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🙌 Hipsters rejoice

Abe Simpson’s rant about the difficulties of staying hip as you age is just as insightful when applied to crypto.

Five years ago, you might have been with “it.” You might’ve stacked your portfolio with coins like litecoin, XRP, stellar and cardano, and maybe even zilliqa, waltonchain, lisk or omisego.

But the market soon changed what “it” was. Now what you’re holding isn’t “it” anymore, and what’s “it” seems weird (AI agent memecoins) and scary (pump.fun rugs).

It’ll happen to you!

While looking back, 2019 does feel like another world — years before Bored Apes, Ethereum layer-2s and memecoins other than DOGE — some things haven’t changed at all. 

The top three coins this morning were BTC, ETH and XRP, just as they were back then. You can even go further into the past to July 2016 and find the exact same projects in podium positions.

Still, outside of those three, much of the market indeed looks vastly different than it did in previous cycles. Hundreds or even thousands of coins have fallen off. 

NEO, IOTA, Tezos, Ontology, NEM and Zcash were top-25 projects in May 2019. Now Tezos is the only one barely in the top 100, replaced by Solana, Toncoin, Avalanche and Chainlink.

But as we all wait for altcoin season to lift boats, a string of dino coins are doing their best to keep ahead of the curve.

I spent the morning filtering price data for coins in the current top 250 by market cap, specifically their bitcoin ratios (their price in BTC).

You probably know, but when bitcoin goes up, the market tends to move everything else up to compensate. USD-denominated prices are then mostly noise — the signal is easier to find by comparing how coins are doing against bitcoin itself.

As it turns out, of the 188 coins in the top 250 that aren’t stablecoins, liquid staking or wrapped tokens, one-third (61) have had their bitcoin ratios rise in the past year (they’ve outperformed BTC).

And of those coins, almost one-third (20) are what you might consider dino coins — tokens tied to projects that were launched at least five years ago. Those are shown in purple on the chart above.

Still, newer coins absolutely dominate. The best-performing dino coin in the past year, CHEX, the native token for license-heavy RWA chain Chintai, has returned about 300% against bitcoin in the past year. 

Meanwhile, I had to remove seven newer tokens from the first chart as their bitcoin ratios had ballooned by thousands of percent, completely dwarfing the rest of the coins. Four of them were memecoins (WIF, BRETT, POPCAT and MOG) as well as mantra, virtuals and aerodrome.

What’s cool is that the market also does seem to be paying attention to some more obscure dino coins. 

There are the obvious ones: DOGE, XRP, XLM, BNB and TRX. which all rallied hard in the past few weeks. But there’s also coins like livepeer, telcoin, nervos, reserve rights and XYO, which rarely show up on many radars.

Calling it now: This altcoin season is one for the eclectic crypto hipster that doesn’t care what “it” is at all.

— David Canellis

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• BTC bounced off $96,200 earlier this morning for the second time in two days.

• USDT has reflipped XRP amid a correction for much of the altcoin market. 

• XRP has fallen 11% in the past day and 20% over the week. It’s still up 250% since this time last month.

• Over $430 million has flowed into Ethereum and Arbitrum bridges in the past week.

• Weekly DEX perps volume hit an all-time high last week, over $96 billion, nearly half of it on Hyperliquid. The previous high was $85.4 billion in March.

🍯 Smell the honey

Who here remembers the Blocksize War? 

I’ll be honest, at the time I was not paying attention to crypto, which means that I missed the saga play out in real time. Though, after starting to report on bitcoin a few years later, it was required reading to get up to speed. But it doesn’t seem as prevalent nowadays…at least not just yet. 

ICYMI: The so-called war was really a debate on the scaling of bitcoin. 

I’m not trying to rehash old news, but today’s episode of Empire was an interestingly technical one, focusing on a paper studying the complexities and risks facing bitcoin consensus from Electric Capital’s Ren and Block’s Steve Lee. 

It’s hard not to argue that this past year has marked a major turning point for bitcoin. We’ve got multibillion-dollar buys from MicroStrategy happening nearly once a week, the bitcoin ETFs are pumping — as David brought up yesterday — and more and more firms are looking to add bitcoin to their balance sheet. If you’re looking at this from the Wall Street perspective, as I’m guilty of doing, then everything looks hunky-dory. 

As Jason Yanowitz pointed out in Empire this morning, firms like Coinbase and BitGo are continuing to build trust and dig their roots into crypto deeper and deeper, making them as much of a mainstay for this industry as, say, JPMorgan. 

Here’s the catch though: Does this make them a vulnerable honeypot?

Ren and Steve’s consensus seemed to be that it does.

“I’d love to see ETFs distribute the coins across more custodians,” Steve said, as a way of making the honeypot just a little less sweet. 

If ETFs continue to dominate the market, perhaps it’s just a matter of time until we see more demand for them to spread their bitcoin over a number of third parties. 

Or, perhaps, more firms need to plant their roots to diversify the space.

— Katherine Ross

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• Max Resnick ditched his Ethereum research position for Solana, and our very own Jack Kubinec spoke to him about the move. 

• The quantum future isn’t quite here yet, Bernstein analysts wrote, which means it’s also not yet a threat to bitcoin. 

• Hailey Welch (aka the Hawk Tuah girl) has gone silent on social media after releasing a memecoin that’s since shed 95% of its value.

• President-elect Donald Trump’s son, Eric, said that the US can become a crypto superpower. 

• After the UK restricted pump.fun, users are on the decline and the amount of new memecoins has halved.

Q: Why is crypto’s attention span so short?

It’s not just crypto. It’s everybody. 

There are a number of reasons for this: social media, the nonstop news cycle, the availability of information at your fingertips. 

Maybe it’s a bad thing. Or perhaps it’s just our next evolutionary step. 

Either way, it is what it is and we might as well get comfortable. At least we all get to jump on the hype train to multiple stops. 

— Katherine Ross

It’s totally all those things that Katherine suggested. But I also suspect there’s something else going on.

When ROI billionaire (that’s Radio On Internet) Russ Hanneman overheard Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks talk about boosting revenue, he famously interjected with:

“Why would you go after revenue? If you show people revenue, they’ll ask ‘how much?’ And it will never be enough. The company that was the 100x-er or the 1000x-er becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you’re ‘pre-revenue’ and you’re a potential pure play.”

Crypto is in a permanent state of searching for potential pure plays, for better or worse.

— David Canellis