Crypto Weekly Roundup: ETH Season

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.

It’s been a weird week with the markets closed on Monday, and considering prices are up slightly, people are surprisingly mad.

There’s a palpable uncertainty and nervousness, I think largely because under normal crypto market conditions we would be in for a very healthy dump across the board.

This time is different. Larry Fink’s patented TWAP (time-weighted average price) buys have made Bitcoin red candles mathematically impossible in this new paradigm. So are corrections and all else.

So every time Bitcoin even hints at sneezing alts take a nosedive.

As always, I purely hold spot (mostly dog money) so my reaction to potential corrections is that I will simply wait, but there is an undeniable weirdness in the air. I maintain that ETF flows at this level make Bitcoin all-time highs by April extremely likely, and from there the mania truly begins.

ETH Season:

My original thought process when the ETF was approved was that I thought the ETH season callers were more likely than not to be right, but I wanted to be convinced.

I think it’s now fairly clear that ETH will in fact outperform over the next few months and that the ETF narrative has been proven bullish, and is therefore likely to mostly repeat.

I have decided not to really do anything about this though.

I basically don’t want to own ETH for the majority of the cycle, so if would be a pure swing trade, and I’m still completely unconvinced it is going to outperform by any order of magnitude. It’ll likely be in the 20 - 30% range against BTC and SOL.

It should normally warrant hunting for good ETH beta, but only Blur really seems to be outperforming significantly, and I’m unclear on how the Blast unlocks actually affect that trade.

My experience from 2021 is that in peak mania, the rotations are obvious, and carry absurd multiples. Chasing 30% at this juncture doesn’t fit with my general approach to this cycle, and so at least for this week, I am opting to sit on my hands.

FTX Rumors:

Some chance this is SOL related, but obviously no real way to know if it’s true.

Hopefully, we hear something in the next few weeks and can resume Up Only.

Penguins on the March:

I absolutely love the penguins. They’re the cutest NFTs in crypto by a mile. I paper handed two through the bear market and it makes me sad every time I think about it.

The penguins have distinguished themselves in a way that I think rivals punks at this point. When I see a penguin on the timeline it makes me smile and I immediately like that person a little more.

They’ve also done really well to build a strong reputation, and recently they got what I believe is an airdrop of nearly 5 figures per penguin worth of $DYM.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on the optimal airdrop mechanism (I favor essentially what Uniswap did) and one of the points of discussion has been this tactic of airdropping to select communities.

From a market perspective, I love it.

Airdropping to well-respected communities with strong reach creates immediate chatter for both your token and protocol, and provides a good incentive for projects to be seen as good actors broadly in crypto.

I expect to see this meta accelerate, and NFT projects with good reputations will begin to trade at a premium as people price these kinds of things in. I don’t necessarily think there is a clear community that will benefit from that just yet, but I would be very bullish on anyone who can get themselves into that penguin-tier conversation on the matter.

Starknet Airdrop:

On the opposite end, STRK was announced last week, and it is hilarious.

I don’t have a ton to say about this one because I don’t really farm airdrops, but lmao at pretending this was well executed.

Should have at least sent a little to the penguins.