Crypto Weekly Roundup: Respect the Pump

Disclaimer: This post contains the thoughts of a medium stupid person (me) on crypto, a volatile and risky asset class. It is not investment advice, and you should do your own research. All information is for educational purposes only. Please don’t take risks with money you’re not willing to lose.

This week was glorious for Solana enjoyers, and the bullish overhang of the Bitcoin ETF approval seems to have put an impenetrable floor under coin prices broadly. Every dip is for buying, and I don’t see what would change that before early January when we reach the ETF decision deadlines.

The Solana ecosystem trade is being re-rated in real-time, and most of these coins aren’t even available on major exchanges yet. The mania is just kicking off.

There is nothing in the way for $SOL on the monthly until about $100, and it continues to crush against every major pair.

Essentially nothing has changed at all since the Telegraph Intern article gave us that mid-October preview of which coins the market liked.

You can see some of the desperation among the people who are overweight ETH especially (and by “overweight ETH” I mean they own any ETH).

Everyone continues to resist the idea that this current paradigm will hold through official ETF approval in January, and every week they are humbled by the market again.

Until something changes at a macro level, I will simply continue to bet on the fastest horse, and right now that is Solana and the Solana ecosystem.*

*Does not apply to my DMT bags, which will surely pump soon.

The Basics of Shitcoining on Solana:

The thing I get DM’d the most often is “What do you like on Solana?” and “Where do I buy the Solana coins?”

So I put together a small primer on the tools, expected airdrops, and my general plans for how to play it.

Rule number one for me is I only ever trade spot. I messed around with leverage, and borrow/lend towards the end of 2021, and escaped unharmed, but I will never touch it again. It’s too easy to blow up, and the small caps pump so much that you don’t even need leverage.

The Solana Ecosystem Thesis:

With all of these Solana coins, the trade seems extremely simple in my mind. Solana is quickly gaining value, and almost everything on the chain has a direct comp to Ethereum. If you think SOL is undervalued compared to ETH, you’re gonna be stunned by how cheap the Solana comps to Filecoin, SHIB, Rollbit, and Link are.

The momentum is clearly carrying SOL higher against ETH, and that means the ecosystem is likely to reach parity as a percentage of the respective L1 market cap. It’s sort of a meme, but it’s very simple and powerful in my opinion until this paradigm shifts.

Now on to the operational stuff.

Solana Wallets:

There are pretty much two widely used Solana wallets. The first is Phantom. This is the wallet I use (with a Ledger, please buy a Ledger - more on OPSEC here if you need a primer).

Phantom is by far the smoothest, best wallet in crypto in my opinion.

The other, newer option is Backpack. It’s fine, I just don’t like the UX as much. Functionally they’re not that different though.

Add one of these to your Chrome browser, sync it to your Ledger (Trezor won’t work) and you’ll pretty much be ready to go. Please please read that OPSEC article if you’ve never done much on-chain stuff before though. This is real money you’re putting in these wallets, and you need to protect it.

Token Trackers & Dexes:

The one quirk of Solana is they just launched a new token type called Token22, or “SuperTokens”. The tokens do some extra stuff, but for our purposes it doesn’t really matter right now. Basically, the metadata won’t totally show properly, even in Phantom wallets, and they won’t show on Coin Gecko or even DexScreener for the time being.

Most Solana tokens aren’t SuperTokens, but more are launching, and you’ll want to be able to see them as new stuff comes to market, so Birdeye.so is going to be your best bet for checking the charts and monitoring price action.

On the Dex front, everyone should just use Jupiter. It’s really smooth, very intuitive, and if you’re coming from another chain you’re gonna love the low fees/potential airdrop.

Jupiter is an aggregator, so it will basically route your trades through different Dexes to get you the best price. It’ll show which Dex it routes you through, and how many different swaps it requires.

Airdrop Farming:

Jupiter: Jupiter was also one of the first airdrops announced during this new bull run a week or so ago.

The BONK airdrop hit in January, Pyth (the Link of Solana) already dropped, and the first round of Jupiter is locked with their recent snapshot, but they’re going to do what sounds like four airdrops total in the next few months (10% of supply is being dropped soon, but they held 40% total for airdrops).

Jito: Jito is almost certainly up after that. They just announced the broad strokes of their token.

Jito is liquid staking, so the Solana equivalent of Lido. Liquid staking means you stake your SOL with a validator to help secure the network, but you’re still able to use it for things like DeFi collateral while it earns yield. For example, you could stake your SOL with Jito and then deposit it in MarginFi, Solana’s borrow lend platform (also likely to do an airdrop), and take a loan against it if you wanted to.

MarginFi: MarginFi is basically Solana’s version of Maker. You can deposit your coins and take loans against them, or you can stake them for yield while other people borrow them. Pretty straightforward, and the airdrop has been rumored for six months now. No official news yet, and I personally don’t ever touch borrow/lend stuff because I don’t like margin and protocol risk, but it’s a likely airdrop target if you’re hunting.

Tensor: Tensor is the main Solana NFT marketplace now, and Solar wrote a great thread last night about the mechanics of a potential airdrop if you’re interested.

Right now their NFT, Tensorians trades at a 45 $SOL floor. NFTs aren’t really my thing but it’s good ecosystem exposure if you want it.

Those are the main rumored airdrops, but worth noting that Solana teams in general LOVE to reward token holders in the ecosystem when they launch their pie-in-the-sky bull market projects. We’re probably only a few months away from that mania starting in earnest.

Coins I Own:

My public shitcoining wallet is blockgraze.sol (9vP9XiVzPkF1djf98tj64tJe5FpawoMPo4qBKasb4KCA) if you want to follow along. It’s worth about $41k at the time of this writing, and will surely be worth millions in short order.

That’s what I’ve assured my girlfriend’s parents anyway.

Note that all of these coins have already pumped substantially, and you should generally size your alt positions so that you can easily survive them going to zero in a single candle. Be safe out there, and don’t ever invest money that will keep you awake at night.

My positioning, in order, is as follows:

• $SHDW: Basically the Filecoin of Solana. I laid out the full bull case in a recent newsletter here.

• $SCS: Basically it’s Rollbit but (still) on Solana. An on-chain casino (the traditional kind). Usage metrics here courtesy of Dune.

• $BONK: Solana’s primary dog coin. The thesis is “Bonk Bonk”.

• $GUAC: This one is a bit of a weird one. I think it started as a meme coin, but then they built a swaps feature, and a research feature, and even have some casino games. I bought some two days ago and it’s up like 100% since then so that’s pretty good. Overall I think this is quite risky, but the market cap is just really cheap and I think that’s a good lens for evaluating what’s likely to pump the hardest in the short term as more people start paying attention.

• $WIF: Don’t buy this one I just think it’s funny. It’s a dog, but with a hat.

I also own some $WOOF, but that one is just a roundtrip from last cycle.

RETVRN.

One Good Meme: