Gm degens. The last 2 months have not been EV positive for onchain coins outside of brief periods of outperformance for a select few (like FWOG for example). But if you haven’t been paying attention, the onchain market is roaring back, new launches are starting to work again and it is time (in my opinion) to start locking in.
Before I dive into some of my favorite picks that look primed to make multiples, I want to lay out my case on why it is a good time to step back in. While doomposters and bears complain about how a 50bps fed cut is bearish, all asset prices have been on an absolute tear. The S&P is hitting ATHs, as is Gold. Now, BTC is hitting $63-64k (which is a resistance level), but what has been fascinating is that alts have started to actually move again with TIA, TAO, POPCAT, SUI, FTM all up ~30% in the last week and POPCAT, FET, SUI, FTM, TAO all up 40-107% in the last month.
Now what is interesting is that this move in the leading alts comes at a time when BTC.d has been grinding up to 3.5yr highs (usually not a bullish signal for alts). I’m specifically looking for BTC to keep its momentum and then BTC.d to finally cool off and for alts to run in the next 6-12 months.
This improvement in the alt coin environment is finally starting to show up onchain as well. My number one, absolute favorite metric to watch for the health of the onchain gambling market is DEX bot trading volumes, which have finally starting showing momentum after 3.5 months of trending downwards.
Notably, this spike in volumes has primarily been ETH driven instead of a marketwide increase, while SOL volumes have actually remained weak since early August. This reminds me of Fall last year where ETH onchain was the leading place to profit until late December when SOL memes really started to take off.
Last year this noticeable increase in ETH onchain DEX bot volumes came in late October after bottoming on 10/6. From there, ETH onchain had 2 very favorable months before losing some steam to SOL and then surging even further in Feb/March during the AI/GPU and 404 seasons. This led to the March meme madness and then the eventual onchain washout that came (especially for ETH coins) in late April. While ETH volumes have had spikes like this since April, they all coincided with SOL volumes spiking as well. This time it has been all ETH, which feels like a loose signal that we’re starting another “onchain is good” cycle.
If you haven’t been in the trenches, this improvement in the ETH onchain trading environment is very easy to see. Here are all the new launch runners we’ve had since ETH onchain volume momentum started coming back in August:
MISHA running straight to $10mm
BERRY running from $1mm to $24mm
CATE going to $44mm from $4mm
VISTA going from $1.5mm → $30mm
DOGE revival going from $500k to $15mm
Another signal I like to look for is how many ETH new launches sub 24hr old are at $1mm market cap or more. During the real mania periods this can be 10+ and during the soft periods there are many days where there is not even one real launch within this framework. Today we have ~4 which is the best I’ve seen in months.
Meanwhile on SOL there have been less coins like this but they still do run hard like SCF’s move from $4.5mm to $100mm and FWOG’s move from $12mm to $80mm. It seems that onchain is back and this is the time to dive in.
And even if the above data points / examples don’t give you the sense that we are indeed back, you can also just feel it across CT and discord/TG chats. People have taken the summer mostly off and they are settling in to run it up again. Ok with the setup out of the way, let’s go into my favorite picks at the moment:
