump + narrative
Looks like CT are looking at these AI plays today:
- NMT (Chinese TAO; AI + L1 + GPUs)
- AIT (First Bittensor subnet w/ token + upcoming catalysts)
- ZKML (Privacy coin; AI tech for ZK proofs and secure computation for data privacy)
Hiiigher?
OpenAI just dropped ChatGPT4. 🤯
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
In the past few hours my feed exploded with insane AI use cases / integrations 🧵:
Carried out an analysis on all NFT collections deployed since February.
Dead = < 10 sales in 30d interval
Underwater = floor price < mint cost
Verdict? 50% of all collections are dead. 70% have floor prices below mint cost.
Will the free mint meta change things?
Wouldn’t be surprised if $FRIEND goes above >$5
> sentiment at all time low, hated rally
> most top influencers have basically sold their tokens if they wanted to
> community is everything
> $FRIEND could be more of a meme token than a utility play, which would actually make
theres a small cap gaming token that’s pretty darn undervalued:
- backed by animoca brands
- grants by polygon
- immutable partnership, will be listed on their platform; opens up the floodgates for more players
- gameplay demo out soon & testnet at the end of Q1
-$2m
Looks like $ARB has decoupled from $OP so far in terms of strength
The thesis remains clear: to bet on the outperformer leading up to EIP-4844; looks like the narrative wasn't priced in after all
ARB up 113% and OP 74% in a month
funniest thing i've seen all day
there's a new token standard on solana that allows you to change the CA anytime
fee increases everytime someone changes the name
someone changed the ticker to their twitter name + added their socials link
One thing I'm doing differently is starting a trade journal on Notion to keep track of my trade ideas and token tickers daily
Makes a big difference in holding yourself more accountable and keeping track of your trades - highly recommend you try it out
The market is showing its hands on what narrative will run next - $RNDR $NOS
Looking at $ALEPH as a RWA + AI + DePIN play
> They've also mentioned they are "working with a dedicated blockchain" (Solana?) for their "pay-as-you-go" model similar to $FIL 's contract-based
Was looking into $TON and think it's still majorly undervalued. Some catalysts:
- NotCoin launch on TON blockchain. NOT is a telegram game where users get to mine $NOT; they've already amassed 10M++ players and airdrop will be this month. This should serve as a liquidity
Base high-level stats:
- 93k active addresses
- 372k daily transactions (as of 8/8)
- $129M Total Value Bridged (TVB)
- Chain officially launches tomorrow on 9 Aug
It's quite clear that we will start to see traction all at once across different chains and narratives
Many opportunities to be "early" into something if you are deep in the trenches
// - AI -
@nosana_ci
• Building a decentralized network of GPUs
• Focused on AI inference
• $23M marketcap vs. RNDRs at $600M
@rendernetwork
• AI x DePIN narrative
• Moved from Polygon to Solana
• Users can contribute unused GPU power w/ the process of rendering
$PUFF -
- Dragon memecoin for THE year of the dragon
- PUFF is highly integrated with the mETH/ mantle ecosystem and was also the largest NFT mint in 2024
- Possibly one of the best token distribution for a memecoin - 30%++ of total supply staked and we are only at Chapter 2 of
A 🧵 on Mantle Network, an emerging modular L2 ecosystem. (
@0xMantle
)
Mantle Network is still in its Testnet phase, however, Mainnet is expected to be in Q3.
Let's take a look at its updates, governance proposals, infrastructure, etc.
New PFP.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Bitcoin Puppets is going to be the NFT of this cycle.
Study wealth effect, study the BRC20/ Ordinals ecosystem, and study the previous run-up of NFTs.
Also study the green candle the puppet is holding here.