Recap of the week + good tweets :

https://cryptonarratives.substack.com/p/narratives-of-the-week-november-22

Narratives of the past days :

- $BTC remains choppy in its $35k-$38k range

- CZ steps down as Binance CEO and Binance agrees to pay a $4bn fine to the US. $BNB takes a moderate hit (-5%).
Good news for the market overall, as the uncertainty has now disappeared and we're far from a catastrophic scenario

- The whole OpenAI drama pushed AI coins higher, with $WLD as the direct Sam Altman beta coin : $RNDR $TAO $AKT $AGIX $IMGNAI $FET $CTXC $OCEAN

- Blur founder announced the launch of the new Blast L2 with "native yield" : $BLUR rips as liquid exposure to this narrative. $MKR too (=> sDAI stablecoin yield on Blast)

- $SOL topped at $68, $BONK reached a new 2023 ATH and the whole Solana ecosystem has significantly pumped during the last weeks

- Gaming coins remain strong : $IMX $PRIME $SUPER $SFUND $ILV $MC

- $AVAX was the direct lagger to $SOL, and now slowed down too. Another alt L1, $KAS, is unstoppable, as usual

- The "Solana oracle" $PYTH launched its token : mimicking of the $TIA launch pattern in progress ?

- $SNX token among the best performers : launch of Infinex as catalyst ?

- Ordinals and BRC-20 still worth watching : $ORDI $TRAC (Chainlink of Bitcoin) $MUBI (BRC20-ERC20 bridge)

We all know that people like to long $AVAX as a catchup trade after a $SOL pump

But how strong is really this relation ?

Well, a lot of $SOL local tops were right before $AVAX local tops

I did not realize it was so obvious before comparing the two charts

Impressive

I wrote a short thread with a few long/short charts to identify trends and strength in the current market :

https://twitter.com/thedefivillain/status/1729491805966635253

Recap of the week + good tweets :

https://cryptonarratives.substack.com/p/narratives-of-the-week-november-29

Current narratives :

- $BTC is still in its range, fails at breaking out above $38k but respects the trendline

- Gaming has been the hottest narrative during the recent weeks : $AXS $RON $ILV $APE $SUPER $ATLAS $SIPHER

- Blast attracted $600M TVL in a week. The Blast-related $BLUR token did a 2x before retracing part of the move. $LOOKS followed that pump

- Best performer of the week among mid caps is $SEI (+70%), a new Cosmos alt L1 made for DeFi that never had its time to shine.

- UST 2.0 narrative : a new protocol "Mint Cash" that plans to burn $USTC pushed the token to 6X in 2 days before dumping a bit. $LUNC and $LUNA pumped too.

- New coins good ? The most recently launched coins $PYTH $FLIP and $VRTX did all pump this week

- $STX, the BTC "L2", is finally showing strength after underperforming during weeks

$TAO is one of these coins that I bought a small bag of just as a "psychological hedge".

When I first heard about it at $400M MC it already looked expensive, but it has become a cultish AI coin and I don't want to COPE seeing it rip non-stop without me.

The psychological hedge trade :

- If it goes to 0, my bag is small enough that I don't really mind

- If it keeps pumping, I won't be seething because it will be making me money

I find it useful to have small bags of some coins when I don't really have conviction in them but in the same time I feel that they *could* pump a lot and I don't want to be sidelined if that happens.

Customly-built categories but the 3 best-performing narratives of November have clearly been :

- Gaming
- AI
- Solana ecosystem

New article : November recap ! Main events, narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch

https://cryptonarratives.substack.com/p/november-recap-narratives-best-performers

Santi has very quickly become a huge $SOL bull, it almost shocked me when I listened to this recent podcast episode

I think a lot of VCs have been panicking and feeling underexposed to SOL, which explains both why SOL has been so strong recently, and why it is likely to remain strong

"I am 98% exposed to the Ethereum ecosystem... but what if... what if... it underperforms during the whole cycle and I did not hedge my bet with SOL exposure ?
Let's throw some money into the Solana ecosystem, I don't want to be sidelined !" [not an authentic quote]

To be clear, I don't think $ETH will underperform, but I am just picturing what is very likely to happen in the heads of a few VCs.

I own both ETH and SOL, and more ETH than SOL, but I think that SOLETH should naturally go up.

## November recap ##

Main narratives :

- Crypto gaming : $ILV $IMX $PRIME $BEAM $RON $SUPER $ATLAS $SFUND

- AI coins : $RNDR $AGIX $TAO $FET $OCEAN $OLAS $AKT $CTXC $PAAL

- $SOL and its ecosystem : $BONK $HNT $NEON $SCS $CROWN $SHDW / SOL NFTs (Mad Lads)

- Winner basket : $SOL $INJ $RUNE $LINK $TIA $KAS

- A few Cosmos coins have been very strong : $KUJI $TIA $SEI $RUNE $OSMO $INJ $DYDX

- Ordinal coins acted as BTC beta : $ORDI $SATS $TRAC

- In memecoin land : $GROK went to $170M MC

Main events of November :

- Binance pays a $4bn fine to the DOJ and CZ steps down as CEO

- BlackRock files for an $ETH ETF

- The new L2 "with native yield" Blast launched (a multisig contract) and attracted $600M TVL. $BLUR rips as liquid proxy

- OpenAI drama => AI coins got attention

- A few new coins launched, that all did well : $TIA, $MEME, $PYTH, $FLIP, $VRTX

Most of my portfolio is in spot bags that have been accumulated over the last 12 months

I am also long on perps on many of the best-performers of the last 2 months

Now the goal is mainly to sit on my hands and not f*ck it up, ie not cut my trades too quickly and also not increase the risk while prices go up until an inevitable (short-term) dump

I will try to avoid spending too much time playing short-term rotations because I want to avoid the lowest timeframes

If I have enough motivation, I will also look for smaller coins with high beta (on-chain coins, shitters, coins that are "hard to buy", etc) but I don't really mind missing them
=> If you are grinding to make it, many opportunities are there for you. For example, I am fine with missing a 10x on $CACAO if I get a 2x on $RUNE on perps. Many people like me will be too lazy to go buy these smaller coins with higher upside, but you can catch these to increase your profits in this environment

Good luck everyone, enjoy

Other examples of higher beta that I can think of :

- $ALEX instead of only $STX
- Smaller ordinal coins that are not on CEX, rather than only $ORDI
- Every fkn SOL coin instead of only $SOL and $BONK lol

If a coin :

- is consistently a top-performer
- has a narrative that makes sense
- does not have awful tokenomics

I usually want to be long the coin, even if it has "already pumped".

Because these coins tend to outperform for longer

This is why $ORDI and $BONK have been no-brainers for example, even if I definitely missed the first part of their move up.

Sometimes you really don't have to make things too complicated

Chart of BTC.D, step by step :

1. Oct 16 - Oct 24 : CoinTelegraph intern tweet wakes up everyone to the fact that the $BTC ETF is coming and that they will be under-allocated. BTC pumps and outperforms (alts simply follow the move), BTC.D goes up.

2. Oct 24 - Nov 16 : $BTC slowly moves up in an ascending range, alts catchup and outperform on the way up, BTC.d goes down.

3. Nov 16 - Early Dec : Both $BTC and altcoins are mostly stable

4. Dec 3 - Nov : $BTC pumps and outperforms the market again, BTC.D goes up. [=> same as step 1.]

5. ???
Are we running step 2 again ?
Either we do, and $BTC remains stable while altcoins go up (ie BTC.D down)... or BTC dumps and altcoins probably dump even more (ie BTC.D up).