Meme Coin Alert: Is This the New Chain for Meme Tokens?
GM everyone, and welcome to the beginning of halving month.
Bitcoin is likely to be the center of attention again as 4/20 approaches, but right at the moment, meme coins are still capturing the most attention.
There’s no shortage of degen gambling going on, so let’s zoom in on a coin that’s actually called DEGEN, and which has gone ahead and launched its own Layer-3 chain.
Here’s what’s in today’s issue:
- Sam shares his thoughts on DEGEN launching an L3 chain, NFT meme coin drops, BackRock’s BUIDL sees over $250M inflows, Solana wallets drained & Magic Eden supporting Bitcoin Runes protocol.
- Week 7 update on the 10x portfolio.
- This week on chain.
- This week’s trending coins by Rebecca.
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DEGEN Meme Coin Launches Layer-3 Chain
Whatever you think about meme coins and their casino economy, they have risen to become a dominant theme at this stage in this particular cycle, a little like NFTs in 2021, or DeFi in 2020.
There are so many meme coin launches, across multiple ecosystems, that unless you’re fully locked-in 24 hours a day, it’s impossible to know everything that’s happening, so it makes sense for a meme coin to launch its own blockchain, which might become a hub for meme-related activity.
The coin doing this is called DEGEN, and the new blockchain–built in collaboration with infrastructure provider Syndicate–is Degen Chain. It’s an Arbitrum Orbit Layer-3 that uses Base as a settlement layer and DEGEN as a gas token, so that Degen Chain can avoid high gas fees while aiming to become–according to founder Jacek–“the blockchain equivalent of Las Vegas.”
The DEGEN token itself is only a couple of months old, having been launched in January and distributed to users of the Farcaster Web3 social platform, and it soared in price on the launch of Degen Chain.
There’s already plenty of interest in the new network, with early attention moving towards a coin called DEPE, which might plausibly become a leading Degen Chain meme token, so then we’ll have speculation on a new meme coin built on a new meme chain that was built by another new meme coin.
That might indicate a state of frothiness bubbling up precariously in the world of memes, so take care out there, but also don’t underestimate how crazy everything can get in a full-blown bull market.
Are NFT Meme Coin Drops the New Meta?
Sticking with meme tokens, a new meta is emerging, by which NFT artists and projects are launching their own meme coins. This started with the Book of Meme token (BOME), which was launched last month by NFT artist Darkfarms, and soared within two days to a $1.6 billion market cap.
Subsequent to that, last week saw the stealth launch of the MFER coin, which was created by artist Sartoshi and dropped to holders of his MFers NFTs. Like Darkfarms, Sartoshi has a loyal OG following, and though his MFers collection is way down in price from its 2022 peaks, the MFER meme token shot up in value on launch.
MFers PFPs by Sartoshi
At around the same time, Poopie, the co-creator of iconic 2021 NFT collection Doodles, released the POOP token, a coin called DUKO was launched by artist Sr Peters ETH, the founder of the God Hates NFTees collection, and then anime-styled NFT project Capsule House announced the release of a token called ANIME.
So is this trend likely to continue? It’s profitable, there are a lot of NFT projects on life-support, and for which meme coins could offer a welcome new spark, and no-one knows more about leveraging hype than NFT founders, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see more NFT-related coin drops on the way.
BlackRock’s BUIDL Sees Over $250 Million Inflows
Over on the ostensibly more sober side of crypto, the new BUIDL tokenized money market fund from TradFi titans Blackrock has seen over a quarter of a billion dollars of inflows within its first two weeks of operation.
BUIDL (which stands for BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) launched on March 20th, at which time it held $5 million in assets. It’s built on Ethereum, in partnership with tokenized RWA specialists Securitize, and looks like a significant TradFi step into the world of yield-earning assets that can be held on-chain.
With seven investors moving assets into the fund since launch, including Ondo Finance, which is shifting $95 million of the assets backing its OUSG token (which gives exposure to US Treasuries), BUIDL looks like it’s now on the fast track to a billion.
Solana Wallets Drained
Amid the FOMO frenzy of the meme coin supercycle (ok, the meme coin couple of months), it’s easy to get sloppy about security in the rush to click buy on a frog wearing a bowler hat, or whatever is the latest path to overnight generational wealth.
However, security is always an issue in crypto, and last week some Solana users found themselves the victims of a wallet-draining operation.
At first, the suspected weak link was BONKbot, a telegram trading bot made by the creators of the BONK meme coin, but BONKbot then tweeted that more than half of the 302 victims were wallets not connected to the bot, stating that BONKbot is secure and the vulnerability lay elsewhere.
Another similar bot, called Solareum, tweeted that it may actually have been compromised, but also strongly denied accusations of any kind of deliberate scamming.
There’s still a lack of certainty around exactly how the wallet drains occurred, but it’s another reminder that exploits are a constant hazard, and if you’re in any doubt about platforms you’ve interacted with, then you should revoke access permissions in your wallets.
Magic Eden to Support Bitcoin Runes Protocol
The Bitcoin halving is expected on 4/20, and this time around it will be accompanied by the launch of the Runes protocol.
If you haven’t been following along with that, Runes is the work of developer Casey Rodarmor, who also created the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol, and it’s an improved method for launching fungible tokens on Bitcoin (similar to ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum.)
And with anticipation around the Runes protocol steadily growing, major NFT marketplace Magic Eden last week then announced, via a tweeted video, that it will support the incoming new token standard.
The top Runes projects in the run up to the halving are RSIC and Runestone, both of which have plans to release tokens when the Runes protocol goes live, and it looks like Magic Eden will be ready to provide a proven, user-friendly platform on which to trade.
But what do you think, will Runes tokens on Bitcoin take off, and are you positioning yourself now to take advantage of the opportunity? Reply to this email and let us know what you think about Runes.
Week 7 Crypto Portfolio Updates
Well, another week of watching our gaming coins get rekt. All three of our gaming coins have strong upcoming catalysts. And I am fairly confident that there will be a massive gaming season…
However, that has not happened yet. The one gaming coin that is doing well from the gaming world is Myria.
Interestingly, both Celestia and Dymension have been lagging, but there are some big airdrops coming soon, especially for Dymension which has about 8 airdrops confirmed right now.
Plus, we have upcoming airdrops for Parcl, Kamino, and Marginfi this month! Should be a good month for the portfolio overall.
Coq Inu, continues to be single-handedly holding up the portfolio.
I decided to take a bit of risk with this position. I withdrew it from the exchange, and put it into Trader Joe on Avalanche. They are doing a MEME COIN RUSH campaign.
The terms are that you need to diamond hand for the entire period, and if you do then you will get some rewards. Could be a worthwhile play.
Considering the general hype around memes, I decided to make a very high risk play. We are risking 2.5% of our portfolio value and buying a memecoin on Base.
The one I chose is BaseNJI, Jesse shared it in his Base Altcoin gems report for premium members last week.
At the current market cap the upside potential is high, for a relatively low downside risk in terms of total portfolio exposure. Make no mistake though, I fully accept that we could lose 100% of the 0.1 ETH I sold for this.
Do not blindly follow what I am doing in this high risk demo portfolio.
Reminder that the FREE Nyan Heroes airdrop campaign is still ongoing. If you want to try to get this airdrop too then follow this link and enter the code “TheCryptoLark”.
Param Labs has a few new tasks, so I did them. Another free gaming airdrop to farm. You can sign up here
I did the Plena Finance tasks on Galxe. A lot of these free airdrops require continual grinding. This is one. BUT, it is only a 4 week campaign, and we are on week 3. So, one more week to go, and it is FREE, so not much to lose.
I also did some more IONET tasks on Galxe.
And, yes, for completeness, I did transactions on Taiko, Berachain, Zksync, Linea, and Scroll, using all the bridges I usually use Orbiter Finance, Jumper, and Rhino.
The week before last saw the second of only two red weeks since launch for the spot Bitcoin ETFs, but the good news is that last week saw the new funds back to positive flows, as they registered a net 12,131 BTC coming in.
Looking specifically at Blackrock, its BTC ETF now holds over 250,000 BTC, which represents 30% of the total AUM across all of the ETFs, and we can see that it’s catching up with Grayscale (which is moving in the opposite direction with daily outflows), which holds around 40% of AUM across all issuers.
Notably, the number of active Bitcoin addresses has not made significant moves upwards so far this cycle. This could be interpreted as suggesting that we still have a long way to go to the peak of the bull run, but at the same time, there’s disagreement about how significant an indicator active addresses actually are, particularly now that the ETFs are acting as an alternative vehicle to gain exposure to Bitcoin.
Last Friday saw the largest inflow of USDC ever recorded to exchanges, with $1.4 billion deposited to Coinbase indicating the possibility of incoming increased buying pressure. The previous highest deposit was $1.3 billion back in January 2023, a point from which BTC started making major gains after the bear market lows of the prior year.
Relatedly, and with the real possibility of a future supply shock in mind, Coinbase’s BTC reserves are at a nine-year low of around 345,000 BTC, having been dropping steadily over the last several years, from a high point in 2021.
And looking at supply-side liquidity alongside demand, with the former dropping as the latter rises, there’s also the suggestion of an incoming period in which buying pressure can significantly outstrip supply.
Switching our attention to Ethereum Layer-2s, on-chain transaction activity is at an all-time high, and a look at Layer-2 activity on Uniswap shows volumes hitting all-time highs. We can also see, on Uniswap, that Arbitrum is leading the way among Layer-2 networks, with almost $16 million in volume, while Base–which, don’t forget, only launched in August last year–is in second place with almost $7 billion in volume.
Ethereum Layer-2 activity
Zooming in further on Base, we can find that its TVL and volumes both soared towards the end of March, with TVL exceeding the $1 billion mark. It’s a similar story looking at the supply of USDC on Base too, which registered almost a 320% increase across the last month, and if we look at daily transactions, then these too hit an all-time high of over 2 million at the end of last week.
Turning our attention to Solana, it’s also a very positive picture, with the number of daily active users drawing a straight line sharply upwards on the left of the chart. And if we look at Solana DEX volumes, we can find that at over $100 million, just the first three months of 2024 so far have registered higher numbers than the previous three years combined.
Finally, to get an idea of where we are in the cycle, and whether retail is jumping in yet, we can see that the Coinbase app–an indicator, when it increases in popularity, of growing mainstream interest in crypto–is still below the top 250 in the App Store rankings, despite having briefly climbed into the top 50 at the start of March. However, we can also see that on Twitter, major crypto exchanges saw a marked increase in follower numbers at the end of March.
Chart tracks Coinbase
Here are my key takeaways from the trends this week and whilst Bitcoin has been consolidating the memecoin mania has continued.
- Silly Dragon is a memecoin on Solana that’s going to give Solana Mobile Chapter 2 holders special access to its upcoming initiatives. The Silly Dragon team has also been at Solana’s Hacker House in NYC.
- CatCoin is a memecoin on BNB Chain, Ethereum and Solana that’s skyrocketed 4,793% in a month. CatCoin is also teasing an upcoming listing on a centralized exchange.
- StrikeX is a blockchain solutions company that’s teasing its V2 in beta and has been hosting giveaways on Coinbase’s Base network. The STRX token has also been listed on MEXC for trading.
- Gala is a play-to-earn (P2E) gaming and music ecosystem that’s announced new token swaps on GalaSwap. Gala has also partnered with Miracle Pay and launched Node NFTs.
- Propbase is a tokenized real estate investment marketplace on Aptos that’s teasing an EVM bridge announcement and centralized exchange listing in the coming weeks.
- Honeyland is a blockchain-based strategy game on Solana that’s teasing an upcoming alpha announcement on April 8. The team has also attended the Solana Hacker House from March 28-29.
- Mochi is a memecoin on Coinbase’s Base network that’s gaining momentum after the network’s total value locked (TVL) jumped 126% in the past month. Mochi is also available to buy straight from Coinbase Wallet.
- Degen is a newly launched Layer-3 blockchain on top of Base that’s seen its DEGEN token skyrocket over 500%.
- BNB is the native coin for the Binance chain that’s seen its daily DEX trading volumes flip Ethereum and Solana on March 24.
- Cat In A Dogs World is a memecoin that launched on the Solana network on March 26 and saw over $176 million in trading volume in the first five hours.
- Ondo Finance is a Real-World Assets (RWA) platform that’s moved $95 million into BlackRock’s new tokenized fund on Ethereum called BUIDL. An exec from consulting firm McKinsey & Company has also become Ondo’s chief strategy officer.
- Jupiter is a Solana DEX aggregator that’s kickstarted its DAO with $137 million in initial capital. The first working group budget proposal has also gone live for the community to vote on.
- Core is a Bitcoin-powered EVM blockchain that’s launched a 6-month incentive program for the ecosystem and appeared at Ethereum’s first-ever hackathon in Mumbai.
- Sidus is a Web3 gaming ecosystem that’s launched a major token burn event proposal that could see 5.8% of the total supply permanently destroyed if passed.
- Solana is a Layer-1 blockchain that’s suffered a wallet drain attack within the ecosystem and has urged users to revoke app permissions. The FTX estate has also sold $7.5 billion in SOL tokens to institutions at a 68% discount to market price.
Thank you so much for your support, and I truly hope that today’s issue will give you insights needed to help you master your wealth.
If you are reading this it means you are on the free version of the Wealth Mastery Investor Report, which is great for news and tips on the crypto markets.
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Lark and the Wealth Mastery Team
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Wealth Mastery (Lark Davis, and the Wealth Mastery writing team) are not providing you individually tailored investment advice. Nor is Wealth Mastery registered to provide investment advice, is not a financial adviser, and is not a broker-dealer. The material provided is for educational purposes only. Wealth Mastery is not responsible for any gains or losses that result from your cryptocurrency investments. Investing in cryptocurrency involves a high degree of risk and should be considered only by persons who can afford to sustain a loss of their entire investment. Investors should consult their financial adviser before investing in cryptocurrency.
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