Altcoins, especially those that saw significant growth during the past two-month bull rally, experienced sharp declines recently.

If retail traders react fearfully and start selling off their holdings, a rapid price recovery can be expected for assets like TRX, AVAX, DOT, ICP, POL, FIL, and TIA.

Bitcoin's activity peaks during U.S. and European business hours, while Ethereum's transaction volume is more evenly distributed globally, with significant activity during Asian market hours.

Most exchanges overindex towards U.S. trading hours. Coinbase, Gemini, and Crypto.com show the largest bias towards U.S. hours at 36.1%, 57.3%, and 37.1% respectively.

Ethereum is likely to reach a new ATH in this cycle.

There are several reasons for rapid growth:

– A significant net inflow into ETFs: over $305M entered exchanges this week.
– A high probability of an altseason could push Ethereum above $4,500.
– Charts' technical analysis indicates positive price recovery and asset growth.

We've seen many "ultra-hot" narratives: AI agents, memecoins, SocialFi, DeSci, Telegram bots, ERC-404...

What do they all have in common?

The way they evolve—and the way they decay.

Don't get caught up in the "big buzz" craze.
Here’s how ↓

All hot narratives follow a predictable pattern: a new concept gains traction (thanks to marketing, novelty, and the snowball effect of rising prices).

Naturally, this new idea trends across social media, creating a wave of excitement that pushes prices even higher.

Teams notice the community is hyped and rush to launch copycat products, often deploying them on new chains or adding a couple of minor features. Speed becomes the priority, as they bank on the hype outweighing substance.

Content creators join the frenzy, farming the trending topic for engagement by highlighting these copy-paste protocols.

The first few clones might gain some momentum, but most subsequent attempts fail to take off.

This is when disillusionment sets in, and the narrative begins to fade.

The original "big thing" usually experiences a sharp price decline.

For example, Unibot’s golden era lasted just two months—now it’s trading at $8 compared to its $200 ATH.

How long will the golden days of Virtuals last?

We’re in a bull market now, so the narrative might hold up longer. But eventually, all narratives exhaust themselves.

My advice?
Be cautious with new, early-stage AI agent plays—the disillusionment phase might be closer than you think.

In November 2024, DeFi TVL surpassed the $100 billion mark for the first time in 2.5 years, currently reaching $126.3 billion.

There’s less than 30% left to surpass the previous ATH of $179 billion, achieved in November 2021.

CryptoRank shared a list of top perpetual tokens by FDV on a chart.

Their current circulating market caps are:

$HYPE – $3.87B
$JUP – $1.5B
$DYDX – $1.3B
$APEX – $89.5M
$DRIFT – $334M
$APX – $64.3M
$WOO – $536.8M
$F – $87.7M
$GMX – $377.6M
$AEVO – $431.7M

Old coins launched more than 4-7 years ago have experienced a significant YTD surge:

• $XRP +296.4%
• $XLM +244.4%
• $TRX +171.5%
• $ADA +95.3%

This trend was likely driven by strong demand in East Asia and reduced pressure from the SEC, allowing trading of coins that were previously under strict oversight.

Bridge netflows are a perfect litmus test for user migration.

• Arbitrum, Base, and Solana – where money goes
• Noble and Mantle – healthy inflows
• Optimism, Fantom, ZKsync – parity levels
• Linea, Avalanche, Sui, Polygon, Blast – outflows
• Ethereum – the money departure hub

Quite illustrative, imo.

Despite high liquidity flowing into the Coinbase platform, it is not leading in this cycle.

Binance is now considered a more critical source of liquidity.

Solana's activation of split epoch reward distribution is already reducing network load.

The average skip rate from epoch 650 to 706 was 42% during the first 101 blocks, compared to just 12% from epoch 707 onward, after split reward distribution was activated.

Over the past 7 days, significant capital inflows have been observed in several protocols, leading to notable increases in their TVL:

• Bitcoin's TVL: by $3.09B
• Ethereum's TVL: by $2.22B
• Hyperliquid's TVL: by $1.87B

Ethena has finally launched its new stablecoin, USDtb.

USDtb is fully backed by institutional-grade tokenized U.S. treasury fund products to ensure stability. Initially, it will be supported by BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund Token, BUIDL.

Earlier this month, a16zcrypto released their list of big ideas for 2025.
Which protocols are already building in these key areas?

My watchlist for 2025 ↓

Read on Substack

Pudgy Penguins continue to gain momentum following the airdrop claim announcement:

• Floor price: $73.3K
• Daily volume: $27.4M
• Buyers: 162