Airdrop April

Any views expressed in the below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.

Gm everyone. I am back on this lovely Sunday after a few-week writing hiatus. I hope you have all been doing well, and I hope that some of you have even made an American middle class salary on memecoins last month. For those wondering, all has been well on my end. I’ve mentioned that the last few months writing had been extremely -EV as I’ve been doing my best to fully lock in with zero distractions. As I expect an active week ahead of us, I figured I’d take some time on what has been a slow weekend, to share some thoughts. This is mainly for myself to look back on in a year or so, but I guess (and hope) some of you folks still enjoy reading this. With that said, let’s dive in.

General State Of The Market

Despite the pullbacks and timeline in shambles after a 2% pullback, the overarching theme of this market is that bears deserve nothing. Larry Fink is on CNBC talking about how he wants to tokenize the world and bears have been unable to take us below $60K (pathetic). Bears will have their time eventually, but we still have some more juice in the tank. I expect things to get even sillier post-halving.

Over the last 2 months, we’ve essentially been living through the equivalent of “defi summer” for memecoins. There’s some great threads out there about memecoins being the new altcoins. The timeline is waiting for “alt szn” without realizing we’ve just gone through one of the craziest alt szn’s we’ve ever seen, just with memes instead.

I’d probably pin my meme success rate at a 6.5/10 over the last 2 months – I’ve done good but not great. I’m telling you this so you can keep this in mind when you hear my takes on this subject and inherent bias. This may have been the easiest meta from an outsider looking in: practically you can buy any dog coin, cat coin, or ansem relative and make money. It doesn’t look like rocket science, but I doubt many of you can hold conviction through multiple 90% pullbacks which is what actually makes this so difficult. Our industry is funny in the ways it erodes our general sense of markets and how they should function. I hit a 5x on a memecoin within a 24 hour period, and the guy next to me hits a 100x on “costco hotdog” and I feel like absolutely nothing. Funny how things work.

It does seem like the memecoin casino is overheated or getting close to it. As always, the “blue chip” memes (this is probably a funny sentence for tradfi people) will be the strongest and come back stronger than before as the overall bull market continues to leg up. I think people will sell some memes to rotate into “real tech” or coins with “real” value. What does this mean? In my opinion, meme sellers will find safety in AI coins and new L1s. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see $doge act as a safe haven. The next big meta coming up off of the halving will be runes, which are just shitcoins on Bitcoin.

Runes

What are runes? They are really just shitcoins on Bitcoin. I’m not going to go into the tech here or token standard, but all I know is that they are launching after the halving. If you visit Magic Eden, they already have a page for runes.

In preparation, we’ve seen RSIC’s runes trading at $0.05 OTC (remember these were a free airdrop) and rune pups doing over 10x in the last week. There are opportunities everywhere, and if there’s one takeaway I could stress, it would be to avoid laziness at all costs. If you’ve missed the ordinals run out of laziness, you should probably download Xverse, Unisat, or a Magic Eden wallet and experiment with BTC to get used to the interface. Like most things in crypto, it doesn’t matter how smart or savy you are - what matters is that you are early.

What I do like about ordinals (and this will translate to runes as well) is that it’s a bit more difficult to onboard as a first-time user compared to ETH/SOL NFTs. Bitcoin is slow and somewhat complicated compared to what us ETH/SOL users are accustomed to. This creates a big barrier to entry as many make excuses not to bridge. While if you’re “in the know”, every group you’re in is discussing runes, but outside of these small circles nobody seems to really care. I think things are going to get beyond silly here - and ultimately the money made will flow back into Ordinals.

Tensor

Ah yes, Tensor. This has been quite a painful ride. After 9 months of season 3 we are finally getting $TNSR.

I’ll save most predictions because by the time this newsletter goes out, there is probably only 1-2 hours until TNSR launches. In the past, I’ve mentioned that I thought this was the most under-farmed airdrop on SOL. I still believe that, considering how brutal it has been farming this thing, along with the losses you had to incur to get ahead (for the most part). I don’t think I’ve been more excited for a single airdrop in my time in crypto (maybe LayerZero) and my expectation (hopium and moon math) is that Tensor launches at some silly valuation. The best part is, if it doesn’t you can see how stupid I’ll look writing this right now.

What happens post $TNSR? SOL NFTs have been in the absolute gutter. I do think the market is hungry for a new NFT narrative. To be fair, this has been taking place on Bitcoin, but SOL is cheap and fast and NFTs are a good use case for games and fun ponzis. There’s no world in my mind where the Solana NFT eco doesn’t benefit from the launch of $TNSR.

What saves ETH NFTs?

This is a good question. ETH NFTs are also in the absolute gutter right now. I think that overall, sentiment has bottomed. Most don’t ever want to touch ETH NFTs again and the general consensus is that they are dead. This is fair. When the general consensus in crypto is that something is dead, it usually is around a bottom.

To be clear, I think the majority of collections, especially the “blue chips” from last cycle, are dead. These will continue to grind down closer to zero. On the other hand, new projects will emerge and some existing ones will leg up at some point - once everyone is rich from coins again.

I think the majority of these gamefi nfts with tokens will do quite well, and also provide a nice stimmy to the market. We had a pretty aggressive NFT run towards the end of 2023 and I think a lot of this was kicked off by $MEME. Now, we have 5-10 collections which will launch $1bn market cap tokens in the coming weeks/months. Giving free money out to NFT people (as we’ve seen) tends to prop up the jpeg market for a period of time.

$ZKS and $ZRO are on the way at some point this quarter which I expect to help. We also have $Blast, and at some point in the coming months a huge portion of this will go to NFT traders staking their $Blur. “NFTs as airdrop farms” is another great meta which should continue. We saw Milady/Remillio pump after the $ENA airdrop, Penguins have $NIM coming up, and I’m sure there is a ton of other collabs in the works.

With sentiment this bad and a ton of “free” money on the horizon, I think there will be a jpeg bid coming sometime around this summer. NFTs are what onboarded most “normies” last cycle, and stuff like NBA TopShot had a huge hand in doing so. I think it’s foolish to think that we won’t get our NBA TopShot moment at some point this cycle - and I’ll be doing my best to find out what this is or if it even exists yet. Recently, Base has been a great place where almost every somewhat stealth new mint is absolutely cooking. At some point, the fun will circle back around to mainnet. It is always darkest before dawn.

Conclusion

In summary, it’s pretty tough to imagine being bearish on crypto right now. I’ve said this over and over again the last 6-8 months, and it still hasn’t been a top signal, so maybe we’re still safe.

I sincerely hope everyone who made it this far has a life changing trade this week. I am geeking at the thought of $TNSR, and looking forward to another fun month in April.

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Wilson