Crypto Weekly Round Up: We Did it!

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.

We did it! The ETF is approved, and the newsletter is back.

Apologies for the hiatus, but Christmas and work and the Dog WIF Hat story kept me busy the last few weeks. I also didn’t have a ton of new things to say in advance of the ETF decision.

Anyone who follows this newsletter knows I’ve been very bullish crypto generally, and the SOL ecosystem especially since mid-October or so. My basic view was that the overhang of something so obviously bullish would lead to a huge wave of front running, especially following the Coin Telegraph intern incident.

Now things get more complicated in some sense, and less complicated in another sense.

On the bullish side, the ETF got approved! There’s no more worry that Gary will rug us at the last second. There is also no concern that this thing would launch and no one would really care.

The downside is that about half of the total volume yesterday seems to be people who have been locked in GTBC finally being able to sell at close to parity with the current BTC price, and this added an enormous amount of negative pressure to BTC prices.

If you’ve heard people call the ETF approval a “supply expansion event” this is essentially what they meant. And BTC “crashed” all the way to $46k just as they predicted.

This phenomenon should be done shortly as the arb is nearly closed. So the question becomes “how do flows hold up over the next few weeks” and “is this a Coinbase listing style sell the news event”.

The other little speed bump is that Vanguard is apparently blocking access to all the spot ETFs on their platform because it “doesn’t align with their investment strategy”.

Sounds like we have some bullish unlocks on the horizon. Vanguard capitulating could be a nice and easy top signal if we get there down the road.

Trade the News?

My basic position is that I don’t care about anything except that it got approved. The absolute most bottom-tier bear seems to be basically calling for a dip to ~$32k before the most face-melting rally in human history. As always, I only buy spot, and I haven’t had cash in my crypto portfolio in many months. The idea of selling my bags hoping to buy back 20 - 40% lower and risk being sidelined for the generation-defining crypto bull market seems so stupid to me that I genuinely don’t understand it.

I don’t have any edge on short time frames, I never have. I can’t trade perps effectively (and I’m willing to bet anyone interested in my market analysis can’t either). So I’m just gonna wait. I’m not a huge fan of maxims because by definition they never apply to new scenarios, but I truly do believe “the markets are designed to shake you out”.

If you’re convinced crypto as a whole is going to 3 - 5x over the next 12 - 18 months, then waiting to try and buy 30% lower seems absolutely insane to me.

Many Hands Being Shown:

After the Coin Telegraph article announcing the fake approval in October, SOL/TAO/TIA ripped off the bottom harder than the other coins. The market “revealed its hand” so to speak, and that paradigm had very few shifts through the actual ETF approval.

Nearly everyone, including some traders who are generally mostly right, are calling for an ETH season. The catalyst is that Blackrock has already filed for an ETH ETF, and the DC Circuit Court decision that forced the SEC to reconsider their BTC spot ETF denial was based on the principle that to deny a spot ETF but approve a futures ETF (which ETH already has) would be “arbitrary and capricious” and therefore an ETH spot ETF seems extremely likely to be approved.

That specific decision also means that something like SOL doesn’t have anything like that on the horizon, and in fact many smaller alts have been formally declared securities in court filings against the likes of Coinbase and Gemini.

So far, ETH and ETH beta (OP, ARB, LDO etc) are leading. ETH/BTC looks bottomy, and it ripped higher following the initial fake SEC approval tweet.

Personally, I’m waiting a bit longer. I currently own zero spot ETH, and my only ETH beta is DMT and Sanko Game Corp. Before BTC started nuking and the market stalled, SOL and other previously high-performing alts started catching up, and BONK & WIF have had an incredible few days.

I do think ETH can outperform BTC over the next few months, and even potentially outperform SOL over that time, but for this cycle, I am very bearish on ETH relatively speaking, and would need to see a lot more strength to convince me to pivot away from my current bags.

I also have some great cope memes prepared for an ETH season and I would love the chance to deploy those.

So I’m just gonna hang on and cheer on my WIF bags and BONK guy until I see something that convinces me ETH or ETH beta can outperform over a longer time frame. I am not good at short-term narrative trading, and I’m not going to mess up the progress I’ve made this cycle trying to pretend that I am.

The Dog WIF Hat Saga:

Now onto the brief WIF story.

For anyone who somehow hasn’t seen my 2,000 tweets about it, I bought about $1,100 worth of WIF on November 23rd (about 3 days after launch) after their community tweeted me a bunch and sent me a picture of my tubby cat with a hat on.

I basically wrote the money off. The meme made me laugh and I thought it had potential so I just figured I could maybe make like $20k or it’d just go to zero.

Then I just kind of waited until we got a huge pump on December 8th that I rode up to like $80k or something and then back down 75%.

December 12th we broke out again and rocketed up over a few days. Coin Desk wrote an article about my (at the time) $100k gain.

Since then I’ve sold in small chunks on the way up. I had about 7.4 million WIF tokens when I bought them, and have about 3.1 million remaining.

Wallet here for verification.

WIF is the only meme coin I ever held for a significant period of time, though I made some money in the ETH on-chain season in August and September.

Obviously I got about as lucky as a single human being can get, but the reason I was able to hang on is that some degree of “thesis” developed for me after I started memeing it for fun.

My last sells were on December 21st and I think I’ve sold about $500k worth total, with about $800k left at the time of this writing and almost $1.1 million more at all-time highs.

I plan to sell in small chunks on what will hopefully continue to be the way up. My remaining bag going from $1.1 million to $200k over the last two weeks before bouncing was quite painful, but the comparison to SHIB, the success I think SOL will have this cycle, and the undeniable attention this meme has gotten just made it impossible for me to sell more.

If we do make new highs and get a Binance listing or whatever might be next, I’ll take significantly more off, because I couldn’t handle a 7-figure drawdown again.

But every time I check, the dog still has a hat.

Incredible technology.