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- 🟣 “Pragmatic solutions” or just more dog coins
🟣 “Pragmatic solutions” or just more dog coins
We know things are about to get crazy, but...
The ETHDenver conference wrapped up over the weekend and attendees’ accounts are rolling in. One that caught my eye was from Laurence Latimer, CEO of “enterprise banking solution for crypto companies” Dinara, who lauded the “pragmatic solutions” on display.
“There's been a mindset shift to a new pragmatism which is healthy,” he said. “This technology is here to stay and we're focused on building the supporting apparatus to deliver real value to businesses.”
The only problem with this framing is that when you look around at the market today, the things that are pumping the hardest are all memecoins. We now have eight esteemed memes with market caps of over $1 billion.
Dogecoin, at $23 billion, is back to levels not seen since April 2022. Solana now has grown a pair — Bonk and Dogwifhat — in the billion+ club. “The hat stays on” until everyone loses his shirt, apparently.
And it’s not just the dogs that are having all the fun; the biggest meme gainer over the past seven days is POPCAT on Solana, which languished in relative obscurity until Feb. 28, and is up 1,300% since.
A half a dozen pale blue “alien nodemonkes” — think Cryptopunks but even more nondescript and pixelated — sold for 53.45 BTC (about $3.4 million) over the weekend.
We have memecoins on memestonks too, with GMEonSol that bills itself as “a parody of GameStop.”
What’s next? GMEwifhat — a parody of the GME memecoin? Don’t forget the liquid restaked version for which you can leverage farm points on Pendle!
“Crypto is ‘growing up,’” according to Latimer. “We're seeing less meme-driven business activity as the industry matures.”
If this is what growing up looks like, I’d hate to see the juvenile delinquent phase. Or was that 3AC and Terra Luna in 2022?
Still, it’s become so trivially easy to launch tokens nowadays that the true Cambrian explosion is not in Ethereum layer-2s, but in dogs, cats and frogs.
On the other hand, so what?
Bitcoin is at marketcap all-time high, on the cusp of breaking its all-time high price in nominal dollar terms and already has done so against the EUR, GPB, JPY and a bunch of other currencies.
We have to expect a little silliness. It just feels too early for this much.
Can BTC reach escape velocity?
Source: RunnerXBT
What everyone’s watching today. Bitcoin is currently trading above its prior monthly and weekly high on a closing basis. A fresh daily all-time high would occur anywhere above $67,607. It’s just a hop, skip and a jump to a new intraday all-time high.
Tl;dr — Price discovery appears imminent.
As the dominant player, Stride is well-positioned to continue its recent success on the back of an expanding Cosmos LST market, chiefly driven by new token launches and growth in liquid-staked tokens as a percentage of staked tokens.
The Uniswap Foundation has put the idea of a fee switch up in the governance forum, paving the way for an additional taker rate to be imminently turned on. This should result in further upside for UNI, especially on the back of Dencun and Uniswap v4’s launch in Q3 2024.
Ether is a commodity just up until the point it is not, or, ether is not a commodity just up until the point it is — whichever you prefer
The bull-market conference was filled with good feelings but little clarity on where the crypto industry is headed next
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The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.
