February 2024 - Monthly Market Update
/Monthly Update || February 2024
“Being part of the herd is a formula for disaster.”
Opening Remarks
Greetings from Ikigai Asset Management¹ headquarters. We welcome the opportunity to bring to you our sixty-fifth Monthly Update and hope these are helpful in better understanding some of what we’re doing and what we’re seeing. We have the privilege of deploying capital on behalf of our investors into a new technology and asset class that has tremendous potential to make the world a better place and create trillions of dollars of value in the process.
We believe we are obligated to be shepherds of this technology – to do our part to push crypto towards fulfilling its potential. We strive to be an objective, reasonable, well-intentioned voice of truth amongst a chorus of biased, fallacious, pernicious opportunists. It’s an honor that we take seriously.
To that end, the new year finally brought us our long-awaited spot BTC ETFs – eleven to be exact (10 new plus one converted GBTC). It was front page financial news for much of the month and certainly dominated the crypto news cycle, as it has since Blackrock first filed for its spot ETF on June 15th last year.
The ETF inflows were impressive by most any standard but were offset by significant outflows from GBTC. The overall net figure was $1.46bn of inflows in 14 trading days-
While BTC price action was flat overall in January, finally getting the ETFs up and running was a nice start to a year that should be a pretty good one for crypto. If you’re reading this, I kinda doubt you don’t own ANY crypto, but if that’s the case, I think now’s a good time to “get off zero”. If you own some but you’re thinking of owning more, the same applies – I think now is a pretty good time. There’s always risk to investing, even more so in crypto, but I’d be quite surprised if prices are lower a year from now than they are today.
In the main section of this month’s letter, I lay out what I think may be a defining feature of the market structure for this year and into the next. If I’m right, the stage is set for things to get truly wacky this cycle. If I’m wrong… well, it’ll prob still be wacky, just in some other way. One thing’s for sure, there’s never a dull day in crypto.
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January Highlights
Ten Spot BTC ETFs Approved and GBTC Conversion to Spot ETF Approved
Spot BTC ETFs Trade $4.6bn of Volume Day 1, $28.4bn of Volume in First 14 Trading Days
GBTC Sees Outflows of $5.6bn, Ten ETFs See Inflows of $7.1bn, Net Inflows Total $1.5bn
SEC Twitter Account Hacked by Not Activating 2FA, Account Tweets ETF Approval Day Early
SEC v Coinbase Has Major Hearing, Judge Appears to Favor Coinbase
Tether Purchases $380mm BTC in Q4, Now 11th Largest Holder at ~66k Total BTC
Vanguard and Merrill Lynch Refuse Spot BTC ETF Access to Clients
SEC Opens Comment Period on Options for Spot BTC ETFs
SEC Delays Multiple Spot ETH ETFs Until March
Grayscale Files for Covered Call BTC ETF
Justin Sun’s Stablecoin TUSD Experiences Sustained 1-2c Depeg, Market Cap Declines 30% In January
FTX Estate Decides Not to Restart Exchange
FTX Expects to Repay Creditors in Full at Petition Date Prices
FTX Creditors File Complaints Against Debtors Plan, Want Higher Valuation of Crypto
FTX Bankruptcy Receives Independent Examiner Appointment on Appeal, After Debtors Fight Against It
FTX Estate Sells All GBTC, Totaling ~$1bn
Helium Launches Partnership with Major Telecom Provider Telefonica to Provide Wifi in Mexico
SEC v Binance Has Initial Hearing, Judge Favors Aspects of Both Sides’ Arguments
Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Says Tether Has Its Stated Reserves
Uncorrelated Ventures Raises $315mm Crypto and Software Venture Fund
DCG Repays $700mm Loan to Bankrupt Subsidiary Genesis
Solana Announces V2 of Saga Mobile Phone, 30,000 Preorders in 30 Hours
US Government Files Notice to Sell $130mm of BTC Seized in Silk Road
Hong Kong Exchange HaskKey Raises $100mm at >$1bn Valuation, Led by OKX
CoinShares Acquires Valkyrie Funds
Bitcoin Mining Hashrate Falls by 25% As Miners Curtail Electricity Usage During Texas Cold
| Asset Class | Jan | Q4-23 | Q3-23 | Q2-23 | Q1-23 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | 1% | 57% | -12% | 7% | 72% | 155% | -64% | 60% | 303% | BTC |
| NASDAQ | 2% | 14% | -3% | 15% | 21% | 54% | -33% | 27% | 48% | QQQ |
| S&P 500 | 2% | 11% | -4% | 8% | 7% | 24% | -19% | 27% | 16% | SPX |
| Total World Equities | 0% | 10% | -4% | 5% | 7% | 19% | -20% | 16% | 14% | VT |
| Emerging Market Equity | -5% | 6% | -4% | 0% | 4% | 6% | -22% | -5% | 15% | EEM |
| Gold | -1% | 12% | -4% | -3% | 8% | 13% | -1% | -4% | 25% | GLD |
| High Yield | 0% | 5% | -2% | -1% | 3% | 5% | -15% | 0% | -1% | HYG |
| Emerging Market Debt | -1% | 8% | -5% | 0% | 2% | 5% | -22% | -6% | 1% | EMB |
| Bank Debt | -1% | 1% | 0% | 1% | 1% | 3% | -7% | -1% | -2% | BKLN |
| Industrial Materials | -3% | -5% | 7% | -11% | 4% | -6% | -13% | 29% | 16% | DBB |
| USD | 2% | -5% | 3% | 0% | 0% | -2% | 8% | 6% | -7% | DXY |
| Volatility Index | 15% | -29% | 29% | -27% | -14% | -43% | 26% | -24% | 66% | VIX |
| Oil | 6% | -18% | 27% | -4% | -5% | -5% | 29% | 65% | -68% | USO |
Source: TradingView. As of 1/31/24.
A Lack of Pretense That Any of This Shit Does Anything or Will Ever Do Anything
At the end of the Closing Remarks from last month’s letter, I said:
“Which brings me to my final thought about how 2024 might unfold. It appears to me that this cycle is starting off with less pretense than prior cycles. I actually think there is LESS expectation this time around that any of this shit does anything or will EVER do anything. That’s not to say there’s not an expectation for much higher prices. That’s not true at all. The general expectation is for BTC to hit ATH in the next year or so and a bunch of Alts to massively outperform. The market is mostly taking that as a GIVEN at this point. But it’s making that assumption while also assuming it will happen without actual mass adoption. People want to gamble on vaporware and next year looks like a good year to be in the casino… The mindset is a sort of offshoot of financial nihilism. There seems to be a much larger collective embrace of a lack of pretense within crypto going into this cycle. Said differently, the ratio of expectations to market cap feels like the lowest its been in six years. The root cause of this will take time to unpack, which I will do next month. But suffice it to say, if I’m right, this cycle will get truly wacky.”
I’ve arrived at this thesis after watching how last year unfolded, how it looks like this year is starting to unfold, and comparing that to prior periods in the 6+ years I’ve been in crypto full time. Unpacking this thesis will be best accomplished in list format:
1. BTC has essentially a free walk to ATHs. We just got spot BTC ETFs, which unlock safe access to BTC for trillions of dollars that haven’t previously had it. The halving is a few months away. The Fed is likely to cut rates multiple times this year. Stocks are at ATHs and look like they’re heading higher. BTC ATH is up ~55% from here. We can argue about the pace to ATHs (1H-24, 2H-24, 1H-25) and we can argue about how far beyond prior ATHs we’ll eventually go this cycle ($75k, $90k, $100k, $120k, $180k), but the path to ATH looks incredibly straightforward. Crypto will have to do very little “work” to get BTC into the high $60s. It will likely just “happen” because we have ETFs and the Fed is easing. We’ve never had a setup like that before.
2. The same setup as above is also essentially in place for ETH, just delayed by 3-12 months. For the exact same reasons that the SEC was forced to approve spot ETH ETFs (lost the Grayscale decision; court ruled that if you have BTC futures and BTC futures ETFs, you have to allow spot BTC ETFs), the SEC is forced to approve ETH ETFs. We can argue about the timing of approval – March? Prob too early. May? Certainly possible but still maybe a bit early. August? Feels about right. I think it’s quite unlikely we get to a year from now and don’t have a spot ETH ETF. Combine that with Fed rate cuts and the reflexivity inherent in the ETH burn mechanism, and I think ETH also has a free walk to ATHs, which is up about 100% from here. Again, reasonable minds can disagree about the timing and how far beyond prior ATHs ETH will go this cycle, but it looks like basically a free walk. We’ve never had a setup like that before.
3. Crypto has never had the “cover fire” of its two biggest, most Lindy, most headline assets having a free walk to ATHs. You combine that view with the view of many crypto market participants that both BTC and ETH “don’t have enough meat left on the bone”. Up 55% and up 100%? What is this, a pump for ants??? And you’re left with many participants immediately looking down market cap for stuff that can move more than just a double or two. There is a palpable component of financial nihilism here – the idea that cost of living is strangling most Americans; that upward mobility opportunity is out of reach for increasingly more people; that median home prices divided by median income is at a completely untenable level. All of that is true, so you need to really swing for the fences. Why not put $500 into a memecoin that could 50x, knowing that you could likely lose most or all of it? It’s not like the $500 is enough to make any difference anyways. Neither is $1k or $5k. That mindset, which is becoming pervasive in America, is financial nihilism. This is the zeitgeist for young Americans, you’re naïve to think otherwise. And it’s a huge driver of shitcoining.
4. If you’re looking for further proof of my point about financial nihilism, look no further than gambling trends. They are staggering.
Look at that chart. Think about anywhere else on Earth you can find that kind of CAGR on that size numbers. You’d be really hard pressed. Semiconductors? Yeah. Financial nihilism is growing like microchips. Sheesh.
5. One last point about financial nihilism and crypto. Americans don’t trust crypto. ¾ that are familiar with crypto are not confident in the safety of trading crypto. 40% of crypto investors are not confident in crypto. And yet, if you polled those same investors and asked them about higher prices, I would give you heavy odds the majority would be expecting higher prices. Don’t trust it, but prices are heading higher. A lack of pretense. Let’s go shitcoining.
6. If you believe in four-year cycles in crypto, then 2023 was supposed to be like 2019. But I was around in 2019 and 2023 was nothing like 2019. 2019 was a come to Jesus year for shitcoining. BTC maximalism had a big comeback. The market realized that there were no users for Alts, much of the tech was complete vaporware and the tokens didn’t have compelling value accrual mechanisms. BTC Dominance (a flawed metric but instructive nevertheless) went from 53% to 71% in 2019. It’s true that BTC Dominance also increased in 2023, but it was coming off of essentially ATLs, and currently sits at 52%, a full 19% lower than where it was four years ago. It’s difficult for me to imagine this metric heading higher this year. Last year I made particular note of the Solana memecoin BONK, which was up 9,600% in 2023. That is an unfathomable return. How did a memecoin lead us into a new bull cycle? It’s because of the lack of pretense that any of this shit does anything or will ever do anything.
7. Relative valuation appears to be one of two dominant trends for buying Alts. ETH is a buy because it’s cheap to BTC. SOL is a buy because it’s cheap to ETH. APT and INJ are buys because they’re cheap to SOL. SUI, SEI and TIA are buys because they’re cheap to APT and INJ. The absolute valuation levels are ignored. Fundamentals are ignored. Buy the thing because it’s cheap to the other thing.
8. The other dominant trend for buying Alts is “which one is going to airdrop me the most free money?” Airdrops were huge in 2023, one of the biggest narratives of the year in Alts. ARB, JTO, BLUR, friend.tech. In 2023, savvy on-chain market participants received stimmy checks from crypto that would make the US government blush. The smallest airdrop sent out by JTO was worth $8,500… Let that sink in. It appears the senior leadership at various crypto projects took notice of the hype that airdrops generated in 2023, and they want in on some of that action. The mechanism by which these airdrops are divvied out is “points”, a relatively new concept for perpetuating ponzis in crypto. Points are not a difficult concept to understand – they are the “quantitative representation of a user’s contribution to the network”. Market participants are now racing around staking, depositing, trading, etc to earn points, with the expectation that in the near future, these points will correlate to an airdrop that has real value, potentially a LOT of value. Because of this “points to airdrops that are worth a lot” setup, the market is really not asking tough questions about what any of these things do, or what the valuation of these things are. It’s a full embrace of the ponzi. Who cares what the valuation is when you get it for free? Never had a setup like that before.
9. Another noteworthy trend that supports my thesis is how much infrastructure plays are leading us so far this cycle. L2’s. Modular vs monolithic. Data availability layer. Parallelized EVMs. Restaking. This stuff is so far down in the weeds there aren’t a thousand people on planet Earth that can really explain to you what it all actually means. Lord knows I’m not one of them. But no one cares! The market simply isn’t asking the question, “ok but what about the end use cases that will actually drive the blockchain activity?” People don’t care, but that certainly doesn’t mean people aren’t expecting higher prices. People def are, it’s just not with the pretense that any of this shit does anything or will ever do anything. The biggest pushback against my assessment of the silliness of leading with infrastructure with such a dearth of end user use cases that will drive adoption is the adage from Field of Dreams “if you build it, they will come”. So maybe that’s what’s going on here. Maybe we just need to get “parallelized EVMs hooked up to a data availability layer enabled by restaking” and the use cases are just going to magically appear like Shoeless Joe Jackson in a corn field in Iowa. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Not this cycle.
10. The SEC is highly likely to lose against Coinbase. We can argue about timing, but I’d give you 3:1 odds they’ll either effectively or literally lose. Bring on the shitcoining.
Pushbacks, Caveats
So the thesis is the market is going to shitcoin hard, shitcoin prices will rip, and that setup doesn’t have the perquisite of actual use cases or actual growth in end user demand. Where could I be wrong in that thesis?
You might say – how dare you! Actual use cases are coming! End user demand growth is coming! Look at AI! Look at DePIN! Look at DeSoc! Look at NFTs! Look at crypto gaming! And I would respond to you that all of those pockets are worth paying attention to (some more than others).
AI is a clear opportunity for crypto, but I am wary about crypto’s ability to execute on that opportunity this cycle. I unpacked this view at the beginning of my June letter, so I won’t rehash it here. I realize that I’m somewhat crossways with Fred Wilson and Vitalik on this one and I don’t take that lightly. I’ll just say that crypto has historically been quite poor at execution, and most anything in AI is inherently very difficult to execute on. So crypto saying it’s going to execute on AI is like asking to borrow $50, getting turned down, and then asking to borrow $50,000. That’s not to say the tokens won’t pump. They already have and they probably will continue to. It would be my base case that a basket of AI names will outperform crypto broadly this year. But I don’t think it will be sustainable. You’ll just blow another big bubble and pop said bubble without ever garnering meaningful adoption that even comes close to justifying the valuations. Just like we’ve seen time and time again.
DePIN is poised to potentially be the brightest spot for actual adoption in crypto this cycle. Helium is objectively one of the most successful projects in crypto history. RNDR is seeing meaningful adoption and is very well positioned right smack in the middle of a strong secular trend. It would be my base case that a basket of DePIN names will outperform crypto broadly this year. But I worry about the token structures. They do not appear to sustainably accrue value over a longer time horizon and look to me to be susceptible to the exact type of bubble and collapse that Axie Infinity had. Doesn’t mean they won’t pump first though.
Decentralized Social Media (DeSOC) is another area worthy of experimentation. Friend.Tech is unlikely to be the thing that gains mass adoption, but it was incremental innovation that will hopefully lead to additional incremental innovation that will eventually lead to a breakout product down the road. It’s just not my base case that will happen this cycle. I don’t see anything on the horizon that leads me to believe otherwise.
NFTs are here to stay but their current incarnation does not strike me as being sufficient to gain mass adoption. It’s worth noting that “NFT” is such a broad umbrella with so many vastly different subsectors underneath that the catch-all term “NFT” borders on a misnomer. There are PFPs that you hope go up in value sure. But there are music NFTs. “Phygital” NFTs. Proof of Attendance NFTs. Fine art NFTs. Gaming NFTs. Event ticket NFTs. Identity NFTs. Real world asset NFTs. All sorts of NFTs. In short, I don’t see any of them ready to bring in say, 10mm incremental users over the next two years. The space overall needs to continue to iterate on innovations to find true product-market fit for NFTs. Maybe that happens next cycle. Prob not this one.
It is my base case that crypto gaming will produce some amount of hype this cycle and should at least be able to feign some real adoption via ponzi-esque incentives. But I have my doubts about the sustainability beyond just a pump and dump. I don’t think a basket approach is compelling for this sector. I think there are probably too many games that will do little/nothing this year. It would be my base case that a select few crypto games (maybe 3-10 names?) will outperform the market this year. You would need to own those names and not all the other ones. And then you would want to make sure to be long gone as the cycle top approaches, because another Axie Infinity likely awaits.
Finally, a couple caveats to the thesis:
First off, macro could derail this whole thing. If the Fed were beginning a tightening campaign instead of an easing campaign, I’d be writing a totally different thesis. The good news is, I don’t see any macro skeletons falling out of the closet this year that would spook risk assets broadly and most of all, vaporware ponzi crypto. If for some reason inflation spiked again and the 6 rate cuts currently priced in for 2024 magically evaporate to zero over the course of the year, I would have serious doubts about being long shitcoins. Good news is, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Secondly, if the Binance situation goes quite badly, that could derail this setup of vaporware ripping. Binance is ground zero for vaporware ripping. The US government is now in charge of their compliance department for the next five years. We don’t know exactly how that’s going to play out. There’s real risk that this setup could manifest in a way that is seriously detrimental to the market caps of vaporware ponzis. I wrote about this in my December monthly. For now, it’s not my base case that the Binance situation will play out in a way that it will seriously curtail Alt price performance this year, but it’s worth paying attention to.
Third, I want to explicitly carve out stablecoin payments from the thesis. Stablecoins are the most successful product in crypto history (objectively more successful than Bitcoin, sorry maxis) and poised to continue to grow. For example, Visa’s partnership with Solana could see major traction in 2024 and that could benefit the price of Solana. That is a real world use case driving an increase in end user demand that in turn drives prices up.
Lastly, the election in November could affect my thesis, but that likely wouldn’t come to fruition until the very end of this year, and likely 2025. If Democrats win across the board, crypto is in for at least two more choppy years from US regulators. The vaporware ponzis may not like that.
So What?
This is a bullish thesis wrapped in a bearish thesis… Or a bearish thesis wrapped in a bullish thesis. I’m not sure which. The thesis is that Alts prices are going much higher in the coming 12-18 months, and that this is happening without the expectation that real world use cases will emerge over the same timeframe that will drive strong incremental adoption of the asset class and technology. High prices, low expectations. Crazy setup, but that’s how I see it.
Market Update – Liquid Crypto Asset Investing
| Symbol | Jan | Q4-23 | Q3-23 | Q2-23 | Q1-23 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | 1% | 57% | -12% | 7% | 72% | 155% | -64% | 60% |
| ETH | 0% | 37% | -14% | 6% | 52% | 91% | -67% | 399% |
| XRP | -18% | 19% | 9% | -12% | 58% | 81% | -59% | 278% |
| BCH* | -15% | 33% | -24% | 117% | 16% | 157% | -75% | 6% |
| EOS | -18% | 45% | -22% | -37% | 38% | -2% | -72% | 17% |
| BNB | -4% | 45% | -10% | -24% | 29% | 27% | -52% | 1269% |
| XTZ | -3% | 47% | -15% | -28% | 56% | 39% | -84% | 116% |
| XLM | -15% | 15% | 1% | 1% | 55% | 81% | -73% | 108% |
| LTC | -8% | 10% | -39% | 21% | 28% | 4% | -52% | 17% |
| TRX | 4% | 21% | 16% | 27% | 10% | 98% | -28% | 181% |
| Aggregate Mkt Cap | -3% | 51% | -6% | 1% | 49% | 119% | -64% | 186% |
| Aggregate DeFi* | -6% | 72% | -5% | -5% | 50% | 132% | -77% | 581% |
| Aggr Alts Mkt Cap | -5% | 53% | -2% | -5% | 33% | 90% | -64% | 479% |
Source: CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. As of 1/31/24. BCH includes SV.
Bitcoin saw a decent amount of volatility in January around the lead-up to, launch of, and subsequent trading of the spot BTC ETFs. After being up as much as 16% on the month and down as much as 9% on the month, BTC settled in about flat in January. The peak in price came the day the ETFs launched and came to fruition as a sort of mini blow off top. The subsequent pull back in price was driven by the large redemptions out of GBTC as it converted to an ETF and was allowed to be redeemed for the first time in its ~10-year history. The market got nervous about the size of these redemptions and the unknown duration of said redemptions (i.e., “what if GBTC keeps selling $500mm of BTC every day for the next 60 days?!?”). So we did a 20% pullback from the top over the first 12 days of trading of the ETFs. On January 25th, JPMorgan released a report stating the GBTC redemptions were largely over and that put the bottom in on price for the month.
I first introduced the below chart five months ago in my September 1st monthly –
Source: TradingView. As of 8/31/23.
Not to toot my own horn, but this is what it looks like five months later-
Source: TradingView. As of 1/31/24.
Not bad! I still think that second yellow X works well as a base case – testing ATHs towards the end of this year. Could come earlier or could come later and the ETF flows are likely to be the single biggest influence on that timing.
Source: @sinz_bitguide. As of 2/1/24.
Source: @sinz_bitguide. As of 2/1/24.
When you see the numbers laid out like that, it’s easy to understand why BTC price was flat this month. It’s also easy to see how once GBTC outflows abate, price is likely heading higher.
Beyond ATHs, I’m not really willing to speculate on where BTC price will go. I know from personal experience of trading a lot of BTC, last time it got quite heavy up above high $50s. Moving a trillion-dollar asset higher just takes a LOT of buying. ETF flows will certainly help alleviate that heaviness, but it makes logical sense that BTC’s returns diminish as it gets larger, and I think that will continue to play out this cycle.
One way to predict this would be to examine Fib extensions. See the chart below from the inimitable Pladizow -
Source: @pladizow. As of 1/31/24.
This shows prior cycle tops and subsequent drawdowns and then subsequent new highs based on Fibonacci extensions. Somewhat amazingly, BTC has had a consistent tendency to top out between the 0.618 and 0.76 Fib extensions from the prior cycle low. That would put us somewhere in the $100k-$167k range. I would take the lower end of that range for sure. I could imagine a struggle around $100k, a strong burst through and then a failure to maintain $100k as support over a multi-month period.
I think to take BTC towards $100k and beyond this cycle, we are going to need some fresh major catalysts. We need another Elon (good Elon not bad Elon lol). We need another Saylor or a few Saylors. We need a major sovereign or a few to buy a bunch of BTC and talk about it. I think it’s hard to just bake into your base case for this cycle that we get those sorts of major headline deals for BTC. Sure, they could happen and when they do, you can reprice your expectations for the peak of the cycle, but you wait to see it first and then reassess.
We need egregiously irresponsible monetary and fiscal policies from central banks and governments globally. We are getting a good amount of that for sure. The Fed is preparing to cut rates with stocks at ATHs and unemployment at ATLs…lol. The US budget deficit was $1.7tn in 2023 and it’s going to be $1.9tn in 2024…lol. These charts below…lol
Source: reflexivityresearch.com. As of 2023.
So we are in Wacky Town and there’s probably no turning back. The monetary and fiscal policy situation will get worse and worse over the coming years and decades and at some point there will likely be a collapse in one or more major currencies – I’m nearly certain that would occur in the EUR, GBP, JPY and CNH before it would happen to the USD. But that whole backdrop is wildly bullish BTC price and it just makes you want to own a good chunk of it and never sell it and buy more on dips. But drilling down into exact timing is much harder. And I don’t get the sense we’re going to have a major currency collapse this cycle. So while monetary and fiscal policies are set to be directionally supportive and that is of crucial importance (BTC loves QE and detests QT), I don’t think we’ll the magnitude of the money printing we saw in 2020 and 2021 that was such a major boon to BTC price last cycle.
Macro is probably going to be supportive of crypto this year. I’ve been saying that in prior monthlies and again earlier in this letter.
The SPX did a two-year roundtrip on a 25% pullback and then recovery back to ATHs. SPX then punched through prior ATHs with conviction and is currently trading a few % above prior ATHs-
Source: TradingView. As of 1/31/24.
This does not strike me as a chart about to top. Sure there’s always big macro risks lurking in the shadows (WW3 anyone?), but I wouldn’t have it as my base case. As January has now closed positive, you also have seasonality on your side-
Rates have likely topped for this cycle. We can argue about the pace they come back in and the ultimate cyclical low, but I’d be quite surprised if the 10Y breaks 5% in the next few years.
Source: TradingView. As of 1/31/24.
Next up is ETH. I’ve been saying for a couple months now that ETHBTC is setting up to run and I think the bottom is probably in for this cycle. ETH ETFs are prob next on deck and so ETHBTC is prob heading higher. Maybe something like this –
Source: TradingView. As of 1/31/24.
It would be my base case ETHBTC will eventually pop up out of this ~3 year range this cycle. How much higher will depend on numerous factors, both BTC-related, ETH-related and ETH competitor-related. This battle between ETH, ETH’s L2s and ETH L1 competitors is set to be perhaps the headline battle for this coming cycle. It’s a trillion-dollar question and I don’t have strong conviction about how it will play out. The ETH competitors have “relative valuation” on their side and a whole sleeve full of ponzi tricks to drive the value of their tokens higher. We’ll see how sustainable those tricks end up being beyond flashes in the pan.
The headline ETH competitor, SOL, has had a HELL of a ride over the last couple years. A gut wrenching 97% drawdown from ATHs followed by an awe-inspiring 920% pump in 2023, a large chunk of which came the last three months of the year.
Source: TradingView. As of 1/31/24.
I think it’s safe to say that the Solana project has now firmly shaken off the SBF stench at this point. And that was no small task. Many, including myself, had serious doubts about the long-term viability of the project after the collapse of FTX, given how intimately intertwined Solana was with Sam and FTX. But Solana was successful in emerging from those ashes. I’m not sure I can accurately characterize exactly how that happened. The community remained intact to a much greater degree than one might have assumed in December 2022 with SOL at $8, much of which was due to memecoins and airdrops. Solana made meaningful improvements to the functionality of the blockchain, which suffered worrisome downtime issues in the prior years. Overall, in the year following the FTX collapse, Solana did an admirable job of convincing the market that it can provide fast, plentiful, cheap, reliable blockchain transactions. That’s still a tough deliverable in crypto overall, so it matters when the market believes a platform can do that.
If for no other reason than all the reasons I mentioned in the main section of this monthly, I think SOL is heading higher. Because of this market’s penchant for shitcoining. SOLETH will likely be higher a year from now than it is today. APT, TIA, SEI, SUI. They’re all likely heading higher in dollar terms and a basket of all these names is likely higher against ETH a year from now. But as I’ve laid out, that will have little to do with actual fundamentals. It will be driven by airdrops, flows, ponzinomics and relative valuation. Should set us up for the exact same bubble and collapse we’ve had throughout the history of crypto. Sigh.
Closing Remarks
I hope you found the main section of this monthly as thought-provoking to read as I found it to conjure up and write. Like I said, it’s a bullish thesis wrapped in a bearish thesis, or a bearish thesis wrapped in a bullish thesis. It kinda depends on how you look at it.
My stance is directionally bullish for crypto prices over the next 12-18 months, and that bullishness is not predicated on fundamentals, or at least not the type of fundamentals that involve providing real world solutions that drive significant incremental adoption. My stance is bullish on bullshit, as the unfortunately accurate saying goes in crypto – “scams pump the hardest”.
In the summer of 2017 when I got into all this, the market was buying tokens that represented narratives that were deemed attractive, regardless of that token’s ability to actually deliver on said attractive narrative. Blockchains are good for logistics, so buy VeChain. Blockchains are good for banks, so buy Ripple. Blockchains are good for IoT, so buy IOTA. Chinese people like blockchains, buy NEO. So on and so forth. Fast forward nearly seven years later (wow I’m getting old) and unfortunately we’re STILL doing this. A basket of AI tokens is likely to pump to the high heavens over the next year, and also likely to make little discernable sustainable impact on the real world.
My thesis I laid out is bearish real world use cases. And it’s bearish sustainable price action. I am explicitly making the call that we’re going to blow another bubble like we have the prior two cycles, and that bubble will be deeply divorced from fundamentals and unsustainable over a multiyear basis. We’ve done it before, and I don’t see any reason to think we’re not about to do it again. In fact, I think it’s more obvious now that that’s about to happen than it was at this point in the prior two cycles.
There is noteworthy memetic reflexivity to all this – “up three, down one”. This refers to Bitcoin’s tendency to outperform everything for three years, then underperform everything for one year, then repeat.
There is STRONG memetic reflexivity to the above table and that memetic reflexivity in turns flows down to Alts, this time with “a lack of pretense that any of this shit does anything or will ever do anything”. Act accordingly.
“A merchant's happiness hangs upon chance, winds, and waves.”
– Japanese Proverb
Travis Kling
Founder & Chief Investment Officer
Ikigai Asset Management
P.S.
Included below is an incomplete list of memorable tweets from the last month. Twitter is not investment advice and my views could easily be wrong. That being said, like it or not, Twitter matters for crypto. I have no interest in being a talking head for a living and babbling about on Twitter is a long way away from being a good steward of investor capital. However, this is a community with open-source software in its DNA, and participants want to crowd-source the truth. We are shepherds of this technology. Answers to fundamental questions about this asset class are not currently clear, so having a public platform to share your views with the community is important. After all, you’re helping shape the future :)
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