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In today’s newsletter:
🔎My thoughts on the memecoin meta
📊On-chain alpha
😂Crypto meme of the week
🗞️The latest DeFi news
🔎My thoughts on the memecoin meta
Altcoins definitely had a rough start to the year.
According to dexu.ai, not a single crypto narrative has seen a positive price performance since the start of 2025💀
Why is the market dipping?
In hindsight, I believe there are several reasons:
Trump's inauguration ended up being a sell-the-news event (everyone who wanted to buy because Trump won had done it before the inauguration)
The launch of a US Bitcoin reserve is taking longer than most people expected
There’s now a lot of macro uncertainty
But perhaps the biggest one is the following:
Millions of low-effort memecoins have flooded the market over the past months. Launchpads like Pumpdotfun have enabled everyone to easily launch a new one.
And this is certainly not sustainable in the long run.
In the previous bull market, we had only a few thousand tokens. Now liquidity is spread across millions of different tokens.
In the past 30 days alone, we’ve seen four major memecoin launches:
$TRUMP - which is down 76% from its ATH
$MELANIA - which is down 90% from its ATH
$CAR - which is down 95% from its ATH
$LIBRA - which is down 93% from its ATH
All of those have reached multi-billion dollar valuations at their peak.
While I don’t have any problem with memecoins such as DOGE or FARTCOIN, celebrity memecoins like the ones I mentioned above are a net negative for crypto as a few insiders make hundreds of millions of dollars off retail investors.
$TRUMP launch made many celebrities believe that insider trading is now legal.
Fortunately, I believe there is still hope.
One thing that makes me optimistic is that DeFi has recently managed to flip memes in narrative mindshare for the first time in a while.
And according to Dexu.ai, memecoins are the 4th worst-performing crypto narrative in the past 30 days.
The sentiment around memecoins on X also seems to have turned negative. A lot of people are starting to realize how extractive celebrity memecoins are.
On top of this, the SEC has just announced a few hours ago a new cyber unit that aims to combat fraud in crypto among other areas.
This will hopefully put an end to the crime season where every celebrity launches a new shitcoin only to dump it on his fans.
I continue to believe that a lot of crypto-friendly policies are going to be announced in the next few months.
But there’s a difference between encouraging innovation and allowing scams.
We need more innovation, not more celebrities scamming their supporters.
I expect a utility season to eventually happen once we finally start getting more crypto regulatory clarity in the US and other major countries.
Crypto is not going anywhere.
The past few months have been rough, but we’ve been through worse.
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Here’s what you need to know about it:
Scallop is the first dApp to receive an official grant from the Sui Foundation
The protocol reached a whooping $190M in TVL at ATH
CMS Holdings, 6th Man Ventures, DWF Labs, and Mysten Labs are among its early backers
Scallop is offering some very attractive interest yields for supplying and borrowing. For instance, the reward APR for borrowing USDC is up to 29%.
SCA is its native token. By staking it, you can receive veSCA.
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8% of $SCA’s total supply has already been locked for 4 years.
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On-chain Alpha🔎
Fluid DEX now has the biggest market share for USDC-USDT DEX volume on Ethereum
Crypto Meme😂
The latest developments in DeFi
Hyperliquid released HyperEVM, adding support for smart contracts
Kaito released its $KAITO token and airdropped 10% of its supply
Arbitrum DAO approved 85M ARB for RWA investments
Monad L1 launched its testnet
Kernel DAO announced that KERNEL holders will get at least 2 airdrops from ecosystem projects. Mira & YieldNest will allocate 1-2% of their supply to KERNEL holders
Ethereum Foundation announced the Open Intents Framework, a system designed to enhance the cross-chain user experience on L2s
Unit, a tokenization layer that allows trading native assets from other L1s using Hyperliquid UX, was launched on mainnet
Defi App released Degen Arena, a gamified points competition between factions to reward its early users
Zero1 Labs extended all vesting schedules for its token by an additional year
GammaSwap teased its upcoming deployment on Sonic L1
Frax Finance transformed frxUSD into a multichain asset using LayerZero
Osmosis released no-fee limit orders
Clearpool introduced Port: a RWA Exchange-Traded Pool designed to solve illiquidity
That’s all for this week!
Until next time,
The DeFi Investor
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