The Hangover Period

Mantle’s Unstoppable 2024 🚀 

Mantle shattered records in 2024 with $2.36B TVL, welcoming 4.3M+ new users and powering over 139M transactions. Its vibrant ecosystem now spans 250+ dApps, driving innovation across GameFi, DeFi, and AI, with 45K+ daily active users shaping the future. And the network has set the stage to have an even better 2025 with its revolutionary partnership with Succinct’s SP1 for ZK validity proofs along with its 40 strong Mantle Scouts Program of 40 industry leaders.

The Hangover Period

The tweet below perfectly summarizes the current market environment. Everyone is tired and increasingly irritable, especially with a lot of charts going full Christmas tree.

We’ve seen market darlings like ai16z and Virtual fall 50%+ in a hurry, Fartcoin and Zerebro are heading towards full Christmas trees as well, and memes across the board look even worse (POPCAT pictured below is a great example).

BTC was down 4% on the week to $94k, though $92k has been defended 3 times now. This week will probably be volatile with CPI on the 15th as well. BTC dominance has been stuck at ~58% (which doesn’t fully show the story of alts). Others have had a brutal month, dropping ~18% or 25% from the peak. During the week this was exacerbated by large moves downward not only in AI coins but also in memes like WIF, SPX and BRETT, which were down 23%+. The market ex fresh shitters hasn’t felt this bearish in quite awhile.

Retail BTC data does point to signs of a near term bottom however, which would help support the market.

Chart of the Day with Vertex

XRP..? The coin has been one of the best performers on the week in a sea of red and honestly looks pretty good. Try app.vertexprotocol.com and trade XRP with up to 10x leverage (and hope retail comes back to send this to infinity on it replacing the current banking system or whatever).

Big drama onchain in the last few days, with ai16z’s Shaw crashing out again / the aiccelerate presale (the crypto equivalent of a Diddy party). But people’s reactions to these things are really just driven by the “hangover” feeling, with everyone tired, and with prices on basically every non newish coin down only. Despite all the whining on the timeline, there still have been pockets of strength, like Dani’s Anon which has been up only, along with signs of bidding today on sort of newish coins like APPLE, EVAN, GRPH, TSOTCHKE and others. The market is increasingly PvP, but the rotations that hit, hit. Pippin was a good recent example, with the token running from ~$35mm to $250mm ATHs from the 8th to the 11th.

Onchain mindshare was actually led by memes today at the top end with CWH and UFD, along with the new launch runner of the day, HOLO. In general the attention board (and esp sub 20d old coins on here) tend to be very fertile hunting grounds despite the softer overall market.

Trench volumes are starting to roll over again, which is usually a net negative for all but the strongest coins. I still contend that watching for bottoms + accelerations in onchain volume data is one of the easiest indicators to help with timing when to enter onchain coins (a lot of coins 3-20x’d in the late December to early January acceleration).

On the topic of Christmas trees, it looks like HYPE new user stats are rolling over as well (though the token price at $20 has been vigorously defended thus far).

0-5d old tokens with numerous $10k+ smart holders included HOLO, AMERICA and LLM, among others.

Interesting accounts getting smart follows:

• Holozone

• Tulip King

• America

• Postiz

• Fission

• Longevity AI

• Sonzai Labs

• SupplyVest

• Nuro

In Partnership with $IO

Instead of owning agent frameworks as a play on “AI agent infra” I continue to believe being long decentralized compute as the “agent infra” play is both simpler and better. $IO has already started to ride this tailwind, setting recent records in daily and monthly network earnings. With the strength of its BD team, along with excitement around AI agents showing no signs of slowing, I think these earnings figures continue their up only climb, driving token outperformance.

SMART MONEY CORNER - Presented by chainEDGE

• Smart buying on the week (ex stables) was led by GNZ, MLG, GOAT and swarms.

• Things do not look great from a smart balance perspective, with basically everything down only outside of GOAT

MEME OF THE DAY