🔎How to prepare for utility szn

weekly valuable insights

Mar 20, 2025

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In today’s newsletter:

🔎How to prepare for utility season

📊 On-chain alpha

😂 Crypto meme of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎How to prepare for utility season

I’ve been saying for a while that I believe a utility season is coming.

Why? The reasons are plenty:

The X mindshare of the DeFi narrative has been surging
The fees of Pump.fun, the largest memecoin launchpad, drastically decreased

Regulatory clarity is finally coming

Regarding regulatory clarity, fortunately, we’ve seen several positive developments in this direction over the past months:

The SEC created a new task force to "provide clarity" for crypto laws
Americans elected the most pro-crypto US Congress in history
The Trump Administration has been pushing for crypto-friendly stablecoin legislation by August

Things like this might not have an instant positive impact on the market, but they will lead to a surge in the number of new crypto startups in the US.

The tide is clearly turning and more and more people are shifting their attention to fundamentally strong projects.

Now, the question is: What’s the best way to capitalize on this?

Here’s what I’m doing to prepare for the next utility season:

Search for fundamentally strong projects that meet certain criteria

I’ll cover below what exactly I mean by “fundamentally strong projects”.

DeFi Minty shared a great checklist that you can see below:

The main questions I ask myself when researching a project are the following:

Has it truly reached product-market fit?

Nowadays, lots of projects use unsustainable points/incentive programs to grow their products. This artificially inflates their metrics, but if the product is used solely because of the incentives, then it’s ultimately destined to fail.

What I always ask myself is this: Would it still make sense to use this product if the token/points incentives would end tomorrow?

If the answer is no, then it might not be a good idea to invest in that project.

Does it have a strong community and a proper marketing strategy?

As crazy as this might seem, XRP flipped ETH in FDV a few days ago.

This shows once again that attention is everything in crypto. Like it or not, attention matters much more than the fundamentals themselves.

The team members of a project being active on social media is an example of a major green flag for that project.

There’s no more bullish thing than a founder who’s constantly sharing his vision on X and building a community that believes in his ability to execute.

Do its token holders directly benefit from the project’s success?

The reality is that most crypto projects don’t actually need a token.

But their teams decided to launch one anyway to raise funds for the development of their products.

That is not necessarily wrong as long as the project has a community-first approach.

By having a “community-first approach”, I mean:

- Launching the token at a reasonable valuation and properly rewarding early adopters (in case the project is new)

- Rewarding the token holders by activating a buyback program or giving them special perks such as access to exclusive products or fee discounts

- The team is constantly engaging with the community and listening to their feedback

There’s a reason why 95% of the new tokens listed on Binance have gone down only since their TGE.

Slowly but surely, we’re entering the era of community-first projects.

A lot of investors are no longer willing to buy a token with size unless they have a very strong reason to do so.

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Does the project have a major catalyst that could attract new buyers?

“Why would someone buy this token later on at a higher price?” - This is something I always think about when assessing my token holdings.

Examples of catalysts that can have a positive impact on a token price include:

An upcoming tokenomics upgrade
A massive upcoming protocol upgrade (e.g. Fluid DEX V2 is expected to significantly increase the trading volume of Fluid DEX)
The upcoming launch of a buyback & burn token program (assuming that the project’s revenue is already significant)
A new major product launch (e.g. Boros is a highly anticipated Pendle product that could significantly increase Pendle’s revenue)

Growing metrics are also a crucial factor to take into consideration that could fuel a price rally. No one wants to invest in a protocol that’s dying.

Everyone wants to bet on the protocol which is outpacing its competitors and surging in market share across all relevant metrics (revenue, fees, TVL, etc.)

I mostly use DeFiLlama to spot fast-growing crypto projects.

Study Case: Mantle

I’ll use Mantle as an example for my research framework as Mantle is one of the most popular DeFi projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Has it reached product-market fit?

Yes. In 2024, Mantle Network hit a new ATH in TVL, its native LST called mETH became the 4th largest ETH liquid staking token, and its native BTC asset called FBTC surpassed $1 billion in TVL.

Does it have a strong community and a proper marketing strategy?

According to Dexu.ai, Mantle is the #4 largest DeFi project by X mindshare.

It was also one of the first big projects to collaborate with Kaito to launch a Yapper Leaderboard in order to incentivize social engagement.

Do its token holders directly benefit from the project’s success?

Mantle is known to have a massive treasury with over $3 billion in assets.

A part of the funds from the treasury has been used to actively reward Mantle’s MNT token holders through the Mantle Rewards Station.

For instance, Mantle has previously restaked a good amount of the ETH from its treasury through Eigenlayer.

The $EIGEN rewards earned in this way were shared with MNT stakers.

In addition to this, MNT is also used for participating in governance and paying gas fees on the Mantle Network.

Does the project have a major catalyst that could attract new buyers?

Based on its recent blog post, Mantle has 3 upcoming major products:

- Mantle’s Enhanced Index Fund - an institutional-grade fund designed to attract both retail and TradFi investors

- Mantle Banking - a Revolut-style on-chain app for payments

- MantleX - an AI-augmented company that will deploy & manage AI agents

In short, this is how I conduct research and what I look at to decide whether it’s worth investing in a certain token.

Moving on, another thing I do when researching a project is to check if it has any major red flags or weaknesses.

Spotting red flags in advance can save you a lot of money. But this requires to exercise caution and do a lot of research before actually buying a token.

Closing thoughts

I hope you’ll find some great projects using the framework I shared above.

But please also keep this in mind:

Timing in crypto is just as important as the tokens you choose to buy.

Last bull cycle, no matter what shitcoins you bought you would have made a lot of money during the altseason. In this cycle, things seem to be different.

As millions of coins flooded the market, it’s crucial to be more selective and make only high-conviction bets (when the market conditions are also good).

What you buy and when you buy is now more important than ever before.

On-chain Alpha🔎

There’s a record amount of $ETH short positions

This might be the reason for ETH’s recent short squeeze.

Crypto Meme😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Solana’s first-ever US ETFs are launching today

Ethena introduced Converge, a new blockchain built to enable TradFi to interact with DeFi products

Hyperliquid introduced $HYPE Staking Tiers for trading fee discounts

Stable Jack announced the launch of $JACK and scheduled its public sale on Fjord Foundry for March 26. Stable Jack is an innovative yield, volatility, and points market

Ripple (XRP) announced that the SEC dropped the lawsuit against them

Mantle announced the full activation of EigenDA on the Mantle Network. This brings a major improvement in both its censorship resistance and bandwidth expansion

Andre Cronje revealed plans to release a DEX that will be able to compete directly with Binance and Coinbase

Binance has launched Binance Alpha 2.0 - enabling CEX users to buy any DEX tokens directly on Binance

AAVE DAO rejected a proposal to launch a new RWA token

Uniswap DAO approved a $165.5M funding plan for ecosystem growth

Cosmos has gotten a native EVM framework for its ecosystem

Arbitrum Team introduced Onchain Labs - a program designed to accelerate emerging apps on Arbitrum

Drift Protocol introduced Swift - an upgrade that aggregates liquidity to give traders the best on-chain execution. Drift is a popular perpetual DEX on Solana

Coinbase’s survey showed that 83% of institutions plan to increase their crypto holdings in 2025

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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