I’ve decided that I want to produce more (crypto related) content, so I’ve decided to make this spontaneous post about some of my thoughts recently. I might do this again in the future, no promises though- I’m very much on the spontaneous/sporadic side.
Obligatory Disclaimer: Nothing in this post should be construed as financial advice, this was written purely for educational and entertainment purposes. I may hold some sort of financial interest in tokens/protocols/companies/whatever in this post.
Generally, the market has been really slow, with prices hovering above 19k for BTC and around 1300 for ETH, and has only moved up a bit recently. Unless you’re a top 1% trader capable of pvping against market maker algorithms or other people who think that they’re 1% traders (they’re usually not), there’s hasn’t been very much opportunity for the average crypto participant when it comes to majors the past couple months. I recognize that I am not a top 1% trader and that retail tourists (read: easy counterparty liquidity) are no longer here, so I have not attempted to trade much at all.
This downturn has been mostly macro-driven, tradfi markets are undergoing QE withdrawals. I might make a separate macro post in the future, but that is a beast of a topic. I’ll just leave this picture of US bond yields, and link this article on yield curves.
Perhaps one of the largest events recently was the launch of Aptos. While I did not participate in any way, shape, or form, I was correct in assuming that Aptos would largely be a sell the news event. There was news floating around that the Aptos team was begging cexes not to list their token on perps, which made me pretty bearish. I also saw news that the airdrop had been successfully sybilled by a number of parties, with a limit sell order of 180k APT appearing on a cex orderbook at one point. The airdrop claim also seemed pretty messy, having to send emails to users for them to manually claim. Lastly, to top it all off, it had a $4b valuation, which is really high for a L1, especially at this stage of the market. For reference, Avalanche is trading at a $5b market cap right now and Atom is trading at $3.5b. All in all, if you had picked up on any one of these things yourself, you probably would’ve been bearish too. Airdroppers were the biggest winners here, followed by people who were able to get a good entry short.
zkSync mainnet is going live in two days. I messed around on the testnet a little bit last week, but I might not have done it early enough to qualify for an airdrop. I will be pleasantly surprised if I get something. Here’s a list of things you can try doing if you want to try and get lucky with me.
Transitioning to talking about ATOM now.
If you go a little further back, ATOM had a good run leading into its conference. These sort of large events are probably the easiest events to trade, though timing them can be a little tricky. ATOM had the benefit of bottoming first in the summer and IBC in general was kind of looked upon negatively since UST depegged, so buyers had a great opportunity to scoop ATOM for cheap. For a two month period of June through July, ATOM traded under $10, going as low as $6.30. For about a week in mid September, ATOM traded above $15, going as high as $16.60. The conference was on Sep. 26th. Post-conference, ATOM has fallen to $12. If you bought any ATOM during that 2 month sub $10 period, you were up at least 50%. If you missed the high and sold during the conference, you would’ve sold above $14. Without some incredibly insane positive catalyst coming out in the conference, there is no reason to hold past the conference- if anything, it’s time to start shorting. The party is over at that point, it’s time to go home. (Another great example of this was DOGE leading into Elon Musk’s SNL appearance. It peaked before he went on and is massively down since.)
It might be a little late now since Hsaka tweeted about it, but Solana has a conference in early November. I’m currently underwater on my position. Solana is something I do feel comfortable holding through an entire bear market though, if it dips more I’ll probably add to the position. I wouldn’t be surprised if it hit $35 before the conference, but who knows really.
I don’t want to write it out again, so here’s some recent thoughts on LDO from a tweet of mine. LDO dumped into the merge, partially due to people taking profits/exiting the very profitable trade, but also because in the case of an unsuccessful merge, LDO would’ve taken a huge hit. Post-merge it surged again, because LDO stETH is the best ETH liquid staking derivative. Personally, I think LDO is something you can hold on a really long timeframe. It’s probably one the better bets on what has a good chance of outperforming ETH itself.
Reddit NFTs were something I don’t think anyone was expecting. It’s led to a surge in price for MATIC as well. Personally, I think most of the profits that are to be made have been made already, I would not want to buy one right now. It’s kind of similar to NFTs on a brand new chain, early buyers can cash out for multiples, late buyers are exit liquidity. If you think Reddit NFTs will continue to stick around and will see another wave of hype in the future, I’d probably wait for volumes to die down and people to lose interest before buying.
Some light shilling:
I’ve been messing around with Arkham a little bit lately, which is an on-chain tracker.
Here’s a tweet thread from their Twitter on its capabilities.
You can click this link here to check it out: https://platform.arkhamintelligence.com/ There’s a waitlist, which you skip if you use my ref link. There supposedly will be an airdrop in the future, and if you click my ref link, I will get more of their tokens. I don’t benefit from this shill in any other way. I also genuinely think it’s cool and worth checking out, I wouldn’t shill you guys trash.
Okay bye now.