Always look for the silver lining.

Empire is not always in the business of sharing life hacks. But here’s a big one: don’t be a pessimist. Cynics and pessimists are always exhausted. And they’re so boring.

So, what’s crypto’s silver lining right now? 

Bitcoin’s positive correlation with stocks means you must no longer worry about specific threats to crypto. That frees you up to focus on threats to our shared baseline reality that might crash the Nasdaq. Much better.

Meanwhile:

• BTC continues to hover under $100,000 and is now down 2% in the past week. Current price: $96,300.

• The ETH/BTC ratio is looking to pick up from 4.5 year lows, gaining 1.3% in the past day to 0.02753.

• USDC sets a new record for supply at over $56 billion after major growth on Solana.

😤 No pressure

If you’re not ready to give up on a monster altcoin season — one on which to stake the future of your entire family bloodline — I totally get it.

Luckily, I’m here to make the case that we really are in the middle of one. It’s just hard to tell, because it’s happening to much smaller coins.

I spent the morning mapping the most recent all-time highs for the current top 1,000 coins by market cap. 

The goal: find how many coins have set new price records in the past few months, as well as the number of coins that have not yet returned to their all-time highs set during 2021’s altcoin season.

Because the sample size was very broad — including coins valued at under $30 million — coins that did not have at least $1 million in trading volume in the past day were filtered out. 

Same with stablecoins, liquid staking tokens and other types of wrapped assets. I just wanted the coins that could moon on their own merit.

That left 361 different coins. And of those, 136 (~38%) had set their most recent all-time highs in 2024 or 2025.

Meanwhile, there were 124 coins that had established price records in 2021 — peak altcoin season — that are still not broken today. That counts ETH, AVAX, DOT, SHIB, 1INCH and GNO.

Another 42 were set in 2022, mostly before Terra imploded in May of that year. Including TWT, SWEAT, COW and WAVES.

So, at the very surface level, the past two years have seen a comparable amount of coins reach all-time highs at least once to 2021. Which is impressive, all things considered.

Even better is that out of the 136 coins to break price records across this year and last, more than half have done so since December. 

That’s 70 chances that traders have had to catch a coin on its way to all-time highs in the past nine weeks or so.

Does all this an altcoin season make? Maybe. It doesn’t fit the mold I’ve previously sketched out, but it does say something about the state of the market.

And here it is: 50 of those 70 chances since December were memecoins or coins tied to AI agents. Which mostly first launched in that same period.

Perhaps, altcoin season is already here. It’s just really hard to capitalize on it. 

I had initially figured that small-cap coins would be symbolic of our bull market — market caps of between $250 million and $2 billion.

Except as it turns out, it may well have been localized on smaller coins, micro and nano-caps worth much less, which have demanded traders be so much quicker to enter and exit than in the past. Great.

— David

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Six weeks until DAS NYC.

Big names. Big conversations. Big moves.

Mohamed El-Erian on the macro forces shaping global markets.
Mike Novogratz on where institutional capital is actually flowing.
Anatoly Yakovenko on the tech pushing crypto and finance forward.

Bring your team. Group passes are 25% off for 10+ people, but only until Feb. 14. Smaller groups (4-9) still save 15%.

📅 March 18-20 | NYC

• World Liberty Financial launched a token reserve though we don’t know yet but tokens it’ll invest in.

• “Not our circus, not our monkeys” was the general tone SEC commissioner Hester Peirce took when asked about memecoins in an interview. 

• Another one: BitGo is weighing an IPO in the second half of this year, according to Bloomberg.

🤩 Hyped up

The vibes may not be great, but it’s hard not to be hyped about HYPE. 

The token’s seen a bit of sell pressure since the beginning of this month, falling to around $23. Yet it’s certainly having a better month than others. 

K33’s David Zimmerman found that HYPE makes up 55% of 7-day DEX volumes, and there’s so much open interest that it could be compared to some of the biggest CEXs. It’s around 47% of OKX’s levels or 13% of Binance’s. 

Let me back up for a second: Hyperliquid, ICYMI, is a layer-1 and a DEX.

“Unlike many projects in the crypto space that launch tokens before delivering a fleshed-out working product, Hyperliquid took a different approach — it focused on building and launching a successful trading platform before introducing its native token, HYPE,” K33 wrote.

And that helped HYPE stand out amongst a sea of token launches.

“31% of HYPE tokens were distributed to users at TGE, while 38.88% was earmarked for future emissions and community rewards. The only other sizeable allocation is for current and core contributors at 23.8%. Notably, especially in a year of major unlocks, core contributor tokens are locked until November 2025 with most vesting schedules complete by 2027-2028,” Zimmerman noted.

Here’s the catch: Things look great right now when you’re looking at the data. If we’re realistically looking at the market then we have to note the weakness in altcoins at this point. 

Is it impossible for HYPE to keep bucking the overall negativity? No. But it’s tricky. 

On the other hand, perhaps there’s a reason folks are, well, HYPEd. If Hyperliquid can set the gold standard for token launches, then perhaps that’s a more sustainable way to improve morale. 

— Katherine

On our mind: The longevity of memecoins