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Main events that happened in May:

• On May 27, DTCC announced it will connect its upcoming tokenized securities platform to the Stellar blockchain. This acted as a massive catalyst for $XLM, which had been bleeding for a while, so it had a lot of shorts to squeeze, and it pumped 2x in 3 days, which is very significant given its size.

• On May 4th, Pavel Durov posted: ‘Telegram replaces the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and becomes its largest validator’. That was a strong bullish signal for $TON, because it’s a coin that’s been forgotten for months if not 2 years, and it had been ranging at the lows around $1.2 for a while. It pumped +115% in 4 days, but it topped there and has been bleeding endlessly after that.

• $MEGA had its TGE on April 30. It opened between $1.5bn and $2bn FDV… and has been absolutely down only since launch, one of the most consistent downtrends I’ve ever seen. The other TGE that happened in May was $BILL, the token of Billions Network (decentralized identity project). It pumped immediately after the launch from $600M to almost $2.3bn FDV, but then came back down to retrace the whole move.

• Ondo Finance said it joined the DTCC Industry Working Group on May 4. It lead to a +50% squeeze on $ONDO after it broke out above its $0.29 resistance.

• On May 5, Jito has announced the upcoming launch of their new platform JTX, which is intented to become the new ‘place to trade on Solana’. The very initial reaction was a sell the news effect for a few hours, before $JTO started bouncing very strongly, as it then moved up 2x in 2 days.

• $BCH conducted its Layla fork on May 15th. It was a catalyst that a lot of people were looking for when BCH was strong a few weeks/months ago, but it has been forgotten since then, and it didn’t pump at all in anticipation of it… But it did sell the news very hard anyway, because it literally dumped -30% in 2 weeks, which is significant for a slow coin large cap like BCH.

Main narratives of May:

BTC: dump after the STRC inflows

$BTC has been somewhat strong during the first week of May, it pumped from $76k to almost $83k, which was the top for the month. $STRC, which grew massively in March and April, took longer before going back to par in May. At the same time, the attention around the product has gone up massively, so there were more and more people waiting for the STRC inflows to be over to derisk or flip bearish. And that’s exactly what happened, BTC topped locally on the day before ex-dividend date when Saylor probably aped a lot of USD into BTC, and it’s been down for the second half of May, bleeding from $82k to $73k. Despite this weakness from BTC, a lot of altcoins managed to be quite strong during this second half of the month.

HYPE new ATH above $75

$HYPE has been one of the main narratives of May, but that only started in the second half, after an important announcement catalysed the move higher: on May 14, it was announced that USDH would be converted into USDC and that it would become the native stablecoin of Hyperliquid, and the vast majority of the yield that Circle is getting on the USDC deposited on Hyperliquid would get used to buy back HYPE.

The other catalysts that HYPE had this month were:

• the launch of the HYPE ETFs, which have been getting a lot of inflows

• the HYPE DAT PURR having significant trading volume (meaning potential buy pressure into HYPE because of the PURR ATM)

• the listings of CBRS and SPCX pre-IPO contracts. The CBRS contract got a lot of attention around the CBRS IPO, so people are expecting the same thing to happen for SpaceX, meaning increased attention on HyperLiquid from non crypto natives.

HYPE broke its $60 ATH on May 21st, and then pushed as high as $76 on May 31st. Almost a 2x pump in one month for a $40bn FDV coin… impressive!

The AI narrative

The only narrative that seems to move several coins from the same category at the same time seems to be the AI narrative. It’s begun in 2023 and it tends to come and go in different waves, not the same coins each time:

• $VVV is the top performing non-scam coin year to date, after 3 weeks of consolidation below $10, it broke out very strongly in May, and quickly reached almost $20. It is now trading in a huge range between $14 and $20.

• $NEAR has had a phenomenal run, it pumped from $1.25 at the bottom to almost $3 at the top, with very limited drawdowns. NEAR benefits from both the AI and the privacy narrative.

• $GRASS had a nice 2x pump from $0.3 to $0.6 during the second half of May.

• $AKT pumped 2x in May after 6 weeks of rounded bottoming.

• $NIL had a +140% squeeze in two days.

ZEC comeback

ZEC has done a great comeback in 2 months. After finding a base in February-March above $200, it started pumping again in April and reached almost $400 again. Then in early May, ZEC had another very strong 2 squeeze, which pushed it to $600. On May 20, it even reached $680, a level that it actually touched 4 times without being able to break it.

ZEC has become a major coin in terms of mindshare and volume, and people were starting to call for prices of $1000 or more. Unfortunately, it collapsed -60% in early June after it was announced that there was vulnerability for years that could have theoretically allowed anyone to mint tokens infinitely without people realizing it.

$LAB, the crime coin of May

$LAB is clearly the scam coin of the month. It went up 3x in April, printing higher lows, which was already a promising “suspicious” price action. It got confirmed in early May with a brutal 6x squeeze in two days… which got fully retraced… before it pumped back up again. $LAB reached $4.5bn FDV on May 6, and then it roughly ranged there for 3 weeks, with a squeeze to $8bn on May 11 that fully dumped back.

The real massive scam move actually happened in late May/early June, because it started going up very strongly with almost no drawdown, and the funding rate, which had always been neutral until then, went heavily negative. That’s what a typical scam move (like MYX, COAI, AIA, RAVE) looks like, and it did reach the same crazy valuations as these coin, since $LAB topped around $25bn FDV in early June. Absolute shame that this happens so regularly with CEXes allowing the crime.

USELESS parabolic move

USELESS has had a phenomenal performance in May: it pumped from $40M to $85M market cap in 2 weeks. It then had a significant correction but quickly came back, printed higher lows, and then even managed to squeeze to $110M mcap at the beginning of June.

USELESS has Bonk guy permanently shilling it, which makes it a great Schelling coins among memecoins, and at a low valuation. So I’m not too surprised that it finally had a strong move, after months of struggling. USELESS is the only relevant memecoin that performed well in May. (There was also a 4x move on $GIGA by the way, but it has a much smaller mindshare.)

What else happened in May?

• $INJ pumped +105% in May and had several catalysts: Circle launched native USDC on Injective + community buyback (almost precisely at the local top) + partnership with Musicow to tokenize music IP. That being said I think the main catalyst was simply the fact that INJ started printing a very bullish chart, which attracted a ton of momentum traders

• $BIO pumped hard as a “peptides narrative trade” in April, then consolidated for 2 weeks before having a second leg in late April / early May. It topped in early May after an overall 4x move in one month. I expected it to remain stronger for longer, but that’s a tough ask for a narrative trade with no real fundamental value…

• $PENDLE was a very strong performer at the beginning of the month because it became a proxy for the STRC growth, as the two main STRC DeFi wrappers (Apyx and Saturn) have pools on Pendle. It pumped +75% in ten days, but then retraced the whole move at the end of the month, with STRC struggling to get back to peg.

• $LUNC had continuation on its April strength, it squeezed +75% during the first 5 days of May, but then topped there. Its full move from bottom to top in one month was +240%, and I honestly don’t think there was any real strong catalyst behind it.

• $STRK pumped ~50% in 3 days after the May 7 governance approval of strkBTC (a federated BTC wrapper that makes Bitcoin stakable on Starknet), which then went live on May 12. Move fully retraced though…

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

Like last month, you are again getting access to the full database (link below) of all interesting trades of May 2026. (I am progressively filling the database to include all trades from 2024 to now, and I’ll give you access to it whenever that’s ready. It will include several hundreds of examples of trades that you’ll be able to sort according to each field!)

Each item of the database is one trade, and each item has these fields:

• Short description

• Ticker

• Month

• Type of coin

• Long or short

• Type of trade (this will be very useful in the future to filter all trades of a certain type over several months)

• Relevance tier: I rank these trades from 1 to 7 by importance/relevance

• Long description

• Primary pump: a checkbox used to mark the main pump for a given coin during the month. Filtering for checked boxes produces a clean, non-duplicated list of the month’s pumps.

Read more

NB: you can now become a paid subscriber to this newsletter to get access to paywalled articles as well as all the future resources I’m planning to share.

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$BTC and the market overall

The first part of May has been rather quiet so far for BTC. It reached new highs at $83k at the beginning of the month, up 38% from the February bottom. But it didn’t managed to go higher after this May 6 top, which does signal weakness, especially in a context where the US equities market (SPY and QQQ) has been absolutely up only.

The AI mania is not stopping, and the memory names have been going crazy since the Iran war local bottom: MU (Micron) went up +160% in 40 days, SNDK (Sandisk) went up +185%, the DRAM ETF reached record inflows (it even beat IBIT’s successful launch). MU was the most traded stock with almost $60bn volume two days in the row, so if you gather all these signals together, it makes sense to expect that some of these memory stocks have had a local top here.

But let’s get back to BTC: Strategy had its earnings calls early in the month, and for the first time ever, Saylor signaled that they were very likely to sell some BTC to pay their dividends, to “inoculate the idea to the market”. As usual, people are trading BTC based on the STRC flows, which are at a maximum right before ex-dividend date, and then usually go to zero for several day after that. As a consequence, it makes sense to get positioned short on the day before ex-div, and wait for the sell-off that could happen afterwards because of the lack of STRC inflows into BTC. That’s exactly what happened this time (but not in May), with BTC dumping from $82k to $76k in 4 days. Yesterday, Saylor announced that they’ve been buying $2bn worth of BTC last week.

As for $ETH, ETHBTC has been down only (-15%) since mid May, and Tom Lee from Bitmine (main ETH buyer in the market) signaled that they might slow down their purchases.

HYPE strength

$HYPE has been under-performing the market during the first 2 weeks of May (despite launching HIP-4 on May 2), as it’s been flat or bleeding while the altcoin market was hot, but the polarity switched completely on May 14, when Circle announced that USDC would replace USDH and that HyperLiquid would now collect all the yield of the USDC sitting on their platform. All of that will go into buying back $HYPE, and we’re talking about more than $100M+ additional buybacks. It pumped HYPE from $39 to $47 in less than a day.

At the same time, Hyperliquid got a lot of attention from being the most liquid place to trade $CBRS pre-IPO. One day later, some FUD hit: CME and NYSE are pushing the US to regulate HyperLiquid, due to concerns about market manipulation and sanctions evasion. HYPE almost retraced its entire pump in 2 days, but then pumped again yesterday, because TradeXYZ has listed the pre-IPO SpaceX contract. A lot of people are now bullish HYPE short-term because of the attention that the SPCX perp might get.

ZEC is really back

$ZEC has had a phenomenal May performance during the first week of May, as it pumped almost 2x with barely any drawdown, from $340 to $640. It’s particularly impressive because it clearly invalidates the downtrend it’s been in since its $750 top in November. As I tweeted, what happens most of the time when a coin pumps very hard and captures a high mindshare is that it puts a top that is very hard to break again. Then you usually get a lower high (ENA, APT), or a double top (TAO, WIF). In some rare cases the second top goes higher by several digit percents (HYPE, PEPE, BONK). Here with ZEC we have a lot of people still calling for like 5x-10x. Not impossible, but seems very unlikely.

$DASH and $DUSK are two “privacy narrative” coins that benefitted from the ZEC pump too. DASH pumped +70% but has retraced most of its move, and DUSK is up 2x in two months, at a slow pace.

VVV top performer YTD, and the AI sector

$VVV has been consolidating for 2-3 weeks right below the $10 level in April, it was not too surprising to see it pump hard after its $10 breakout, and it reached $18 in a week, with only small drawdowns. On May 12, it got listed on Upbit, which marked the top with a squeeze to $19.5, followed by a -33% drawdown to sub $13. VVV managed to go up 20x from its December bottom, which makes it the top performing non scam coin year to date so far, by a wide margin.

Other noticeable moves in the AI sector include:

• $IO had a brutal +70% squeeze on May 6 (along with $FIL and $STORJ), but has been bleeding since then.

• $AKT went up almost 2x in May, almost 3x from its 2026 bottom.

• $NEAR had had a decent pump in early May, and is still holding quite well here against the market, it’s one of the coins that seems to have bids even when the market is weak.

• $TAO and $RENDER have not been particularly impressive.

Pavel Durov pumps TON

One of the strongest narratives in large caps lately has been the ‘revival’ of $TON after Pavel Durov tweeted that Telegram would replace the TON Foundation as the primary driving force behind the TON blockchain and become the network’s largest validator, while also confirming that fees on the TON network had dropped sixfold. The overall feeling of the market participants was ‘wow Pavel Durov wants to pump $TON, and Telegram has huge distribution, so bullish’. Which is why TON pumped relentlessly (+115%) for 3 days. It topped right below $3, and has been bleeding since then. The TON Binance perp contract reached a new record at $1.5bn (which often happens at a local top), and I suspect a lot of TON buyers have been trapped since then.

$DOGS, which is a project of the TON ecosystem, has pumped 3x too.

$USELESS strength and memecoins

After months of awful price action, $USELESS has finally managed to express substantial strength in May. It started with a +30% move to its strong $50M mcap resistance, and from there it accelerated until it almost reached $90M MC. It is now back to $60M, but I expect the 0.05 level to now act as a strong support.

Most other memecoins have been rather timid recently, except for $GIGA which pumped 4x in ten days. Another noticeable on has been $Binancelife (BIANRANSHENG), because after its parabolic 15x pump in April, it still doesn’t look tired, and is even consolidating into a potentially new leg higher.

$LAB: 10x squeeze to $8bn FDV

The main scam coin of May so far has been $LAB. After a ‘slow’ +230% move in April, it suddenly squeezed very hard in early April, and basically 6x’d in a day… before retracing the entire move… and then pumping 10X again from $650M to almost $8bn FDV. The overall behavior of LAB is quit strange, because so far it seems topped but it’s also not dying, and it also is the only scam coin that became this large (FDV wise) while constantly having a positive funding! ZachXBT has been going after LAB, but it absolutely didn’t prevent the price from going higher anyway, because CEXs don’t care about scam coins and are even happy about their existence.

The second most noticeable crime coin move has been $SKYAI, which went up 25x from its February bottom to its May highs, and up 60x from its 2025 bottom. It topped in early April without a climax around $850M FDV. Among coins that appear to be manipulated because of their low float, we can also mention $GUA, which is up 13x year-to-date despite no one knowing anything about this coin.

A ton of (more or less short-lived) altcoin pumps and squeezes

We’ve been reviving a ton of altcoins in May, we can’t really say if it’s the beginning of a new uptrend or just a mechanical bounce to attack ‘comfortable shorts’ after weeks of ranging, but most of the moves overshot and then corrected.

• Ondo announced its selection for DTCC’s Industry Working Group on May 4, 2026. The group will support the design of tokenization services for U.S. capital markets. The news allowed $ONDO to finally break its very strong $0.29 three month resistance, and the coin pumped +70% in a week. It then had a -30% correction, and yesterday it pumped a bit again on the news that the SEC is expected to release its “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks as soon as this week. $ONDO has a ton of unlocks, which definitely doesn’t help its price action.

• $SUI is one of the main large caps of the cycle, and it’s been underperforming for months, so it’s not surprising that it finally bounces again on a sign of strength in the market. $SUI pumped from $1 to $1.4 in two days but retraced the whole move.

• $INJ pumped +75% in May and had several catalysts: Circle launched native USDC on Injective + community buyback (almost precisely at the local top) + partnership with Musicow to tokenize music IP.

• $ICP had a nice and clean +75% Christmas tree pattern over a few days.

• $LUNC pumped +240% from its April bottom prices but topped on May 5.

• $STRK pumped ~50% in 3 days after the May 7 governance approval of strkBTC (a federated BTC wrapper that makes Bitcoin stakable on Starknet), which then went live on May 12. Move fully retraced…

Then there were even more short-lived pumps that were very intense and strong squeezes, but that rarely lasted more than one day:

• $SAGA had a +250% squeeze in a day, and it was doable to short it quite close to its top by just waiting for the volume to “saturate” on the Binance perps contract, as the highest volume 15min candle (almost $50M) marked the pico-top and it went down only from there.

• $NIL had a +150% move in one day, it also fully retraced in one week.

• $BABY squeezed 2x in 2 days, before collapsing.

• $B3 pumped 8x bottom to top in May. The last leg happened after the Upbit listing, and it’s been consistently bleeding from there.

$MEGA failure and the other TGEs

One of the most anticipated launches of the year happened on April 30: $MEGA. MegaETH is an Ethereum L2 that is supposed to be very ‘high performance’. Unfortunately for them, no one wants to buy L2s anymore, so despite a pump on pre-markets to $2bn FDV, the coin has absolutely been down only since launch, it’s currently trading right above $800M FDV.

Unsurprisingly, the TGE that everyone knows about ($MEGA) is down only while the TGE of a coin that no one knows has been up only after launch: $BILL. The project is called Billions Network, and it seems to be a decentralized identity project. The token launched below $600M FDV, and it went up 4x in a week, until its top at almost $2.4bn FDV. It fell down -50% since then.

$GWEI is another rather recent TGE that has been up only since its inception in February, it went up 6x bottom to top and currently trades at $1.3bn FDV.

Finally, $AIGENSYN (Gensyn) which launched in late April has been listed on Binance spot last week: it pumped +66% to $500M+ FDV but is down since then.

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• On May 5, Jito has announced the upcoming launch of their new platform JTX, which is intented to become the new ‘place to trade on Solana’. The very initial reaction was a sell the news effect for a few hours, before $JTO started bouncing very strongly, as it then moved up 2x in 2 days. It’s also been helped by SOLBTC being surprisingly strong at the same time, with a +15% move in a week. JTO has been bleeding non-stop from its recent highs though.

• $PENDLE went up +65% in May to its top, mostly because its benefitting from the ‘STRC narrative’. Both Apyx and Saturn are 2 protocols tokenizing STRC shares (through proxies) and they are growing fast. They both have pools on Pendle, which makes Pendle a sort of bet on STRC growth.

• $BCH had its Layla hard fork on May 15. BCH has been an extremely disappointing coin since February, as it’s been incapable of finding any form of strength. This has been even more true in May, with BCH going down from $450 to as low as $350 today. The sell the news trade after the fork worked very well, even if most of the move down happened today.

• $CHZ is doing okay-ish in May, it’s not really pumping but doesn’t seem to follow the market when we go down. The reason for that is that the soccer World Cup is going to start in a month, and this has always been a strong catalyst for Chiliz.

• $CFG, a RWA protocol, seems to be one of the tokens that is among the best proxy for the CLARITY act being resolved, and it seems to be getting more and more likely that Clarity will pass. CFG went up +70% in early May, 3x from its March lows.

• $ASTEROID, the “SpaceX mascot” Shiba, has been consolidating between $110M and $180M mcap for one month, which tends to signal that it will probably end up breaking out higher, especially now that we know that the SpaceX IPO will happen in early June. Strong and main catalyst for ASTEROID, it seems logical for it to pump into the event and then dumping hard.

• $STABLE and $H are two very strange coins that are at the frontier between scam coins and organic coins. I think that neither of them could be sent to $20bn FDV like MYX/RAVE/COAI, but we can also clearly see in their charts that they don’t move organically, and that there are not a lot of sellers. In May, $STABLE has reached new highs (from its bottom) at $4.3bn FDV. Given the chart which shows the lack of sellers, I’d expect $STABLE to go higher. $H is a bit different because it already pumped to $4bn FDV at its ATH, and I don’t know if it could top that, but it’s just been consistently up from early April, from $800M to $3bn FDV.

• Unibase seems to be an AI agent protocol, its token $UB has pumped 12x from the April bottom to its May highs. It’s already down almost -50% from the top, and I don’t know how ‘organic’ this coin is.

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

NB: You can now become a paid subscriber and get access to a growing library of trading resources including monthly recaps of the best trades, links to all my up-to-date TradingView watchlists, actionable trading articles, etc.

Main events that happened in April:

• The Solana perp DEX Drift got hacked on April 1st for almost $300M by DPRK. $DRIFT dumped -60% in a week from the news. They have since then partnered with Tether to get some form of soft bailout and they will be switching from USDC to USDT as collateral on the plaform.

• Another very important hack happened on April 18 and it involved Kelp rsETH, with like $300M unbacked tokens that got minted and used on Aave as collateral, leading to bad debt on Aave. Kelp was using the LayerZero technology to bridge tokens, so both $ZRO and $AAVE got immediately smacked down by more than -20%. In the days after the event, the “Defi United” initiative lead to several donations from people in DeFi to fill the hole on Aave and erase the bad debt problem.

• $TAO dumped hard on April 10, from $340 to $260 in a few hours, when the leader of the main Tao subnet basically announced that he would be stepping away. I don’t know the exact details but it corresponds to what we can call a rug, and it immediately affected the price of TAO in a significant way. TAO did bottom very quickly after that dump, though.

• $WLD did host their “Liftoff” conference on April 17. It went up +35% in a week before the event, and then ran the textbook ‘sell the news’ on the day of the conference. It went up -27% from there in two weeks, as there was no substantial announcement during the event.

• The $TRUMP memecoin team held its conference on April 25 in Mar-A-Lago. Unsurprisingly, nothing has been announced either on that front, and $TRUMP sold off -25% in a week.

• Listings of the month: $ZEC on Robinhood, and $ZAMA $SOON $SPK $XCN $PRN on Upbit.

• TGEs of the month: $CHIP and $GENSYN, two AI coins. The most interesting one was definitely $CHIP (USD.AI), because it launched at a rather small valuation of $300M while having decently high mindshare. So what happened is a rather usual pattern, which is the squeeze post-TGE. $CHIP ran up +360% in two days to $1.4bn, and from there has been bleeding endlessly. Another similar move happened on $BASED, which was launched last month, and first sold off for 2 weeks, before finding strength on the $50M FDV support, and the whole move ended with a huge squeeze to $300M+ FDV, followed by a significant retrace.

Main narratives of April:

Green month for BTC and ceasefire

The price action of $BTC in April has been a steady uptrend, green month overall for crypto and a +20% bottom to top move on BTC. Stocks started moving up during the first week of April for no apparent reason given the bearish conditions (Iran war and oil price up), and then on April 8 we got the ceasefire news on the Iran front, which pushed stocks up even more, and BTC as well.

As time went by, it became more and more clear that the equities market wasn’t really that concerned about the Iran conflict, and the same thing applied to BTC. Another bullish catalyst for BTC is that STRC has had monster inflows, $2.2bn raised in one week by Saylor. And surprisingly, the market didn’t even sell off during the second half of April after the ex-dividend date.

$RAVE to $28bn FDV and all the other scam coins

We’ve had a lot of altcoin pumps and moves in April, but not a single one as memorable as $RAVE, which was THE scam coin of April, and ran in a similar fashion as MYX/COAI/AIA. $RAVE has always had a rather scammy price action, and it started moving from $0.25 on April 8. In two days it got to $1 with zero drawdown and then just kept moving up and up and up, in a very inorganic way, it had a few flash crashes but no real dump, and it reached $12 on April 13… and then went as high as $28 five days later. Which corresponds to $28bn FDV! A new record reached for a scam coin. On that same day, zachXBT started fudding the coin, and RAVE started collapsing once Gracie from Bitget said they would investigate it. It simply went down -98% in one day, from the top… Once again, I recommend my article with advice about how to trade manipulated coins, as well as the compilation of all the most outrageous crime pumps we’ve seen so far in 2 years.

$RAVE was not the only scam coin in April, in fact there were a lot of these:

• $STO squeezed 15x in two days and then retraced the entire move in one day.

• $ARIA went up 10x in March/early April, before having a -93% retrace in one hour, followed by a 15x comeback… followed by another -90% dump. Absolutely wild price action.

• $SIREN was down -97% from its top in early April, then pumped 5x in a day, and 15x in total after 2 weeks.

• $BLESS had a 6x pump-and-dump over a few days.

• $LAB pumped 5x bottom to top in April.

• $SKYAI had a very volatile 6x pump in April.

• $BSB pumped 6x, after a TGE in March.

• $M managed to make new highs after 8 months, and reached $25bn FDV.

• $TRADOOR had a 12x move in 3 months but then collapsed -92% in a single day.

Memecoin strength

With the market generally being strong, it’s not surprising that the memecoin sector has been among the best performing one:

• $DOGE has been putting a very nice rounded bottom over 2-3 months, and it finally broke out of it in April, it went up +12% after breaking $0.1.

• $USELESS pumped +60% in April. As a very low cap, it can often be a good long when the market moves up.

• $SPX went up +60% bottom to top. It’s a memecoin that I still like overall.

• $Binancelife is probably the most impressive pump by far, it went up almost 15x from its bottom in 20 days, to $600M mcap.

• $NEIRO, $PNUT and $BOME, all had strong squeezes, but mostly retraced them.

• $FARTCOIN got manipulated on HyperLiquid by a whale in early April, and it lead to a +50% pump and dump. FARTCOIN closed the month in green anyway.

Surprisingly, some NFTs also found life in April, such as Bored Apes and Pudgy Penguins, and their respective tokens too.

• $PENGU went up +65% and got shilled by High Stakes Capital too.

• $APE had a strong +180% squeeze in a single day, but that seems to be the result of some manipulation by a whale on HyperLiquid, so it immediately dumped -50% from the top in 3 days.

$ZEC is back

One of the most noticeable move coming from a “major” was the $ZEC pump. It spent 2 months finding a base around $220, and it suddenly pumped +65% in a few days to almost $400. After that, it’s been consolidating around $350. $ZEC also got listed on Robinhood on April 23.

$BIO and the peptides trade

On April 13, Bio Protocol‘s AI agent — peptAI — designed an entirely new ADHD peptide in under 24 hours. That was a strong catalyst for $BIO, and also positioned it to become the “peptides narrative trade” in crypto, which is why BIO pumped +170% in 3 days, and then pumped again to new highs and even +50% higher in late April/early March.

Strong squeezes across the board

One of the most common patterns we’ve seen this month has been the “strong short-term squeeze” happening on random altcoins. Among the most impressive ones, we have $ORDI, which pumped +350% in 2 days, before immediately selling off -65%. Another example was $SPK, Spark, the lending platform of the Maker/Sky ecosystem, which gained a lot of strength immediately after the Aave hack, and ended up pumping 3x in less than a week.

I can also mention $ENJ, Enjin, an old gaming coin, which pumped 5x over a week with a nice parabola. Other examples include $MOVR, $ORCA, $KAT, $HIGH, which did all pump 2 to 4x in a matter of days, without having some real continuation.

What else happened in April?

• Three slow and steady coins that were strong in March have remained strong in April: $HYPE, $MON, and $VVV. $HYPE started the month with a +30% pump from $35 to $45. $MON move up +70% once it flipped its ICO resistance at $2.5bn FDV. $VVV has broken out from $7 to $10 after a month of edging. VVV is the top performing non scam coin year to date.

• $LUNC has been essentially up only in April, pumping from $200M to $400M market cap, and then even to $650M at the beginning of May. I’m not exactly sure what is going on there, but one of the potential catalysts is the Terra Station wallet announcing their relaunch with new AI capabilities.

• $CARDS is the token of Collector Crypt, one of the leading platforms of Pokemon cards RWA. It’s been revived in April, and it has pumped 4x from $10M to $40M mcap in a few weeks.

• $AERO went up +60% in April, after 2 months of bottoming/consolidation around $0.3. It is possible that the market is already anticipating the launch of Aero on the Ethereum mainnet, which is expected to happen in July.

• $PENDLE has been particularly strong in April, simply because it’s considered as a proxy for STRC success. The 2 main “STRC wrappers”, Apyx and Saturn, both have pools on Pendle, and their TVL is overall up only.

• We’ve had a real on-chain runner in April, and that was $ASTEROID, or Asteroid Shiba. It’s a very old coin that was sub $100K mcap but that got revived in a few days after some Elon tweets about Asteroid becoming the mascot of SpaceX. ASTEROID reached $200M mcap. With the SpaceX IPO coming this year, it will remain a potentially strong catalyst for the coin.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in April:

• ENJ: +180%

• RAVE: +172%

• BIO: +145%

• ORCA: +135%

• H: +112%

• LUNC: +100%

• APE: +85%

• EDGE: +76%

• PENGU: +53%

• ZEC: +41%

• AERO: +37%

• COMP: +34%

• SPX: +34%

• ARB: +33%

• VVV: +30%

• PENDLE: +28%

• JTO: +28%

Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in March :

• Binancelife: +652%

• SKYAI: +487%

• TAC: +412%

• ASTEROID: $100k → $200M mcap

• ZEREBRO: +310%

• LAB: +228%

• BSB: +191%

• UB: +181%

• SWARMS: +176%

• CARDS: +143%

• BAS: +115%

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

Like last month, you are again getting access to the full database (link below) of all interesting trades of April 2026. (I am progressively filling the database to include all trades from 2024 to now, and I’ll give you access to it whenever that’s ready. It will include several hundreds of examples of trades that you’ll be able to sort according to each field!)

Each item of the database is one trade, and each item has these fields:

• Short description

• Ticker

• Month

• Type of coin

• Long or short

• Type of trade (this will be very useful in the future to filter all trades of a certain type over several months)

• Relevance tier: I rank these trades from 1 to 7 by importance/relevance

• Long description

• Primary pump: a checkbox used to mark the main pump for a given coin during the month. Filtering for checked boxes produces a clean, non-duplicated list of the month’s pumps.

Read more

This article is, in a way, a follow-up to my first piece on how to trade scam coins profitably.

It is a compilation of all the most important examples of scam coins we’ve seen over the past 2 years. I’ve included my key observations throughout, along with a large number of charts.

I also provide a set of key metrics for each of these manipulated coins, to give a clearer sense of what they typically look like: total ROI from bottom to top, open interest (in USD) at the peak, daily volume at the peak, and the magnitude of liquidations.

The reason I write this article is because crime coins are really strong outliers in this market, and you can’t trade them the same as normal/organic coins. Each category (scam vs organic) has very different trading rules. If you try to look for the 10 largest moves (bottom to top ROI) you could have caught on Binance Futures since early 2025, you will realize that literally 9 out of the top 10 are scam coins. (ZEC is the only organic coin that made it into the list.) I therefore believe it’s particularly important to internalize these examples, as well as to develop a solid understanding of how to trade them.

Here is the list of all the coins studied in this article, sorted by (arbitrary) category:

Read more

NB: you can now become a paid subscriber to this newsletter to get access to paywalled articles as well as all the future resources I’m planning to share.

$BTC and the market overall

The first 2 weeks of April have been very constructive for BTC, as it’s been going up progressively from its $66k local bottom to a top above $78k today. The main catalyst has been the de-escalation on the Iran front, with the ceasefire announced on April 7, and then negotiations going on between the USA and Iran. Today the strait of Hormuz has been declared officially open again. The stock market has basically been up only for the first two weeks of April, and both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq have now made new highs. The “nothing ever happens” crowd is winning more than ever, after one month of extreme bearishness on CT. Oil is also down from $120 to $80 today. It feels almost inevitable that a deal will be found between the USA and Iran, and that the war will definitely not resume.

Another massively bullish catalyst for BTC in April has been the wild success of $STRC, the main preferred share of Strategy, which has been having 2 days at more than $1bn daily volume right before ex-dividend date. Saylor has announced last week a $1bn BTC purchase funded entirely through STRC, and he’s probably going to announce something even bigger next Monday.

$TAO subnet FUD and the AI narrative

The AI category seems to be the only category that still remains a “narrative” category. The main coin of the category is obviously $TAO, but it has suffered a bit lately. It was the best performing large cap in March, with a 2x move in 2 weeks, and it almost touched $380. It had a small correction after that and then started a rounded bottom pattern, but then it dumped hard on April 10, from $340 to $260 in a few hours, when the leader of the main Tao subnet basically announced that he would be stepping away. I don’t know the exact details but it corresponds to what we can call a “rug”, and it immediately affected the price of TAO in a significant way.

Another top-performing AI coin for months now has been $VVV, which had a squeeze in early April to $8.5, and then spent a month digesting it and then printing higher lows until a new breakout that happened in April, and brought it to a $10 top. If its market cap was larger, I would say that VVV is likely to be topped after a 10x from its December lows, but it’s not even $1bn FDV and the chart still looks strong.

$GRASS is the third AI coin that has a very constructive chart, it had a very strong squeeze in March, then went down almost -45%, but has been going up again in April.

$HYPE remains solid

$HYPE has remained ‘quietly unstoppable’ lately, it went up from $35 at the bottom to almost $45 now… which technically still corresponds to a $45bn FDV, even though the FDV is not a very relevant metric for HYPE. There has been two successful attempts to “attack” the HLP in April, one on XPL and one on FARTCOIN, and in both cases they resulted to pump-and-dumps on these coins, as well as a loss for HLP. It didn’t really impact the price of HYPE though.

The mindshare of HYPE seems to be growing among tradfi people, and the clear product market fit of HIP-3 (oil, precious metals, stocks, indexes markets) is confirming the HYPE bull thesis.

$RAVE to $25bn FDV and other scam coins

The most noticeable altcoin move of April so far has probably been the gigantic pump of a pure “scam coin”: $RAVE. RAVE has gone up almost 100x in 10 days, from $250M FDV to $25bn FDV. This puts it at the very top in the “crime coin leaderboard”, along with $MYX, $COAI and $AIA which all reached $20bn FDV too. I don’t have much more to say about it than everything I wrote in my article about trading scam coins profitably. Scam coins follow completely different rules compared to normal/”organic” coins and shorting them is a very dangerous game if you don’t have a clear framework. RAVE is obviously an extremely cornered supply coin, meaning the ‘real’ market cap is infinitely smaller than its current official $5bn FDV.

An other completely egregious scam coin was $SIREN in March, which has the most insane chart I’ve ever seen. In late March/early April, it dumped -92%… before pumping back very strongly, up 5x in one day. And then it pumped again on April 16, reaching a 15x move bottom to top in two weeks.

$STO also had a noticeable move, as it pumped 13x in early April, this was a different kind of manipulation, because it was mostly a short squeeze that rekt some shorts but completely collapsed afterwards. Shorting these coins is much more interesting than shorting a RAVE like coin, if you nail the entry you can really have a very profitable trade in a short amount of time.

I should also mention $ARIA, which literally had a -92% drawdown, followed by a 17x pump, followed by another -91% dump.

$M is also an outrageous scam, it had a +40% pump from roughly $3 to $4, and is now trading at more than $20bn FDV… talk about cornered supply!

Other scam names in April so far include $SKYAI, $TRADOOR, $DEXE, $LAB, $PLAY.

“Popular coins” polarity switch?

There’s a category of coins in the market that I call “popular coins”, which are high mindshare coins that CT usually likes and holds. These coins can do well in bullish conditions, but they tend to suffer when the market turns, which is what has been the case for the past 6 months. Interestingly, some of these coins have started to show some constructive signs lately.

One example is $XPL, which has had a notoriously bad price action since its launch, with a literal -95% drawdown in 4 months. $XPL had its “manipulation squeeze” in early April, which pumped it +50% in a day before a full retrace, but it’s been printing higher lows linearly since then, and is currently trading close to $1.4bn FDV.

$LIT is another example, it suffered substantially after its launch, and dumped from $3.5bn FDV to below $800M FDV in late March. On April 2, Telegram announced the launch of its native perpetual futures trading powered exclusively by Lighter, which was a good catalyst to push $LIT up, as it moved +42% in 9 days.

Another typical ‘popular coin’ is $MON, which also had a bearish price action right after its TGE, it dumped from $5bn FDV to $1.6bn FDV, but has been quietly printing higher lows in February and March, and is accelerating in April, as it pumped +60% to roughly $3.6bn FDV.

Finally, I can also mention $FARTCOIN and $USELESS, both have been showing constructive price action in April, which might ideally accelerate upwards if BTC remains strong.

“Doomed coins” showing signs of life

What’s maybe even more noticeable is that not only popular coins have been moving up, but also ‘doomed coins’ that have been suffering non stop for months, have also found a bit of strength. $LDO is an example of such a coin. The Lido DAO has announced a buyback of $LDO coins using the treasury, and the coin is now up almost +40% in just a few days. $OP and $ARB, two high FDV doomed coins (that don’t really have a high FDV anymore…) are also up lately, $ARB is even up +50% from its lows. The same goes for $ENA, up +55% from its bottom after announcing that they were pivoting away from only the basis trade and t-bills, to include more sources of yield (RWA, private credit, etc) for their stablecoin. Finally, $WLD has been ‘bouncing’ +30% off its bottom after a few months of terrible PA, and they did host today their ‘Liftoff’ event, which unsurprisingly has lead to a -10% sell the news effect.

Squeezes all over the place

We are in market conditions where there are a lot of squeezes happening every week, usually they last one or two days, but sometimes they can keep going longer. 3 examples of such squeezes are $ENJ, $ORDI, and $MOVR. $ENJ went up 5x in a week, but so far the $0.1 has acted as strong resistance. $ORDI had an extremely impressive +340% pump in 2 days, for absolutely no “fundamental” reason. It had a $2.5bn volume yesterday on its Binance perp contract, which leads me to think that it is already topped… Finally, $MOVR had a 3x pump in literally 2 hours today.

As I’ve said in a tweet yesterday, spending more time being flat + opportunistic is a much better idea than holding ‘passive’ swing shorts as inverse investments, specifically because of these squeezes. And that’s mostly true on small/mid caps obviously.

Memecoin squeeze

Yesterday was a day of strong squeeze for “shitty” memecoins, which reminded me of the May 2025 squeeze when we had MOODENG pumping 10x. The leader of yesterday’s move has been $NEIRO, which pumped +160% in 3 days. $PNUT also went up 2x in a day.

A lot of the best-performing memes in March have been BSC/Binance related. The most noticeable one is Binancelife, it is up +650% in 2 weeks from $50M mcap to almost $400M. $GIGGLE also went up +170% in 11 days.

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• Two of the most recent coins launched have had constructive price action. $EDGE is the token of the EdgeX perp DEX, and it’s up more than 2x since the launch, as it pumped from $0.5 to a top at $1.38 today. Based is a trading app which uses a HyperLiquid builder code (meaning it’s built on the Hyperliquid orderbook). Its token $BASED launched at $120M FDV, printed the airdrop dump pattern to $50M FDV, before bouncing 2x in a few days and then squeezing hard to $320M FDV yesterday. It went down -66% top to bottom in a day after that.

• The Solana perp dex Drift was hacked on April 1st for $285M. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a long-term and sophisticated operation by North Korean hackers. The $DRIFT coin dumped -50% on the day and -65% over 5 days. Yesterday, Tether and partners announced up to $150M in recovery funding for Drift, which lead to a +40% pump that quickly retraced.

• The $BIO team (plus autonomous AI agents) ran a rapid drug-discovery pipeline and proposed a novel peptide agonist that could improve ADHD symptoms, they announced it on April 14 and it sparked a squeeze on $BIO which went up +160% in 2 days.

• $ZEC has become a very important coin in terms of mindshare since its meteoric rise in Q4 2025, and after 4 months of digestion/dump, it seems to have found a bottom at the $200 support. It formed a rounded bottom in March and early April, and then had an acceleration from April 7 to April 10, with a +55% pump in 3 days that brought it to almost $400 again. It’s been bleeding since then.

• Chaos Labs announced on April 7 that they would step down as one of the two risk managers for the Aave DAO. It lead to a -7% dump in 2 hours, after weeks of FUD (Marc Zeller leaving, etc), but it marked a local bottom. $AAVE is now up +36% from there, and there has been a new important governance proposal called ‘Aave will win’, that plans to fully align Aave Labs with the $AAVE DAO and token.

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

NB: You can now become a paid subscriber and get access to a growing library of trading resources including monthly recaps of the best trades, links to all my up-to-date TradingView watchlists, actionable trading articles, etc.

Main events that happened in March:

• On March 3, Marc Zeller, one of the most active DAO participants of Aave, announced that he was going to stop all his Aave activities, because of disagreements with Aave Labs. $AAVE dumped -10% on the news and then another -10% at the end of the month.

• On March 5, ICE (NYSE’s parent company) announced an investment into the Asian crypto exchange Okx (at $25bn valuation), it lead to a +60% pump in 15 minutes on $OKB but then the move got mostly retraced.

• The $TRUMP memecoin team announced (on March 12) a new dinner for the largest holders in April, which initially lead to a +10% spike on $TRUMP but then it moved up +60% in one day… before fully retracing in around 2 weeks.

• There were rumors about a potential investment from Coinbase into Bybit around March 14, which pushed $MNT up roughly +20% in two days.

• Across Protocol announced on March 11 that their token would get converted into an equity-only model, with current holders being offered the possibility to sell their $ACX token at a fixed price, 30% above the 30d TWAP of ACX. $ACX first pumped 2x before settling at a price very close to the “conversion price”.

• The Aster mainnet launched on March 17, it had been announced one month before, but $ASTER pumped +8% on the news, before selling the news roughly -20% from there.

• On March 31st, a research paper came out about the quantum risk that could affect crypto, and it accelerated the timeline about this risk. A lot of people have been freaking out on CT, but it didn’t really affect BTC price negatively. It lead to a +50% pump in 4 days on $ALGO, though, because it was mentioned in the paper.

• Listings of the month: $ICP, $ETHFI and $SKY on Upbit, all of them retraced their listing pumps pretty quickly. $NIGHT got listed on Binance spot and performed rather badly afterwards. $EDGE and $BASED had their TGE, but none of them had a noticeable price action.

Main narratives of March:

BTC relative strength during the Iran war

The PA of $BTC has been nothing more than a range in March. The Iran war started in late February, and surprisingly, BTC has been reacting in a rather positive way, because it went from $67k to $74k in 4 days, then dumped to $66k but pushed to $76k in mid-March. One of the strong catalysts that have helped BTC in March has been the massive success of $STRC, the preferred share of Strategy, which has had huge volume right in the week before the ex-dividend date (which always happens at the middle of a month). The second half of March has been much weaker for BTC, which went back yet again to its $66k support.

The war in Iran is a situation that has been mostly deteriorating in March, in the sense that the strait of Hormuz has been quickly blocked by Iran, which lead to a massive increase in oil price, which implies inflation coming, and some significant headwinds for the world economy… and there has been no signal that the strait would re-open soon. Because Trump is so unpredictable, we don’t really know what his goals are, meaning that it’s possible that he pulls out very soon and claims victory, but it’s also possible that the US puts boots on the ground in the near future.

The stock market has been correcting in March, from almost $7000 (on the S&P500) to a bottom at $6350, but it’s really nothing too spectacular given how bearish the sentiment has been in equities. Gold has also suffered significantly in March, it dumped from $5400 at the highs to $4100 at the exact bottom, before a strong bounce back to $4700. The reason gold has dumped this hard is simply that it’s been pumping so much these last 2 years that it’s now become a risk-asset, with a lot of people ready to dump it that bought it at the highs.

It’s positive to see that $BTC managed to outperform both equities and gold since the beginning of the Iran war, suggesting that the $60k bottom is probably a strong one.

TAO and the AI narrative

The main altcoin narrative by far, and probably the only one, has been AI, which is the only them that seems to keep appearing every 6 months or every year (the first three waves were early 2023, then early 2024, then late 2024 with AI agents). One catalyst for that narrative could have been the GTC conference by Nvidia on March 16-19, because it’s already been an AI catalyst in 2024 for example.

The leader of the narrative is $TAO, and it has also been the best large cap trade of the month, since it went up more than 2x from $175 to $370, with an increasingly large mindshare. The TAO perp contract on Binance has reached a new daily trading volume record above $1bn, which usually signals at least a local top. Another potential top signal for TAO is that it’s been shilled by both Chamath and Jason Calacanis in March…

Other strong AI coins in March have been:

• $VVV is probably one of the best performing tokens YTD, and it opened March by continuing its squeeze to $8.5, resulting in +360% gains in less than 3 weeks. It did top there but then has spent the rest of the month ranging around $6, and it does now look ready for another leg higher.

• $GRASS has had a very strong first half of March, it bottomed at $0.16 in February but squeezed to $0.48 in mid-March. It’s been bleeding since then.

• $AKT which is down -95% from its top, had a 2x pump in March.

• $RENDER pumped by almost +50% in two weeks.

• $NEAR had a clear outperformance during the first two weeks of March, but then under-performed.

• $FET went up +90% bottom to top.

HYPE success with HIP-3 oil contracts

$HYPE has had a very strong performance during the first 2/3rds of the month, it almost went up +50%. Besides the fact that HYPE is clearly the chosen coin among altcoins at the moment (same as SOL in late 2023/early 2024), it has also benefitted from the fact that the Iran war has brought a lot of attention and volume into oil contracts, which are available on Hyperliquid through HIP-3, and are confirming the success of HIP-3. The potential of these markets, which are completely uncorrelated from the crypto market health and sentiment, is huge, and that makes people even more bullish on HYPE.

What topped HYPE on March 18 was the S&P licensing the S&P500 perpetual contract of tradeXYZ, it seems that the news was frontrun, and HYPE became slightly weak afterwards.

$SIREN crazy squeeze

Unfortunately, one of the most noticeable altcoin moves of the month has once again been a scam coin squeezing hard. In February, $SIREN had a one-day pump and dump from $0.1 to $0.35, and from there it started to grind upwards endlessly, reaching $0.5 again in early March, and then continuing to $1. The whole move culminated with a gigantic squeeze in one day from $1 to almost $5 at the top (liquidating a lot of people in the process). It dumped back to $1 two days later, but even managed to have two waves of comeback after that. It printed one of most insane charts I’ve ever seen on a crypto CEX.

(Btw, I have a full article sharing my most important advice and tricks for trading scam coins profitably.)

$SIREN has not been the only noticeable scam move in March. $M (Memecore), which is one of the most blatant manipulations in the market, has pumped from $1.8 to $2.8 again, making it an almost $15bn FDV coin again. $M has been trading above $7bn FDV for more than 6 months now, which is an insane performance given the fact that absolutely no real huma, holds this coin or talks about it.

There has also been three ‘up only’ crime coins, which are going up endlessly with no drawdown: $TRADOOR (+130% on top of +100% in February), $DEXE (+300%), $ARIA (+500%). $BR had a 5x pump in 2 days, but then dumped -35% from its top. $BANANAS31 also had a 4x pump in March.

What else happened in March?

• $PIXEL had one of the strongest ‘non-crime’ squeezes in the market in March, as it pumped +230% in one day with gigantic volume ($2bn day on Binance perps), which was signaling exhaustion and a probably top. It dumped -50% from there, and then squeezed back to the highs before bleeding during the following weeks.

• $TRX is one of the most impressive coins in the top 30, it’s been basically up only against the altcoin market for 2 years straight, and it keeps trading like gravity didn’t apply to it. It went up +15% in March, with very little drawdowns and volatility as always.

• $KAITO has been surprisingly strong, since its $0.28 bottom in February, it’s been trading as if sellers were exhausted, and it’s just slowly moving higher whatever the direction of the broader market. As far as I’m aware, there is no clear catalyst for KAITO right now.

• $ZRO was quite strong during the first half of March, as it pumped from $1.8 to $2.3. It seems to be among the most interesting coins on a fundamental basis, and we’ve seen on-chain that a few wallets have been accumulating multi-million position worth of ZRO, but it was not enough for preventing it to turn weak at the end of the month.

• $MON is moving extremely slowly, but it just keeps printing higher lows, making it one of the strongest large caps in the market.

• After 4 months of digestion of its gigantic pump, $ZEC might be finding a base above $200, it seems to be forming subtle higher lows.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in March:

• TAO: +67%

• AKT: +62%

• FET: +48%

• JST: +32%

• RENDER: +24%

• VVV: +21%

• MON: +18%

• HYPE: +17%

• ZEC: +13%

• TRX: +11%

• OKB: +10%

Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in March :

• ARIA: +383%

• STO: +222%

• BANANAS31: +179%

• QUBIC: +141%

• DEXE: +132%

• TRADOOR: +132%

• NAORIS: +106%

• BEAT: +95%

• SIREN: +94%

• ONT: +90%

• BR: +82%

• DRV: +75%

• STG: +69%

• M: +63%

• PIXEL: +63%

• PHA: +49%

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

Like last month, you are again getting access to the full database (link below) of all interesting trades of March 2026. (I am progressively filling the database to include all trades from 2024 to now, and I’ll give you access to it whenever that’s ready. It will include several hundreds of examples of trades that you’ll be able to sort according to each field!)

Each item of the database is one trade, and each item has these fields:

• Short description

• Ticker

• Month

• Type of coin

• Long or short

• Type of trade (this will be very useful in the future to filter all trades of a certain type over several months)

• Relevance tier: I rank these trades from 1 to 7 by importance/relevance

• Long description

• Primary pump: a checkbox used to mark the main pump for a given coin during the month. Filtering for checked boxes produces a clean, non-duplicated list of the month’s pumps.

Read more

NB: you can now become a paid subscriber to this newsletter to get access to paywalled articles as well as all the future resources I’m planning to share.

$BTC and the market overall

The most important event of the past 2 weeks has obviously been the fact that the US started a war against Iran in late February, but $BTC has been reacting surprisingly well to it. $BTC is currently up roughly +10% in March, and showing a lot of strength.

$BTC pumped from $67k to $74k (on March 4), then it got back to $66k, and since then it’s been a slow uptrend that brought us to $74k once again. Looking at this chart, I would say we should break out above this $74k level now, as it looks like BTC doesn’t want to go down.

One clearly bullish signal we’ve had lately on BTC is that there has been a massive increase in demand for $STRC, with last week being by far the week with the largest volumes on STRC (it was ex-dividend date week). It turns out Saylor has been able to raise $1.1bn+ for STRC last week, which is a historical record. I expect demand to keep being strong for the weeks to come, but it will naturally always be the strongest in the days leading to ex-dividend date. I have a written a very detailed (free) piece on STRC last week, you can check it out here.

BTC is not performing well alone, most altcoins are strong too, and they are printing clean rounded bottoms.

In tradfi, what we’re seeing is the SPY going down in an extremely slow manner, as it tends to always bounce back strongly to lower highs, and the whole market is hedged. Oil has been going crazy in the first week of March, with a pump going from $70 to $120, before dumping down to $80 and then back to $100.

AI meta is back

The strongest category in altcoins right now is clearly AI coins. The AI x crypto never stops coming back, keep this in mind for your altcoin trading:

• $VVV is the most impressive performance we’ve seen lately from a non-scam coin, it went from $1.75 at the February lows to as high as $8.5 on March 2, after a 2x in 4 days. VVV service is providing private inference, and it’s seen its demand grow organically a lot lately, you can read a bullish case on VVV here. It might be topped now though.

• $TAO is back once again with much strength, it’s up +66% in one week. I don’t follow Tao ecosystem updates closely, but the increase in mindshare is clear.

• $RENDER: +40% in 5 days

• $GRASS: +130% since late February and not stopping.

• $NEAR: I’m not sure this is still an AI token at this point (because their narrative changes regularly), but it’s up +20% in a week, and the chart looks good.

$HYPE to $40 (HIP-3 oil volume)

It feels like any new macro trade or event keeps acting as an excuse for buying $HYPE, because such trade can be expressed on a tradfi HIP-3 market, especially on weekends where price discovery could theoretically happen on Hyperliquid. Obviously the recent macro event that helped the price of HYPE has been the war in Iran, because the oil perp contracts on Hyperliquid have attracted a lot of volume, and $CL constantly trades at the highest volume among HIP-3 markets. As a consequence, $HYPE is trading very strongly, and is currently getting close to $40, up almost 50% in just 2 weeks.

At the same time, $LIT remains extremely weak, it went down from $2 to $1 in a few weeks, it’s having a similar PA as $XPL during its endless bleeding. $1 is a very important Schelling point, but I wouldn’t really be that shocked if it were to break to the downside.

$PIXEL and the short-lived gamefi pump

$PIXEL is one of the gamefi coins that have been launched this year, and it had a massive pump over 2 days on March 10 and March 11, it went up +250% with gargantuan volume (almost $2bn on Binance perps in one day, often signaling a top). It topped there, dumped -40% and then surprisingly revisited the highs before dumping again. I don’t think there is clear catalyst for the pump, the Pixel founder has been announcing some major updates but I don’t think it can explain such a squeeze.

$PIXEL pumping lead to moves on other gamefi tokens such as $XAI (+65%), $MAVIA (+16%), or $PORTAL (+30%), but that didn’t last longer than a day.

Scam coins

Every week, some of the biggest moves in the market remain scam coins:

• $SIREN is up from $250m mcap to $600M+ again, and it looks like it wants to end with a new squeeze.

• $BANANAS31 went up +250% in March and looks like it follows a similar path as SIREN.

• $LYN went up 5x from the January bottom to its March top… but has collapsed -82% from its top in 5 days.

• After going down -90% from its top, $RIVER is now up 3x from its bottom.

• $POWER pumped 12x in February but it dumped -90% in one day in early March.

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• On March 12, it was announced that there would be a dinner/gala again for the largest $TRUMP tokenholders, which will take place on April 25. This was announced at a time when TRUMP was having a terrible performance, down -50% in only two months. The knee-jerk reaction was a quick +10% pump, but then it pumped very hard the day after the news, for a total move of +60%. I think TRUMP will be a phenomenal short again if it keeps pumping higher.

• $ZRO has been consistently strong in March, the news-selling effect from the February Zero chain launch announcement seems to be completely absorbed now and the price of $ZRO is in a steady uptrend, currently trading around $2.15bn FDV.

• Coinbase is reportedly in talks to take a minority equity stake in Bybit. The news broke on March 14, and it was followed by a +12% move on $MNT, which might finally be getting strength again.

• On March 5, ICE (NYSE’s parent company) announced that they would invest into the Asian crypto CEX OKX, at a valuation of $25bn. $OKB pumped +60% in 15 minutes on the news, before retracing half the pump.

• On March 3, the long-time contributor of Aave and key member of the AAVE DAO Marc Zeller announced that he was leaving the DAO (after basically blaming Aave Labs), $AAVE dumped -7% on the news.

• On March 11, Across Protocol proposed dissolving its DAO and token structure to form a U.S. C-corporation, arguing that a traditional entity would make it easier to secure institutional partnerships and revenue agreements. $ACX holders can either exchange ACX for equity or sell tokens for USDC at $0.04375, a 25% premium to the recent 30d avg price. The token pumped 2x in one hour, and has been bleeding since then.

• We’re seeing a strong move from memecoins lead by $PEPE (+20%) today, with $FARTCOIN, $USELESS and $WIF showing double digit gains.

• We’re in market conditions where we keep having sudden squeezes on coins that tend to last A to 3 days before endlessly bleeding. Examples include $PHA (+150%), $BABY (+55%), $SIGN (+120%), $XAN (+110%), $C (+90%) …

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

NB: You can now become a paid subscriber and get access to a growing library of trading resources including monthly recaps of the best trades, links to all my up-to-date TradingView watchlists, actionable trading articles, etc.

We’ve seen a significant increase in $STRC trading volume over the past two weeks, as well as growing interest in this product on CT, so I figured it was a good time to write a new article on Strategy and its new structure.

This is now going to be the fourth article I’ve written about MSTR and the Bitcoin Treasury model:

• The first one was an introduction to the MSTR playbook, where I addressed several misconceptions about it.

• The second one explained the “full-stack treasury company” model and the mechanism that justifies the premium to NAV (mNAV > 1x).

• The third one was an introduction to the Preferred Share Playbook, which is Strategy’s new (and current) model launched in 2025.

In this article, we are going to focus on $STRC, Stretch, which has now become MSTR’s main preferred share as well as the main focus of Saylor and the management team.

What is STRC and how does it work?

First, let me remind you what preferred shares are: to keep it simple, they are debt-like instruments, but they are ultimately equity of the company. This means that these preferred shares never have to be ‘paid back’, and Strategy can’t default on them. Preferred shares sit higher in the capital stack than the common stock $MSTR, meaning that in the case of bankruptcy, preferred shareholders get paid before common shareholders.

So far, Strategy has already issued five preferred shares ($STRF, $STRC, $STRK, $STRE, $STRD), which I introduced one by one in this article. Here are the defining features of $STRC, also called Stretch:

• It belongs to the category of “short-duration high-yield credit.”

• Strategy’s goal is to keep $STRC as close as possible to $100 (”par”), ideally within a 1% range between $99 and $100.

• $STRC pays a variable monthly dividend; the current rate is 11.5%.

• If $STRC trades too far below par, Strategy can increase the monthly dividend rate so the product becomes more attractive and demand rises until the price moves back toward par.

• If $STRC trades above $100, Saylor can issue and sell new $STRC shares at $100 through an ATM (“at-the-market”) program1. This effectively creates a ceiling around $100.

• If Saylor doesn’t want to issue shares through the ATM, there is another option: the company can redeem STRC at $101, implying there should be little incentive to buy it above that level.

• STRC is a perpetual preferred stock (like every other Strategy preferred), meaning it never comes due and has no maturity date.

How Strategy uses the ATM to control leverage

Even if it’s not strictly debt, Strategy’s preferred shares can be seen as a way to introduce leverage into the balance sheet. Strategy makes a distinction between the leverage ratio (only considering convertible debt against their BTC reserve) and the amplification ratio (convertible debt + preferred shares / BTC reserve), but the amplification ratio is the real way to gauge MSTR’s leverage2.

This means that each time Saylor issues and sells additional STRC shares, he is increasing Strategy’s leverage. The tool he can use to de-lever the company is the ATM on the common stock: by issuing new MSTR shares and buying BTC with the proceeds, he decreases Strategy’s leverage ratio while scaling the company at the same time.

It’s very easy to understand: let’s say a company holds $10bn worth of BTC, has $3bn of debt, and a market cap of $12bn. That would mean that its leverage ratio is $3bn debt / $10bn BTC = 30%.

Now let’s imagine that the company issues $2bn worth of additional shares and then buys $2bn worth of BTC with that money. If we assume that prices don’t move3, then the market cap of the company is now $14bn, and its BTC treasury is now worth $12bn. But the notional amount of debt hasn’t changed, so the new leverage ratio is $3bn debt / $12bn BTC = 25%.

As you can see from this example, using the ATM on the common stock scales the company ($12bn → $14bn market cap) while also reducing its leverage (30% → 25%).

So what is going on with STRC right now? Is Saylor buying a ton of $BTC?

How STRC demand turns into BTC buying:

As I said before, Saylor is a seller of STRC at $100, but not anywhere below $100. This means that whenever the price is trading strictly below $100, all the volume corresponds to STRC shares changing hands between past, present and new holders. And whenever the price is at $100, a portion of the volume corresponds to standard STRC shares changing hands (some people are sellers at $100 too), but the remainder corresponds to Saylor issuing new shares and selling them to the “surplus demand” at $100.

Last week, the ratio between the weekly volume of STRC and the size of the ATM for the week was roughly 40%. I’m going to use this number for the example, but it’s obviously not a rule; it could very well be 25% or 60% in some cases.

This is what happens when $STRC has a $100M volume day while trading at par: Saylor can issue 40% of that amount through the STRC ATM by selling $40M of additional STRC shares. Then he turns around and immediately buys $40M worth of BTC.

But selling STRC (which is a debt-like instrument) increases the leverage of the company, and he wants it to remain stable. Right now, the leverage ratio of MSTR is around 33%, and I think he wants to keep it around this level. This means that each additional dollar of debt must be matched with three dollars of BTC added to the treasury. In our situation, if Saylor adds $40M of debt through STRC and $40M of BTC, then he still needs to add $80M of BTC to the company’s reserves.

How will he do that? By using the ATM on the common stock MSTR, as I explained above. So he’ll issue and sell $80M of new MSTR shares, and then immediately buy $80M worth of BTC with the proceeds.

Conclusion: with this rough math, $100M of daily volume on STRC results in roughly $40M of new STRC issued and $120M of BTC purchased and added to the company’s treasury. With STRC, Strategy has found a way to transform the demand for stable yield into buy pressure for BTC.

What Happens If STRC Demand Explodes? Is Saylor forced to lever to the tits?

Another important thing I want you to notice here is that with the model I just outlined, Strategy could very well multiply the market cap of $STRC by 3x (or, in other words, add $8bn worth of debt through STRC to its current $4bn market cap) without increasing its leverage ratio (i.e., credit risk) at all.

Saylor already has all the tools he needs to increase STRC to whatever size is required to meet the growing demand for this product, while keeping the leverage ratio completely stable at 33%.

Obviously he would increase the notional amount of the company’s debt and the dividend payments he has to make, but it would all scale at the same pace as the BTC treasury, meaning the company wouldn’t be taking any additional risk with respect to BTC price.

What are the real constraints on this strategy?

The mechanism I described above of running both an ATM on STRC and on MSTR at the same time requires two conditions to be met:

• The first one is obviously that $STRC must trade at $100: whenever this happens, it simply means that there is more demand for STRC than its current market cap, so Saylor issues new shares to match the surplus demand.

• The second one, which I have not mentioned yet, is that the mNAV must be higher than 1x to use the ATM on the common stock. As I explained in detail in this article, the North Star of Strategy is always to increase the bitcoin-per-share (bps) ratio in the long run. When they sell MSTR to buy BTC at an mNAV higher than 1x (i.e., at a premium to NAV), it is accretive in terms of bps. The higher the mNAV, the more accretive it is to do so, and at exactly 1x it is neutral. But when the mNAV drops below 1x, selling MSTR for BTC becomes dilutive in terms of bps, so they will avoid doing it.

As you might have noticed, I mentioned in the previous section that using the ATM on MSTR can scale the company and reduce leverage, but if the mNAV is higher than 1x, then using the ATM on the common stock also has the benefit of increasing the bps ratio.

By the way, the mNAV is literally displayed on the homepage of Strategy.com. They use the most diluted mNAV as their reference (which is the correct thing to do). It is currently at 1.2x, and I think the lowest it has been so far in 2026 is 1x.

What would happen if Saylor had to issue new STRC shares (because of too much demand for STRC) but the mNAV was below 1x? Would that mean he would not be able to use the ATM on MSTR to keep the leverage ratio stable, and would be forced to increase leverage?

Well, first, I think this scenario is rather unlikely, because STRC trading at $100 implies that investors are confident in the overall structure, so MSTR should at least be above 1x mNAV at the same time. And second, this ignores the fact that they have another tool to contain demand for STRC: reducing the dividend rate.

Let’s talk about the dividend rate. “Paying a 11.5% yield doesn’t sound very sustainable.”

First, let me remind you that STRC launched with a 9% dividend rate. The dividend rate is the tool that can be adjusted to both match demand for STRC and ensure that it trades at par. The current guidance from Strategy is that they will increase the dividend rate by 25 bps if the monthly VWAP (on STRC) is between $95 and $99, and they will increase it by 50 bps if the monthly VWAP is below $95. They will also decrease the dividend rate if the monthly VWAP is above $101.

So basically what they have done so far is progressively increase the STRC dividend rate from 9% to 11.5% in order to reach an equilibrium where STRC trades around $100 on a daily basis. The current week has been the most successful week for STRC by far, because it has not only been trading consistently at par, but also with huge volume (around $300M–$400M a day, compared to slightly more than $100M on average).

The demand for STRC fundamentally depends on a few variables:

• Credit risk: What is the current leverage ratio of Strategy, or in other words, how much BTC is currently ‘backing’ STRC? This is a direct consequence of the BTC price: if BTC goes down, all else being equal, the leverage ratio goes up, the credit risk increases, and demand for STRC should decline (i.e., STRC price down).

• Yield: What dividend rate is STRC currently paying? The higher the dividend rate, the higher the demand for STRC.

• Awareness: How many people even know about STRC? This is a very important factor during the first months or years of the product, because it is basically a variable that can only go up, and it can significantly affect demand for STRC, all else being equal.

• Confidence: How many people feel comfortable putting their money in STRC after seeing it trade for months and consistently pay dividends? This is a special factor because confidence can vary a lot: if STRC trades in a very narrow range close to $100 for a long time, more and more people will consider it safe, but if we suddenly see a 10% dip in one day, that trust can evaporate quickly.

What we’ve seen so far since inception is that credit risk has gone up (because of the 45% drop in BTC from its ATH), the yield has gone up, awareness has gone up, and confidence has gone up too. One factor has impacted demand negatively, while the three others have impacted it positively, and we are now finally in the “ideal” situation where STRC remains at $100.

An 11.5% yield was the dividend rate required to bring STRC to par with BTC trading around $68k. This sounds quite constructive to me for a product that has been trading for less than eight months. Saylor expects BTC to grow at a 20-30% CAGR over the next 20 years. As I explained in detail here, under these assumptions, issuing debt at 11.5% interest to buy an asset growing at 25% per year makes perfect sense. In theory, you could even pay a higher interest rate and still make money by arbitraging the spread between the interest paid and BTC’s expected annual return.

The most likely path in my view is that demand for STRC will continue to grow, and Strategy will progressively decrease the dividend rate back to 10% (or even below in the long run) to contain demand while reducing their interest cost.

What happens if everyone tries to exit STRC?

Well, the price of STRC will dump in this situation! But that’s exactly what we’ve already seen a few times with this product: in August 2025, it dumped 6% from $98 to $92; during the November 2025 sell-off, STRC dumped 11% from $100 to $89; and in February, it dumped 7% from $100 to $93.

You have to be aware that Saylor’s stated goal is clearly for $STRC to remain in a tight range close to $100, and STRC has become the main focus of Strategy. So if STRC trades on average below $99 over the course of a month, Strategy will increase the dividend rate to bring demand back in line with a $100 price. As long as people are confident in Strategy’s ability to maintain this, there will always be dip buyers below $100 looking to play the “arb trade” back to par.

In the short term, the price can very well dip 10% because of panic among holders, but if you are confident in the structure put in place by Strategy, then the price should move back to par within a few days or a few weeks, as we’ve already seen in the past.

What prevents the dividend from just rising forever?

Let’s imagine that STRC doesn’t go back to par. That would mean Strategy has to keep increasing the dividend rate… and since there is no formal limit to how high it can go, this might start to look like a death-spiral scenario? Well, not exactly.

First, you have to understand that the dividend “guidance” does not legally bind Saylor to do anything. At the end of the day, the company is free to do whatever it wants with respect to the dividend rate, and it can stop increasing it even if the average price for the month is below $99.

Basically, if they expect BTC to grow at 20–30% per year, then they probably have in mind a “maximum” dividend rate they would be comfortable paying, maybe something like 15%. Once that level is reached, they could simply stop increasing the dividend regardless of where STRC is trading.

Keep in mind that the dividend rate can be adjusted monthly, and if you expect BTC to recover after a bear market, then a “high dividend rate” would not need to be maintained forever. As the price of BTC rises again, the credit risk of STRC would improve, which would mechanically increase demand for STRC and bring it back toward par. At that point, the company could start reducing the dividend rate again. Over the long run, the dividend rate of STRC could very well fall to something like 8%, even if it had temporarily reached 13% during a period of stress.

In the next section (Risk #4 below), I will outline what a worst-case scenario might look like if BTC enters a prolonged bear market and Saylor is forced to keep raising the dividend rate.

Understanding the Risks

This whole article sounds like nothing can go wrong, and I don’t believe in a free lunch at all. What are the actual risks I’m taking as a STRC holder?

Let me be very clear about my stance on this matter: I think the risk of STRC is mispriced right now, and that the yield-to-risk ratio is attractive given reasonably bullish assumptions for BTC price. But I am NOT saying that you can get paid a high yield with no risk. There is risk, and it is always tied to BTC performance.

But I think there is a mismatch between what price trajectory people expect for BTC and the perceived risk of STRC. Basically, I think that if you take crypto natives’ expectations for BTC over the coming years, 95% of them expect a scenario that would leave STRC largely unaffected, meaning they could clip a 10%+ yield with “low risk” according to their own BTC expectations. But let’s talk about the risks.

Risk #1: Asymmetric downside vs upside

The structure of STRC means that if you buy it at $100, your upside is capped at the yearly dividend payments (11.5% right now), while your downside can be anywhere between 0 and 10% in just a few days, based on historical price action. This means that if STRC dumps 6% in a week, you have temporarily lost the equivalent of half a year’s worth of dividends, which can be a problem if you need to exit your position quickly.

If your goal is to hold STRC for the long term, it doesn’t really matter because if you’re confident it will always get back to $100, then you’ll eventually be able to exit your position with no haircut. (Let me remind you that the return-of-capital nature of STRC dividends means holders are incentivized not to trade it short term, since they don’t have to pay taxes on the dividends.)

Risk #2: STRC dumps at the same time as BTC

The credit risk of STRC is directly related to the price of BTC, so as you have probably noticed, the drawdowns in STRC tend to happen at the same time as the largest sell-offs in BTC. This means your “stable”, yield-generating allocation can take a haircut precisely when you are already most vulnerable as a crypto bull.

Risk #3: STRC trades at a discount for an extended period of time

The trust people have in STRC’s ability to return to par comes from both its actual credit risk and the perceived risk inferred from historical price action. This second factor could work in reverse: if everyone expects a 5% dip to get bought back up but it doesn’t, what happens?

Then the people who bought the 5% dip exit their positions and the price drops further, potentially triggering additional emotional selling levels one by one, resulting in an even larger drawdown. If we imagine a scenario where STRC is down 15% and unable to bounce back for several days, then the confidence accumulated in the product could progressively erode, triggering even more selling pressure.

What can stop the vicious cycle in that situation? As always, it’s the price of BTC that would resolve it. Saylor’s entire strategy ultimately relies on the expectation that BTC will return 20%+ annually over the next decade or more.

What would the worst-case scenario look like?

Risk #4: the fundamental risk is always BTC performance

The worst-case scenario for STRC is the one I described just above, but with BTC being unable to regain strength during a prolonged bear market. It’s obviously very hard to have a clear vision of what would happen in this situation because of how many variables are involved, but it would look something like this:

• $STRC would trade below par, so Saylor would increase the dividend rate every month to try to bring it back to $100.

• At some point, the dividend rate would become too elevated to make sense, so he would keep it stable and stop increasing it. That would mean he would stop following his “guidance” of increasing the dividend rate when the monthly VWAP is below $99. Remember that this is only guidance, nothing forces him to follow it.

• Not following the guidance would hurt confidence in STRC even more, and it could continue trading at a large discount, maybe something like a 40% discount and a 15% dividend rate, implying an effective yield of 25%.

• $MSTR would trade below 1x mNAV, meaning they wouldn’t be able to sell MSTR shares to help cover the dividends.

• Strategy would then rely entirely on its USD reserves to pay the dividends, and currently they have 28 months (2 years and 4 months) worth of dividend payments in reserve.

• As we approach the end of those 28 months, all of the instruments would likely face even more pressure: BTC, MSTR, and STRC would have even more reasons to decline.

• Once the USD reserve is depleted, Strategy would have to sell BTC gradually. Right now the yearly dividends are around $1bn, so if that were to increase to $2bn, Strategy would have to sell about $200M worth of BTC each month to keep paying the dividends. Alternatively, they could decide to stop paying the dividends, in which case the value of the preferred shares, of STRC, and of MSTR would drop even further, and they wouldn’t be able to do much until the price of BTC recovers.

So this is roughly an outline of the worst-case scenario. As you can see, the USD reserve offers a huge buffer against a bearish scenario, because Strategy could theoretically stop doing anything and just keep paying the dividends for more than two years without being forced to act.

Right now we are in the middle of a BTC bear market, with the price around $70k (down about 45% from the top), and yet $STRC is trading at par (with an 11.5% dividend rate) and the mNAV is at 1.2x. Given that I don’t expect BTC to experience a two-year bear market (the 2022 bear market lasted roughly one year from top to bottom), and that Strategy hasn’t even had to start using its USD reserves yet, I am of the opinion that the overall structure of Strategy is quite safe and resilient at the current leverage ratio.

The main risk is… that it’s working too well?

As I tweeted yesterday, I think that as a BTC bull, the main risk related to MSTR is that it works too well.

In fact, MSTR already owns about 3.5% of the total BTC supply, and that could negatively affect future demand for BTC, as it may start to taint the narrative of BTC as a pristine decentralized asset. The “Digital Credit” narrative around STRC and its high yield is also creating a negative reaction among some people in crypto, once again potentially impacting BTC demand as a consequence.

And as I’ve explained throughout this article, the amount of BTC that Strategy holds will only keep increasing. The only scenario where this is not true is one where we get at least two years of pain in BTC. And even then, it would take many more years of bad price action to slowly deplete Strategy’s BTC reserves through dividend payments.

I can understand why some people are bothered by MSTR’s involvement in BTC, but to me, if that is enough to make you flip bearish on the long-term prospects of BTC, then you probably weren’t that bullish to begin with. To me, it isn’t that big of a deal. Sure, Strategy is a single entity holding 3.5% of the BTC supply, but at the end of the day Strategy and its BTC reserves belong to its shareholders.

Is that really so different from BlackRock effectively holding a similar amount on behalf of its IBIT shareholders? They are obviously not the same thing at all, and there is no bankruptcy risk for IBIT, but to me they are somewhat similar: they both represent the financialization of BTC, and they were both inevitable.

I don’t think Strategy and STRC are a systemic risk for BTC at all, but I can see the negative impact they may have on the narrative. Anyway, this article is mostly here to educate people about STRC and the structure of Strategy, after that, you can decide for yourself how bullish or bearish you want to be.

Is STRC a new UST/Anchor?

I think the Luna / UST / Anchor comparison has been mentioned so often on CT lately that it’s worth addressing it. It’s a completely different situation on many levels:

• UST was a stablecoin, so maintaining the $1 peg was absolutely critical. STRC is a preferred share that ideally trades within a 1% range close to $100, but it can very well drop several percent below $100. It has already happened, it will happen again, and it is not necessarily a problem.

• UST was backed by LUNA, and the value of LUNA was partially tied to the success of UST. When UST traded below peg, users could redeem UST for newly minted LUNA. This increased selling pressure on LUNA, which reduced confidence in the system and created even more selling pressure on UST. The result was a reflexive death spiral that drove both UST and LUNA effectively to zero within days. This kind of reflexive mechanism does not exist with STRC, because a decline in STRC does not trigger forced issuance, redemptions, or dilution elsewhere in the system, it doesn’t affect BTC.

• The Anchor yield on UST was 18-20%. Not only was it significantly higher than the current ~11.5% yield on STRC, it was also largely subsidized and structurally unsustainable. The source of the STRC yield is relatively straightforward: Strategy expects BTC to return more than 20% annually over the coming decade. STRC holders receive the first ~11.5% (or whatever the dividend rate is at the time) with relatively low volatility, while MSTR shareholders absorb the remaining upside and volatility.

• We know exactly how Strategy can keep paying the dividend. If mNAV is above 1x, they can sell MSTR shares through the ATM. If mNAV drops below 1x, they can rely on the USD reserve (which currently covers more than two years of dividends). If the reserve were depleted, they could ultimately sell BTC derivatives or BTC from their treasury. With UST and Anchor, it was just “trust me bro, we’ll keep paying”.

• A drop in price affects the two systems very differently. When UST lost its peg, confidence collapsed and the market quickly assumed the system could go to zero. With STRC, a lower price mechanically implies a higher effective yield, which can attract new buyers. For example, in a completely bearish scenario, if STRC were trading at $50 with a 12% dividend rate, the effective yield would be around 24%.

• Finally, the time dynamics are completely different. Luna/UST was a fragile system that could collapse in a matter of days after a loss of confidence. In the case of STRC, even the worst-case scenario outlined earlier would unfold much more slowly (very slow death), potentially over several years, unless you assume a sudden and catastrophic collapse (-90%) in the price of BTC in just a few months.

TL;DR

• STRC is a yield instrument backed by Strategy’s bitcoin treasury. Its dividend rate is dynamically adjusted to keep the price close to par ($100).

• You can currently earn an 11.5% annual yield paid monthly on a mostly stable instrument, with very transparent risk.

• STRC is essentially a way for Strategy to turn demand for yield into structural buying pressure for BTC.

• The structure can scale massively without increasing MSTR’s leverage, as long as Strategy simultaneously runs ATMs on both STRC and MSTR (mNAV>1x required). This means Strategy could absorb $10bn (or much more) of new demand into STRC while keeping its leverage ratio stable at around 33% and its credit risk unchanged.

• Every $1 of STRC issued should roughly translate into $3 of BTC added to the treasury, thanks to the common-stock ATM used to maintain the leverage ratio. Based on rough math, $100M of daily STRC volume at par ($100) can lead to $100M-$150M of BTC purchase.

• Strategy effectively turns BTC exposure into two different tranches of risk: STRC holders receive a relatively stable yield with low volatility, while MSTR shareholders absorb the remaining upside and volatility of BTC. As Lavoisier famously put it: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”

• The whole structure is designed to increase bitcoin-per-share (bps) over time, which ultimately benefits MSTR common shareholders, because it means MSTR should mechanically outperform BTC.

• Short-term drawdowns of 5-10% in STRC are possible, but as long as confidence in the structure remains intact, the market tends to arbitrage the price back toward par.

• The real risk is not a sudden collapse but a prolonged BTC bear market, which could gradually stress the structure over time.

• Even the (very unlikely) worst-case scenario would unfold slowly, thanks to the USD reserve and the flexibility Strategy has to adjust the dividend. If MSTR were to collapse, it would likely not happen in a spectacular and brutal way like Luna/UST, but rather through a slow and prolonged deterioration.

• It makes very little sense to be bullish on BTC while being bearish on MSTR and STRC. Based on Strategy’s current level of risk (subject to change), MSTR can’t really die without BTC dying first.

I hope this article makes a few things clearer about STRC and the current MSTR playbook. If you have any questions or would like me to clarify something, feel free to comment below or ask me directly on Twitter!

I find this useful to get a sense of what kinds of moves are realistically possible, as well as the “unrealistic” ones that actually happened in the order books. See, for example, the last section of this article, which highlights what I call “scam coins”, tokens that exhibit completely wild pumps and erratic behavior.

This “Best Trades of the Month Recap” is something I’ve been doing privately for a while, but I’ve decided to make it more presentable and turn it into an article series (all months from September 2025 until now have been covered so far in 6 articles gathered on this page). These recaps are very useful to me because that’s how my brain works: I like having a library of chart patterns and examples to build frameworks I can rely on when making trading decisions. Some people rely much more on intuition, so it’s up to you to decide whether this type of article will be useful for you or not.

Be aware that these recaps are 100% hindsight, and they don’t pretend to be anything else. Sometimes I’ll over-rationalize moves after the fact. A trade only becomes “obvious” once the chart has already been printed. I don’t claim these trades were easy to take or that I nailed them!

Note that this article is behind a paywall, but I’m definitely not telling you that subscribing will make you a profitable trader or give you “invaluable alpha”. I’m not guaranteeing anything at all, I’m just sharing material I personally find useful. Don’t subscribe if the monthly cost isn’t 100% painless for you. Ideally, even getting one actionable trade idea each month from these recaps should pay for itself 10x, so if you don’t think that’s realistic given your portfolio size, then don’t subscribe.

I am also turning these recaps into a table format, like a small database, to classify each trade more precisely and make everything more condensed and readable. February 2026 is the first month that is available (link below) as a database, but progressively I’ll have the whole database including past months (+2023/2024) available. Each item of the database is one trade, and each item has these fields:

• Short description

• Ticker

• Month

• Type of coin

• Long or short

• Type of trade (this will be very useful in the future to filter all trades of a certain type over several months)

• Relevance tier: I rank these trades from 1 to 7 by importance/relevance

• Long description

• Primary pump: a checkbox used to mark the main pump for a given coin during the month. Filtering for checked boxes produces a clean, non-duplicated list of the month’s pumps.

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BTC timeline

Here’s a broad timeline of February:

• Gold had a blowoff top in late January, which was followed by a massive correction from $5600 to $4400. The bottom happened on February 2, and it quickly bounced back to $5100 in two days. Silver also had a blow-off top and dumped almost -50% from $121 to $64 on February 6.

• $BTC opened the month with horrendous weakness, it had topped at almost $98k in January, opened February at $78k, dumped to $70k in 4 days, and then had a crazy move from $70k to $60k in one day on February 5.

• $BTC bounced very strongly off the $60k level, and came back to almost $72k in less than a day. This whole move marked the range for the remaining of the month, basically from $60k to $70k.

• After the first week, $BTC spend the whole month ranging around $68k, and there were only 2 noticeable short periods of strength: Feb 13-14 and Feb 25, where we had a few strong altcoin moves on these two occasions.

• On February 27, BTC dumped from $68k to $65k because of the rumors of the US attacking Iran soon, which happened exactly one day later. BTC then dumped from $65k to $62k on the actual attack news, but got bought back up all day long to close the day and the month at almost $68k. Khameini’s death was announced on the same day, which was considered as rather bullish by the market (because it meant that the US would be less likely to spend too much time on that conflict).

ZRO conference

Maybe one of the only actual narratives in altcoins in February has been the LayerZero conference on February 10. $ZRO had been performing very well in anticipation of this event, essentially since the beginning of the year. I was expecting the event to be a clear sell-the-news, but what happened was a bit different.

During the day, a video announcing the launch of their own chain leaked, and it lead to a news-selling sell-off of roughly -20% in one hour, but that marked the bottom for the day. Later during the day, they made their official announcements, and it was effectively the launch of their own chain, called Zero, but it came with extremely strong partnership announcements, such as Citadel Securities, Cathie Wood/ARK, DTCC, ICE.

The result was a very strong pump once the conference ended, $ZRO went up roughly +45% in 12 hours, which killed a lot of ‘sell-the-newsooors’, but then… it retraced the whole pump and it did bleed all the way down back to $1.5 which seems to be a strong floor for it.

VVV noticeable strength

VVV has been the top performing “non-scam” coin in February, it bottomed at $1.65 and closed the month at $5.5 (before squeezing to $8 on March 2). One of the catalysts is that it’s a legit project sitting at the intersection of AI, privacy and crypto, trading at a small valuation (sub $100M at the bottom), and also benefitting from the OpenClaw wave, because OpenClaw was literally recommending Venice as a model provider in their docs up until yesterday.

(I tend to think that it topped in early March with that squeeze to $8.4 but I could be wrong)

A few other AI coins woke up near the end of February, with $SAHARA squeezing +70% in a day, and $GRASS pumping +70% too, in 4 days.

A strong month for scam coins: $PIPPIN, $SIREN, $POWER

NB: Click here to read my full guide on how to trade manipulated coins profitably

A bear market seems to remain great conditions for scam coins to thrive. In February, we’ve had the comeback of $PIPPIN, an old AI memecoin whose supply has been completely cornered by some entity, and is trading like a textbook manipulated coin. $PIPPIN was stable at $180M mcap at the beginning of the month, after a -70% drawdown in 4 days, and it started pumping strongly on February 8. It moved up +315% in 7 days to a new ATH at $750M mcap. Then it cooled down to $500M before pumping again to a new ATH of $900M mcap. Strangely, it’s not trading at a negative funding rate anymore, which makes it a much less dangerous scam coin short than usual. That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it cross $1bn mcap one day.

$POWER is one of the new crime coin that revealed itself in February, it went up 12x bottom to top and squeezed to $2.3bn FDV, with a highly negative funding rate. Be VERY careful with shorting this one.

Another interesting chart is $SIREN, a BSC scam memecoin that had a one-day pump and dump from $100M to $400M back again to $100M MC on February 8… before spending the remaining of the month grinding upwards to new highs. The move topped with a significant squeeze to $600M mcap.

I can also mention $BULLA, which went up 13x in late January and then collapsed -95% in a day on Feb 1 from $450M FDV to $25M FDV. I can also mention $ARC which moved from $40M to $130M before a -80% collapse.

Bear market conditions

We are in bear market conditions where many of the bullish altcoins moves are short-term squeezes that wet quickly retraced in most cases. Here’s a list of all coins that exhibited this kind of behavior in February: ZK ZIL LA NIL SONIC DYM ME MOVE 0G INIT RPL ESP AZTEC BIO AGLD SAHARA. We’re talking about moves ranging between +50% and +100%, that usually happen in one day and with negative funding rate (making the shorts tricky), and then the coin bleeds back down in a few days.

Outside of the post-dump bounces, we only had 2 short periods of strength on altcoins. The first one was on Feb 13-15, and it was lead by memecoins (+50% for USELESS and +35% for PEPE), and AI coins (+35% for $TAO, +150% for $VVV, +25% for VIRTUAL). The second one was really short-lived on February 25, and it was a pure short-squeeze of “dead” large caps that had a +25%/+30% day (DOT NEAR UNI APT FIL TIA… lol)

$HYPE and perp DEXes

$HYPE closed January with significant strength by pumping from $22 to $34 in one day, and the strength continued in early February. It went to $38 on February 3, and was by far the strongest token during the whole dump and February 5 liquidation cascade day. It was so strong that it almost reached $37 on Feb 6 as if the market wide dump didn’t even happen on HYPE, but that marked its top against the altcoin market. It did slightly underperform the altcoin market during the following 20 days, and went back down to $26.

One of the reason for its strength in early February is that Multicoin was buyer of $HYPE in size for a few days, and HSI/PURR (the HYPE DAT) was also accumulating some.

In the perp DEX sector, $LIT has remained ridiculously weak in February, and is now using $1.3 as its support that it’s been testing 4 or 5 times now…

As for $ASTER, it did bounce with tremendous strength after the February 5 dump, and went from a bottom at almost $0.4 to $0.7 in a few days. It’s been strangely flat at $0.7 for the rest of the month. It has a bullish catalyst which is the launch of its own L1/chain in March.

Uniswap X BlackRock news

On February 11, Uniswap announced that they were partnering with BlackRock to bring liquidity to their BUIDL product, and on top of that, they also announced that BlackRock was investing directly into $UNI tokens (an undisclosed amount). The market reaction was extremely strong, $UNI pumped +40% in 10 minutes, which is very impressive for a coin this large ($3bn+ FDV). But then the whole move got fully retraced in like 10 hours. Very typical bear market pump-and-dump.

AAVE FUD

Aave has had a rough month in terms of FUD. The first news was that BGD Labs announced on February 20 that they would exit Aave DAO after 4 years, citing misalignment over V4 strategy. It lead to a -8% dump on the $AAVE token. At the end of the month, Marc Zeller who is a prominent figure in the Aave ecosystem, wrote a full article to criticize Aave Labs by labelling them as essentially an extracting actor, and that lead to additional weakness on the token overall.

What’s been particularly bad for Aave is that their main competitor’s token, $MORPHO, has been very strong in 2026, and went up almost +75% in February. Right now, both tokens are almost on par in terms of FDV, at roughly $2bn.

Other events of February:

• On February 18, Base announced that they will pivot away from the Optimism stack to build their own one. It’s been a massive deathblow for $OP which went down -40% in 4 days. $ARB took a hit too because of correlation, it’s now trading at ‘only’ $1bn FDV, down -96% from its top. ($OP is down -97%)

• $BERA had an extremely strong short squeeze on February 11, it pumped +160% in 8 hours, and the spot-perp dislocation reached extreme levels too (15% gap). It’s a strange coin that tends to massively under-perform the market most of the time, but will sometimes have random squeezes that can be very strong, it already happened last month with its 2x pump in 5 days.

• On February 18, $WLFI had a sudden +30% pump for no apparent reason, accompanied with an increase in OI of almost $100M, which probably means that one single entity was responsible for the pump by longing $100M worth of $WLFI… And the price has topped there, is down almost -20% from the top, and we’ve had no news since then. Pretty strange move by this entity, I expect $WLFI to be trading much below in the coming months.

• In late February 2026, Terraform Labs’ bankruptcy estate sued Jane Street in Manhattan federal court, alleging the firm used non-public information to trade ahead of key UST liquidity events during the 2022 Terra collapse. $LUNC pumped +35% in the days following the news.

• $ZEC is still digesting its meteoric rise from Q4 2025, and it remains an underperformer overall, but it can also have some strong squeezes, such as the +45% move it had on Feb 13-14. I think it’s quite likely to reach $150 or even $100 in the coming months.

• $HNT has had a strong 2x move in February, is that a dead cat bounce for an asset that has had way too much emissions or is this DePiN coin finally low enough to become a good buy?

• Just like last month, $STABLE keeps trading like a coin with cornered supply, it’s made new highs at almost $4bn FDV after a +144% from its local bottom at $1.6bn FDV. It’s also been shilled by DegenSpartan in an article, which is rather bullish given the fact that we barely hear about DegenSpartan these days.

• $BCH is really a strange coin, it’s been up only (40% outperformance) vs BTC for 22 days on BTC, before suddenly collapsing against it, and retracing all these gains in less than a week. A lot of people got bullish on BCH because of the “quantum resistant” narrative, as well as its overall strength against the market since early 2025, but it now really looks like someone with deep BCH pockets has decided to offload and is non-stop twapping out of it.

• Robinhood listed two altcoins in February, $SNX (Feb 19) and $CC. $CC barely reacted but it lead to a +42% move for $SNX in a few days. Upbit listings remain extremely strong catalysts for coins, it happened fro $AZTEC (+70%), $ESP (+100%) and $SKR (+40%), and they did all trade at very negative funding for several hours after the listing. The same happened with $BIRB on February 3 with a 2x on its Bithumb listing.

• The two notable TGEs of February have been $AZTEC and $ESP (Espresso). Both have been trading at rather low valuations (below $500M FDV, they would have easily been $1bn+ FDV a few months ago), which signals that the altcoin premium is slowly getting re-rated down. $ESP has had a strong pump though, with +280% gains bottom to top in February.

• Polymarket announced that they would be partnering with Kaito on offering attention markets, it lead to a +13% pump in 3 minutes on $KAITO, fully retraced in one hour.

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

I’ve been getting more and more interested over the recent months in what I call “scam coins” or “manipulated coins”. This interest picked up after we saw three absolutely insane pumps three months in a row from $MYX, $COAI and $AIA, which did all reach the crazy high valuation of $20bn FDV.

When these meteoric rises were happening, I was completely shocked to witness it. I was also shocked that, while I considered it a 3 sigma event, most crypto natives didn’t even seem to care and were barely looking at these coins.

For a long time, my focus was on trying to fade these coins because they were inevitably going to fall hard from their stupidly high valuations. Obviously that’s what ended up happening (-97% for $MYX, -98% for $COAI, -99% for $AIA), but the problem is that they can reach retarded valuations way before they top, which makes shorting them an extremely dangerous game.

For reference, Monad, one of the most hyped projects of the cycle, has topped at $5bn FDV and is currently not even trading at $2bn FDV. The three coins I’ve mentioned above probably have less than 1/100th the level of mindshare of $MON, and yet not only did they reach $5bn FDV… but they actually 4X’d after that.

So I progressively flipped my view on these scam coins, and instead of being bothered by their over-valuation, I started embracing them. If shorts are getting absolutely destroyed because of a midcurve thesis, then maybe the right trade is to actually long these coins?

And indeed, this new approach has been much more efficient and profitable for my account, so I decided to write this article, to share all the lessons I’ve learned on that topic. And there are a lot of them…

What is a scam coin and how to spot them?

There is obviously no strict definition for a scam coin (or “crime coin”), it’s just my term for coins that are manipulated (by the team or an external actor) and inorganic, and also very likely to pull out some “scammy pumps”, which are usually brutal, strong, and engineered to rekt shorts.

Here are the characteristics of a scam coin and how to spot one:

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$BTC and the market overall

In the last edition of this newsletter, 2 weeks ago, the price of $BTC was still $88k… a lot of things happened since then. There has been an acceleration to the downside at the end of January, with $BTC dumping at the same time as metals after their blowoff top (but without taking part in the upside…) and the Warsh nomination as Fed chairman which also pushed $BTC down to $80k.

On Saturday (Jan 31), Garrett Bullish who is a Hyperliquid mega-whale started closing its $650M $ETH long, but the whole market panicked (probably not only because of him of course) and $BTC went down to $76k on that day, and $ETH wicked to $2250, which fully liquidated Garrett. ETHBTC went from 0.035 to 0.03 at the end of the month.

But the massive weakness continued in early February, it’s as if $BTC was absolutely unable to find strong buyers. On February 5, $BTC was trading at $70k which was already looking like a decent discount, but it spend the whole day selling off and the move down accelerated to reach $62k, and finally there was a last move to $60k where BTC finally bounced. In less than a day, it was back to $71k, which makes it a +18% move from the bottom.

I think a lot of the smart money who was ready to bid was waiting for an ‘obvious’ entry that would be liquidation driven, but it never really came, so they settled for the $60k round number, which was too stupid not to buy. Overall, what makes this dump so strange and a bit scary is that there is no clear catalyst for it. I think it’s mostly a combination of several bearish catalysts, and I think this tweet by Alex Krüger sums it all up pretty well.

The sector that has been negatively affected the most by AI recently has been software, and the SaaS ETF $IGV is down -30%, strangely looking a lot like BTC, which means it probably dragged it down with it.

Right now BTC is trading at $67k, it’s been mostly bleeding since it kissed $72k, I think we’re in a $60k-$72k range for now. We’re also in a very clear bear market, with bear market price action. $ETH is currently ranging around $2k.

$HYPE strength and the other perp DEXes

After it’s strong move from $22 to $34, $HYPE did consolidate around $30, and it then managed to pump again to as high as $38 on February 3. There are a few reasons for this bullish move: the team unlocks from February were 90% smaller than expected, the precious metals move has brought a lot of volume to HyperLiquid and makes HIP-3 a clear success, and finally, Multicoin has been accumulating large amounts of $HYPE recently. (HSI/PURR, the $HYPE DAT, has also been buying more than $100M worth of HYPE lately).

When $BTC dumped hard and bottomed on February 5, $HYPE was barely selling off, and it bounced very strongly immediately after the bottom, to $37. But it’s been cooling off after that, and is currently ranging around $30.

$LIT has been clearly weaker than $HYPE overall, it’s basically in a range against the altcoin market. It’s made new lows on February 11 at $1.32, but bounced, and is now again above the $1.5 level.

The other important perp DEX (even if I think it’s clearly doomed in the long-term), $ASTER, has been very weak since mid-November, and it dumped hard with BTC on February 5, its bottom wick almost reached $0.4. But since then it’s one of the strongest coins, and has bounced back to $0.7. It will probably print a lower high against OTHERS soon.

Gold and Silver blow-off top

It already seems to be far away, but the gold and silver blow-off top was just 2 weeks ago. Gold broke its $5100 resistance on Jan 27, and then squeezed +10% in a day to $5600. That move marked the top and in 4 days, gold dumped to $4400, where it then bounced back to $5100. This level is now acting as a strong resistance and gold is currently trading right below $5000.

A similar move happened on silver, it squeezed from $90 to $120 in one week, and then bottomed at $64 just one week after the top. I’d much rather be long gold rather than silver going forward.

$ZRO new chain

LayerZero has been teasing a very important announcement for a while, and it happened on February 10. $ZRO has been performing very well in anticipation of this news, essentially since the beginning of the year. I was expecting the event to be a clear sell-the-news, but what happened was a bit different.

During the day, a video announcing the launch of their own chain leaked, and it lead to a news-selling sell-off of roughly -20% in one hour, but that marked the bottom for the day. Later during the day, they made their official announcements, and it was effectively the launch of their own chain, called Zero, but it came with extremely strong partnership announcements, such as Citadel Securities, Cathie Wood/ARK, DTCC, ICE.

The result was a very strong pump once the conference ended, $ZRO went up roughly +45% in 12 hours, which killed a lot of ‘sell-the-newsooors’, but then… it retraced the whole pump and is now back to its pre-announcement price.

Uniswap x BlackRock

On February 11, Uniswap announced that they were partnering with BlackRock to bring liquidity to their BUIDL product, and on top of that, they also announced that BlackRock was investing directly into $UNI tokens (an undisclosed amount). The market reaction was extremely strong, $UNI pumped +40% in 10 minutes, which is very impressive for a coin this large ($3bn+ FDV). But then the whole move got fully retraced in like 10 hours. A lot of people got very excited about the news and were expecting a DeFi narrative revival, but it didn’t happen at all, we are in a bear market, and news pumps have to be faded…

$BERA short squeeze

$BERA had an extremely strong short squeeze on February, it pumped +160% in 8 hours, and the spot-perp dislocation reached extreme levels too (15% gap). Apparently it was an unlock day for $BERA. It’s a strange coin that tends to massively under-perform the market most of the time, but will sometimes have random squeezes that can be very strong, it already happened last month with it’s 2x pump in 5 days.

After its recent squeeze, $BERA went down -35% in just a few minutes, and is down -50% overall now.

$BERA is not the only coin that is having this random squeeze (with negative funding) behavior, we’re in a market where these happen almost daily now: $ZIL pumped 2x in a day on February 2-3, $LA had a +60% move too, $ME and $MOVE squeezed yesterday too. $ZK had a +40% pump on February 1st, and apparently that was partially because deposits were halted on Upbit?

$PIPPIN and other crimes

I have already talked about this coin a lot, it’s my favorite scam coin, and it’s moving aggressively again: from November to December, $PIPPIN (AI memecoin) went up from $20M to $500M mcap, and even had a final squeeze to $750M mcap that marked its top. Since then, it’s been ranging in a very erratic manner between $300M and $500M. In late January it pumped to $550M before collapsing back to $180M… where it found a bottom, and has been pumping since then. Right now, it’s trading just above $500M. We know that an entity has been cornering the supply and accumulating something like 95% of it, which is why I think it’s rather likely that this coin makes new highs, until the entity is ‘done’.

Another very scammy move has been $BULLA, the Hasbulla memecoin listed on Binance perps, which pumped from $30M to almost $500M FDV in late January… and had a -95% collapse on February 1st.

$SIREN, another BSC memecoin with a history of dubious price action, had a +300% pump and dump in one day on Feb 7-8.

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• $BCH is one of the strongest large cap coins, on high timeframes it still looks very close to its cycle top (which is very rare), and the BCHBTC chart has been up only for one year. I suspect DonAlt is going to announce very soon that he bought some, with the thesis that it’s Bitcoin without Saylor. Some people have also been shilling it as a quantum resistant BTC. I think it’s quite likely to outperform in the near future.

• On January 28, it was announced that OpenAI was planning to launch a social network and that they would use Worldcoin for the ‘proof-of-humanity’ part, $WLD then pumped +42%… before retracing the whole move in one day.

• On January 31, the news came out that a UAE fund had acquired 49% of $WLFI prior to the launch. The knee-jerk reaction was a quick pump immediately followed by several hours of dump on $WLFI, leading to a -10% drawdown. $WLFI is down -16% vs OTHERS between the news and now, so it definitely had a negative impact on it. And it’s still trading at $10bn FDV…

• $BIRB is the token of the Moonbirds NFT collection, it had a +170% squeeze on its launch and reached almost $500M FDV. It then bleed down to $220M, but printed a double top a few days later with its Bithumb listing on February 3. The coin tends to very easily squeeze and trade at negative funding, which makes it hard to short.

• On February 10, Polymarket announced that they would offer attention markets in partnership with Kaito. $KAITO pumped +13% in 3 minutes… then printed the full retrace in one hour.

• $MON has been relatively strong vs the altcoin market since late Jan, it’s up +45% vs OTHERS. Good to have it on your watchlist.

• $CC is one of the rare coins that is quite strong and doesn’t dump a lot despite the market being very weak. That being said, I think $CC is quite richly valued here.

• $BNKR has had a 6x pump in two weeks because of the recent onchain AI season on Base.

• $AZTEC (privacy L2) and $ESP (Espresso, infrastructure project) were both launched recently, and their current FDV is around $200M. That’s probably 10x lower than they could have been if they launched 2 years earlier, which says a lot about the state of the current market. People have stopped giving insane premium to altcoin valuations.

• I wrote about the $AXS pump in the last edition of this newsletter, and said it was a short despite the highly negative funding rate, and that was correct, it’s almost down -50% since then. But any bounce on that downtrend goes once again with negative funding, this coin doesn’t want to properly die.

• The recent market wide dump has killed the privacy meta, with $ZEC being hit hard on the way down, it dumped from $400 to sub $200 in one week. $XMR and $DASH also dumped hard, $ROSE too. $DUSK has been bouncing slightly since then.

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

January 2025: TRUMP coin launch & presidential inauguration

• President Trump’s inauguration and $BTC $110k ATH on Strategic Bitcoin Reserve speculation

• $TRUMP coin launch and meteoric rise to $80bn FDV

• $SOL new $295 ATH after $TRUMP launch

• $FARTCOIN $2.75 ATH

• $MELANIA launch killing the on-chain market

• $XRP $3.4 ATH

• $SUI $5.4 ATH before weakness

• Murad coins comeback: $SPX $GIGA

• Altcoins down vs BTC

• AI agents + memecoins destroyed

• On-chain: $VINE ($500M) $KEKIUS ($400M) $JELLYJELLY ($250M) $USA ($300M)

• $TOSHI Coinbase listing and 20x squeeze

• $LTC relative strength (potential 1st alt ETF)

February 2025: Tariff dump to $78k

• Tariffs dump Feb 2, massive wipe on alts and ETH

• End of month dump and range break: $100k → $78k

• BSC szn: $TST ($10M → $500M), $BROCCOLI launches and PvP

• On-chain destruction (and overall bad sentiment about industry/scams/Solana): $LIBRA $CAR $JAILSTOOL

• Sonic season: $S (+150%), $SHADOW (25x)

• New coins: $BERA $IP (5x pump) $KAITO (pump to $3bn)

• Bybit hack ($1.5bn stolen)

March 2025: Crypto reserve news disappointment in a weak market

• “Crypto Reserve” news: $ADA $XRP $SOL massive pump

• Market still scared about tariffs, new $77k lows

• $HYPE to $12, JELLYJELLY exploit on Hyperliquid

• $FARTCOIN bottom at $0.2 and +225% move

• $TON +40% after Pavel Durov’s release

• $BERA PoL launch

April 2025: Liberation day & $75k bottom

• Liberation day

• $75k double bottom

• $FARTCOIN very strong (3x)

• 2x on $TRUMP dinner announcement

• End of the month pump ($BTC to $95k)

• AI agents ($VIRTUAL up 3x) and memes bounce

• $SUI +80% bounce

• ETHBTC bottom below 0.018

• $HOUSE to $120M on-chain

• $LAYER keeps squeezing to $3.4bn FDV

• $OM scam -90% collapse

May 2025: ETH squeeze back to $2700

• $BTC: $94k → $112k

• Huge squeeze on $ETH ($1800 → $2700) and beta coins ($ETHFI $EIGEN)

• Memecoin echo bubble: $MOODENG $PNUT $WIF $GOAT

• $HYPE: $20 → $40

• ICM meta on-chain: $LAUNCHCOIN 30x

• $KTA 6x

• $KAITO 3x

• $SYRUP 3x

• $SPX 2x

June 2025: Chop and new $HYPE ATH

• Month of chop around $106k for $BTC (Elon-Trump FUD + Iran-Israel FUD)

• New $HYPE ATH at $46

• $SPX back to $1.75bn FDV ATH

• $SYRUP 2x

• $AERO 2x

• $AURA: $1M → $170M on-chain

• $USELESS: $10M → $200M

• $CRCL IPO

• Treasury companies remain a hot narrative

July 2025: DAT summer, strong month for the whole market

• New BTC ATH $123k

• $ETH almost back to $4000 thanks to BMNR inflows

• Dino coins pump: new $XRP ATH at $3.6+, $XLM and $HBAR 2x

• $PENGU 3x back to launch price

• $BONK 3x (Bonkfun and Bonk eco hot)

• $ZORA 12x pump

• $SPK 6x squeeze to $2bn FDV

• $SPX new ATH ($2.3bn FDV)

• $ENA treasury company announcement and +180%

• $VINE up 5x on Musk’ Vine AI speculation

• $BANANAS31 scammy squeeze to $800M MC

August 2025: New ATH on majors

• New BTC ATH $125K

• New ETH ATH $4950

• Jackson Hole pump (Aug 22)

• $LINK +80%

• $MNT 2x

• $BIO +450% (AUBRAI TGE)

• Altcoin DATs news-selling : $TON $LTC $IP

• $CRO DAT and Trump Media partnership: +150%

• $DOLO pump (WLFI TGE catalyst)

September 2025: DAT szn (SOL, AVAX, WLD) + CZ is back (ASTER, BNB)

• CZ is back: $BNB to $1000, BSC szn

• $ASTER skyrocketing 20x

• Perp DEX szn: ASTER, AVNT, APEX

• $SOL DAT and $250 top

• $AVAX DAT: +50%

• $HYPE kissing its $60 top

• $PUMP $3bn → $9bn FDV move

• $MYX crime to $20bn FDV

• $MNT steady outperformance

• $WLD DAT +160% short-lived pump

• $XPL TGE

• $IP KBW catalyst and top at $15

• $M crime to $15bn FDV

October 2025: 10/10 crash right after BTC $126k ATH

• BTC $126k ATH

• BNB szn: $BNB to $1350, $CAKE +75%, $4 ($20M → $300M), $GIGGLE ($15M → $300M)

• 10/10 crash: biggest crypto liquidation day ever

• $ZEC parabolic rise continues ($75 → $440), $DASH and $ZEN pump as beta

• $TAO halving catalyst pump 2 months in advance

• $MNT blow-off top: $2 → $2.9

• $COAI scam pump to $20bn

• $VIRTUAL 2x: Robinhood listing + x402 meta

• $CLANKER 5x on Farcaster acquisition news

• $ZORA Robinhood listing (+120%)

• Base szn (VIRTUAL, CLANKER, ZORA)

• $SNX 2x: DegenPing shill + trading competition

• $H: $650M → $4bn FDV

• $USELESS $440M top

November 2025: Red month to $81k for BTC, $ZEC to $750

• Red month for $BTC: $110k → $81k bottom

• $ZEC final part of its parabolic move and $750 top

• $STRK $1bn → $2.8bn FDV pump

• $UNI 2x fee switch pump

• Several altcoin squeezes early in the month: $ZK (3x), $ICP (+230%), $FIL (file storage narrative)

• $AIA crime pump to $20bn FDV

• $JELLYJELLY squeeze to $550M FDV

• $TNSR 10x squeeze (Coinbase Vector acquisition insider trade)

• $SOON: $700M → $5.5bn FDV

• $MON TGE and short-lived pump to $5bn FDV

December 2025: choppy and uneventful

• $BTC choppy and ranging, alts bleeding until Dec 18 bottom

• Luna coins “DK sentence” pump

• $PIPPIN squeeze to $750M MC

• $HYPE weakness

• $UNI Unification (fee switch) going through

• $ZEC bounce and lower high

• $TAO halving (and dump)

• $CC DTCC news and pump

• Scam pumps: $BEAT $FOLKS $LIGHT

NB: You can find an article that specifically details the best trades of January here. It’s a new category of articles I write for paid subscribers, and I’ll progressively add other content (a database of the best trades for each month, of the pumps+scams of each month, TradingView watchlists/spaghetti charts, trading advice, etc) for them.

Main events that happened in January:

• $ZK got an Upbit listing on January 7, it pumped +25% then retraced the whole move in a day. On the same day, we also had $ZKP and binancelife getting listed on Binance spot. ZKP pumped 2x before bleeding endlessly, whereas binancelife had a +50% pump and dump on the news… before pumping +135% in a week. $MNT got listed on Robinhood on January 20, which lead to a ridiculous +5% pump and dump.

• There have been a lot of new launches in January, as usual: $FOGO, $BREV, $INX (Infinex, the new project by SNX founder Kain), $ZAMA, $BIRB, $ACU, $SKR, $FIGHT, $ELSA, $SPACE, $SPORTFUN. The standard price action for all of them is that they bleed endlessly… but sometimes they pump first right after the TGE. For example, $BIRB (the token of the Moonbirds NFT collection) had a +160% squeeze at launch, with very negative funding, and $ACU pumped almost 3x. The craziest one though is $SKR (It’s a token for the Solana Seeker phone, strangely…) which had an almost 8x squeeze post-launch.

• On January 6, MSCI announced that MSTR would not be excluded from their indexes. The impact on BTC price action was a very limited +2% move up.

• On January 28, it was announced that OpenAI was planning to launch a social network and that they would use Worldcoin for the ‘proof-of-humanity’ part, $WLD then pumped +42%… before retracing the whole move in one day.

• On January 15, Twitter announced it was banning “reward-for-posting” apps, which lead Kaito to shutdown Yaps, and it’s been a fantastic short opportunity on $KAITO, which went down -50% from there.

• Farcaster got acquired by Neynar on January 21, $CLANKER popped (+15%) on the news but then bleed down -40%. It’s essentially a failure for Farcaster, and a closing chapter for the founder Dan Romero.

• On January 31, the news came out that a UAE fund had acquired 49% of $WLFI prior to the launch. The knee-jerk reaction was a quick pump immediately followed by several hours of dump on $WLFI, leading to a -10% drawdown.

Main narratives of January:

Very red end of the month for $BTC

$BTC opened the year strongly, with a move up from $88k to $95k in 5 days. Then it corrected down to $90k, where it bounced to reach its monthly highs at $98k on January 14.

During the January 17 weekend, Trump announced that there would be tariffs on European countries because of Greenland, and the market only reacted on the CME open which brought $BTC from $95k to $92k. On January 21, Trump announced that these tariffs were cancelled, but the reaction on the market was lackluster, with $BTC now using $90k as a resistance.

Then the end of the month has been an acceleration to the downside, with $BTC dumping at the same time as metals after their blowoff top (but without taking part in the upside…) and the Warsh nomination as Fed chairman which also pushed $BTC down to $80k.

On Saturday (Jan 31), Garrett Bullish who is a Hyperliquid mega-whale started closing its $650M $ETH long, but the whole market panicked (probably not only because of him of course) and $BTC went down to $76k on that day, and $ETH wicked to $2250, which fully liquidated Garrett. ETHBTC went from 0.035 to 0.03 at the end of the month.

Strong first week of January

The first week of January, which is also the first week of the year, is usually a risk-on week, and that’s exactly what we got. The whole market moved up for a week as if there was a TWAP running endlessly.

• $PEPE was the leading coin on that move and it pumped +80% in 4 days.

• Memecoins were more or less the top performers, with FARTCOIN going up +75%, 2x for USELESS, and even +86% for $WIF.

• An other category that was very strong is AI, with coins such as $RENDER (+112%), $VIRTUAL (+86%), $TAO (+37%), and $VVV (+120%).

The move topped roughly after one week though, with OTHERS having a double top on Jan 6 and Jan 14, but then the market collapsed.

The $XMR breakout and the privacy meta

The privacy has made an extremely strong comeback in September-November with the meteoric 20x pump on $ZEC. The other main privacy coin is $XMR (Monero), and it finally had its time to shine in January: it’s been strong vs the market for a while, but on January 11 it started going crazy, broke out above its $500 resistance, and then went in a straight line to $800 in 3 days.

Then ZachXBT tweeted that a hacker had just been swapping almost $300M worth of BTC+LTC into XMR, so everybody understood that it was a one-time inflow that pushed the price, and $XMR collapsed back below $500.

That being said, a few other privacy coins have pumped as beta:

• $DASH pumped +150% in 3 days.

• $DUSK pumped 6x bottom to top in January, it was really strong.

• $ROSE: +120%

• $SCRT: +110%

Conversely, $ZEC which managed to be strong in USD and on a relative basis in December, has been weak in January, and that is not very surprising given the fact that it needs to digest a 20x move. On January 7, there was a FUD event around a part of the ZEC dev team that was quitting, and that was a catalyst for $ZEC to go lower, -23% in 3 days, and -45% overall in January.

Korean craze: $AXS $BERA

Koreans on Upbit have been pumping a few coins on January, but the strongest by far has been $AXS, which went up +220% in 211 days, and with negative funding rate on top. It also took a while to come down (it was only down -40% after 10 days from the top), and was trading among the highest volume coins for a long time.

The other coin that got pushed in a similar way on Upbit (and maybe the DAT was involved too?) is $BERA, an extremely weak under-performer that suddenly pumped almost 2x in 5 days thanks to the Korean craze.

The Tornado cluster pressuring $HYPE down before the pump

In early January, a huge holder of $HYPE (known as the ‘Tornado cluster’ because all the wallets were funded through Tornado Cash) has begun unstaking its HYPE and selling it, and the total amount was in tens of millions of $ worth of HYPE. I tweeted that this immense selling pressure would push HYPE down for a while, with the price going from $28 at the January top to $20.5 at the bottom on January 21… but the Tornado cluster was done selling on January 26 and that was also the day when $HYPE went crazy, from $22 to $35 in one day.

There were three other positive catalysts for HYPE at the end fo the month: the team unlocks were 90% smaller than expected, they announced the launch of HIP-4 for predictions markets, and the precious metals going crazy lead to a huge volume spike on these HIP-3 gold/silver/copper markets.

$RIVER crime to $9bn FDV

The leading scam coin by far and probably the top performer of January bottom to top was $RIVER, a project that I’ve mentioned as being a textbook crime coin on January 6.

It did in fact have an insane price action, it pumped from $5 in late December to $90 at the top, which corresponds to $9bn FDV. It did all of this while very regularly trading at -1% or -2% hourly (!) funding rate, and with an impressive volatility up and down.

At the end of the month, it went back down from $90 to $10…

On-chain showing signs of life again

For the first time in months, we have gotten some things moving in the on-chain world again in January:

• The $WHITEWHALE memecoin which went from $1M to $75M mcap in December has continued with a very strong price action to $200M, where it topped and came back below $30M before bouncing.

• There was an AI meme meta with coins launched on Bags such as $GAS (reached $60M) and $RALPH ($50M). It also pumped $MET by +20% as a result.

• The $PENGUIN memecoin based on the viral ‘Penguin going to the mountains’ meme reached $120M mcap.

• There was then another AI meta but on Base, with $MOLT (Moltbook) going from $1M to $120M mcap in one day. This Base AI szn was good for $CLANKER which pumped +160% bottom to top.

This on-chain resurgence, combined with a relative under-valuation with consistent buybacks, is probably what explains the strength in $PUMP in January, it had a +75% pump from roughly $2bn to $3.4bn FDV.

Gold and Silver blow-off top

January has been a crazy month for precious metals, and especially gold and silver which had a blowoff top to conclude their parabolic run.

• Gold went from $4400 to a top at $5600 followed by a severe -21% pullback in 4 days to $4400 (and then a rebound to $5100 in early February).

• Silver went from $72 to $121, and then had a -41% pullback to $72 again.

Gold and Silver both had one of their worst days ever in terms of drawdown on that pullback.

What else happened in January?

• $LIT (Lighter) launched in late December, it went up to $3.2bn FDV in early January, but began stalling there, and that was the signal to get bearish on it as it proceeded to go down to $1.5bn FDV in two weeks. New coins with high mindshare almost always do the same thing: first a short-lived pump, then a large correction.

• $CC (Canton) is a very strange and unpredictable coin, in late December it was extremely strong after the DTCC news, even against a market that was in a downtrend. And now in January, it was initially very weak while the market was pumping. On January 12, $CC had is halving, and it went down -25% after that, but then pumped again +80% at the end of the month (against a weak altcoin market…).

• $IP (Story Protocol) has always been a heavily manipulated coin, and after a -90% drawdown from its KBW top at $15bn, it had again a very inorganic +150% pump in January to $4.2, before retracing down the whole move.

• Surprisingly, $POL (Polygon) was one of the top performers in early January, it went up +90% in a few days with no drawdown. But as soon as it started showing signs of weakness, it was over, and it came back down in a steadily manner. Apparently they bought two payment businesses, and that’s probably why the coin pumped this hard.

• $STABLE is the main competitor to $XPL, and it’s a kind of “XPL but it goes up”. It pumped from $1.5bn FDV to $3.2bn FDV at the top, with a very suspicious price action that was a slow grind that culminated with a squeeze. I think these movements clearly suggest that the supply is controlled and cornered, making it a kind of scam coin.

• $ZRO has been one of the most consistently strong coins in January, it went up 2x from $1.2 to $2.4bn FDV at the top. It’s clearly a coin with strong fundamentals (by far the leading bridge coin), and the team has been teasing some important announcements for February.

Best-performer list :

Best-performers among large caps in January :

• AXS: +125%

• STABLE: +60%

• ZRO: +42%

• PUMP: +41%

• HYPE: +22%

• CC: +20%

Smaller coins worth noting that had a good performance in January :

• RIVER: +117% (+650% at the top)

• RENDER: +20%

• CVX: +18%

• DCR: +8%

• DASH: +7%

• CHZ: +5%

• MORPHO: +4%

And even smaller ones :

• FHE: +345%

• BTR: +345%

• BNKR: +334%

• PLAY: +123%

• SURGE: +122%

• ENSO: +116%

• IRYS: +97%

• ROSE: +72%

• ARC: +23%

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.

It’s a monthly recap of what I consider to be the best trades in the crypto market, or at least “doable trades” with a clear rationale behind them. It also includes some of the month’s most memorable moves: the biggest pumps, the most blatant manipulations, or the most extreme types of price action (like “10x pump and dump in a day”), even when there was no clear trade to take, just to keep track of them.

I find this useful to get a sense of what kinds of moves are realistically possible, as well as the “unrealistic” ones that actually happened in the order books. See, for example, the last section of this article, which highlights what I call “scam coins”, tokens that exhibit completely wild pumps and erratic behavior.

This “Best Trades of the Month Recap” is something I’ve been doing privately for a while, but I’ve decided to make it more presentable and turn it into an article series. These recaps are very useful to me because that’s how my brain works: I like having a library of chart patterns and examples to build frameworks I can rely on when making trading decisions. Some people rely much more on intuition, so it’s up to you to decide whether this type of article will be useful for you or not.

Be aware that these recaps are 100% hindsight, and they don’t pretend to be anything else. Sometimes I’ll over-rationalize moves after the fact. A trade only becomes “obvious” once the chart has already been printed. I don’t claim these trades were easy to take or that I nailed them!

Ideally, I’ll also try to turn these recaps into a table format, like a small database, to classify each trade more precisely and make everything more condensed and readable. (And share the database, of course.)

Note that this article is behind a paywall, but I’m definitely not telling you that subscribing will make you a profitable trader or give you “invaluable alpha”. I’m not guaranteeing anything at all, I’m just sharing material I personally find useful. Don’t subscribe if the monthly cost isn’t 100% painless for you. Ideally, even getting one actionable trade idea each month from these recaps should pay for itself 10x, so if you don’t think that’s realistic given your portfolio size, then don’t subscribe.

Here is the list of trades mentioned, in bullet points:

Read more

NB: you can now become a paid subscriber to this newsletter to get access to paywalled articles as well as all the future resources I’m planning to share.

$BTC and the market overall

The price action of $BTC over the past 2 weeks has been quite sad. We started the year with a strong pop for roughly a week, then BTC corrected from $94k to $90k, then it pumped again to $98k, but that marked the top, and it’s been extremely weak since then. On Jan 19, it dumped hard as a reaction to Trump wanting to tariff Europe about Greenland. It kept dumping after that and reached the equilibrium level at $87k. It pumped a bit when Trump cancelled the tariffs, but overall remained close to this $87k-$88k where it is still sitting right now.

Even though I remain constructive on BTC in the grand scheme of things, we are clearly in bear market conditions, as BTC is struggling massively against both the stock market (regularly making new highs) and obviously precious metals, which are going crazy. Gold has reached $5000, and Silver is going parabolic, it pumped 2x in less than two months. That pump culminated with a short squeeze to $118 yesterday, immediately followed by a -13% retrace.

The spotlight is now on commodities, but only the physical ones, BTC is not getting any love. Even with Saylor having already bought more than $3bn worth of $BTC this month, it wasn’t enough. The new strategy by Saylor is now to keep buying BTC by selling MSTR, even close to 1x mNAV, because it creates more room to issue more prefs without increasing the leverage of the balance. By doing this, it also decreases the share that the convertible bonds represent in the “leverage mix”.

$HYPE - $LIT - $PUMP

The first 3 weeks of 2026 have been hard for $HYPE with the giant “Tornado cash funded cluster” selling tens of millions worth of $HYPE over several weeks, which lead it to dump as low as $20.5 on January 21. Yesterday though, HYPE has started an extremely strong uptrend, and went from $22 to $28 in basically one day. The Tornado entity is almost completely done with the selling, and the PURR DAT is very likely to be buying right now, which explains this massive relief bounce.

$LIT has been struggling massively as well, and had a double bottom right above $1.5 on Jan 20 and Jan 25, it now bounced to $1.9. I think it makes sense for it to go higher from here if the market doesn’t go completely risk-off.

$PUMP is another app that generates a lot of revenue, and it’s been trading quite strong in January. It’s been rejected at the $3bn FDV resistance on Jan 17, then had a correction, but is up +25% in one day today, and reached $3.2bn FDV.

$RIVER scam to $10bn FDV

We do have a new $MYX, ie a new scam coin able to reach absolutely insane valuations: $RIVER. I’ve tweeted a few weeks ago that RIVER had all the ingredients of a perfect scam coin, and it’s been behaving exactly like one, as it’s gone from $10 to $90 in 2026, which corresponds to… $9bn FDV. And obviously, the most outrageous part about the whole thing is that it’s been trading at a crazy negative funding rate, and regularly reaches -2% hourly funding on Bybit.

So far it’s topped at $90 and has had a -30% correction, but I wouldn’t guarantee (at all) that it’s dead now.

Other scammy moves we’ve seen recently: $BTR (currently up +350%), $FHE (went up +750% and it ended with a squeeze that topped it), $HANA (up +150%), $BLUAI (it had a +150% pump and dump in 15 minutes), $ENSO (it pumped 4x and topped there).

The privacy meta

The main altcoin narrative of the year so far has been privacy, and it was particularly lead by $XMR, which had a multi-year breakout at $500 and then went straight to $800 in 4 days. But then it actually turned out that all the XMR move was just because of $280M hack of BTC and LTC that got swapped into XMR in a few days… which then lead to $XMR retracing the whole move back down to $500 and even below.

The XMR move lead to pumps on a lot of privacy beta coins though, the most notable one being $DASH, which had pumped hard in November as a ZEC beta. It then dumped from $150 to $35, but on this XMR-lead leg, it went to $100 again in 4 days, which is quite impressive. I think it’s topped again now.

We then had even smaller beta coins move, such as $DUSK for example, which had a meteoric rise of almost 5x in 3 days. I can also mention $ROSE or $SCRT, which both went up 2x.

$AXS pump and the Korean craze

One of the strongest coins in January 2026 has been a very surprising one: $AXS. It seems to be a coin that Koreans love, because it’s been the top volume coin recently on Upbit. It went up +230% in 10 days, and has mostly been trading at a negative funding rate. It topped at $3 then went down -35%, but bounced very hard yesterday. I think it’s still a decent short but the funding is eating into the PnL a lot… Naturally the other metaverse coins such as $SAND and $MANA followed AXS too, but they are also significantly weaker and don’t bounce as hard.

The other coin that got pushed by Koreans was $BERA: After two extremely underwhelming first weeks of the year, it suddenly spiked strongly and went up almost 2x in 4 days. It’s now almost retraced the whole move.

What else happened in the altcoin market ?

• The LayerZero team has been teasing some announcements lately, and $ZRO has been one of the strongest VC coins in 2026. It went up 2x in 20 days, before retracing a bit. Chart looks good but there are still a lot of VC unlocks on it…

• I don’t really know why it pumped so hard, but $GUN (Gunzilla, a gamefi project) has gone up +250% in January bottom to top, making it one of the top-performers.

• $STABLE is the main competitor to $XPL and it was initially trading rather poorly, at similar valuations as XPL, but it’s now 70% higher in FDV than XPL and has gone up +60% in 2 weeks, to more than $2bn FDV now.

• $KAIA (the rebranded version of Klaytn) had a strong +100% pump over two days and then retraced half of it.

• There was a 3-day meta of new AI coins (retarded memecoins just based on any of the “current hot thing in AI”) and they were all launched on the Bags launchpad (related to Meteora), which made $MET pump by +35%… before giving it all back.

• $CC (Canton Network) had its halving (of emissions) on January 12, it started selling the news 2 days later and went down -25%, but has bottomed there and is currently back at $0.15. Still looks overvalued to me but quite hard to short this unpredictable coin.

• $MNT got a spot listing on Robinhood on January 20, it had a +4% pump-and-dump, but overall remains a weak coin.

• Farcaster got acquired by Neynar, which is kind of an admission of defeat from the Farcaster team. CLANKER initially popped on the news, before going down -35%.

• Both of the themes that were hot during the first week fo 2026 (memes + AI) have become rather weak. FARTCOIN, SPX, USELESS, RENDER, TAO, have all been trending down. Only $VVV remains strong and is now back to the highs.

• A token has been launched for… the Solana Seeker mobile. Strange choice, the ticker is $SKR and it had +430% pump on the day of listing, it has been bleeding since. Another new TGE is $ACU (Acurast, a depin project), it went up +150% before retracing.

• On January 15, Twitter announced it was banning “reward-for-posting” apps, which lead Kaito to shutdown Yaps, and it’s been a fantastic short opportunity on $KAITO, which is down -40% from there.

• After $WHITEWHALE recently, the trenches now got another “$100M runner” again with $PENGUIN, the meme based on the viral “Penguin going to the mountains” meme, and it reached $170M mcap (and probably topped forever there?)

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.