Don't Panic: We're Going so Much Higher — NGMI Newsletter #4
Market overview special, upcoming trends to be very excited about, imminent Solana pumpage, delayed Ethereum moves, NGMI Capital Updates & more
To start this one off with a bang I’d like to give a quick shout-out to David Belle over at Fink Money.
As someone who spends my entire life looking at internet coins — I’ll be the first to admit that I know precious little about stocks and legitimate real-world assets.
If you want to get strong insights into new narratives, fresh companies and good ideas in a super short, easy-to-read format — I highly recommend giving Fink Money a whirl.
Bitcoin: you simply don’t have enough
Bitcoin has been pulling back from last week’s highs, and I’ll be the first to admit that accelerating outflows from spot Bitty ETFs don’t look spectacular.
There is no reason to panic.
Our father who art in heaven (aka. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink) is watching over us now, and the BlackRock-led, interdimensional giga-TWAP orders from giant financial institutions across the United States of America are only going to keep coming in hot, thick and heavy.
Yes, there will be weeks of low inflows.
Shit, there might even be a few weeks of significant net outflows.
Bears will panic, and cry that the end is nigh.
It’s in your best interest to ignore those who lack conviction in the current climate.
We are currently 16 days out from the Bitcoin halving, and if we look at past data of what occurs in the six to twelve months following the halving — there are many good reasons to be bullish.
Pre-having and post-halving nukes are all normal parts of the natural, beautiful chaos of the market — which is desperately trying at all times to wipe overleveraged and otherwise misallocated investors from the face of the earth.
Now some might say, “But Tom, the past doesn’t accurately predict the future” and to that, I would say “meh, it kind of does.”
When you have a wealth of reliable, historical patterns to go off, they’re usually a very good place to start when making predictions about the future.
Unless you truly believe yourself to be some kind of genius who has legitimate information that justifiably suggests the future might be very different [hint: you don’t] — then I would suggest not betting against observable trends that are currently playing out in real-time.
All in all, none of the bearish nonsense matters when you observe the broader trend. I humbly ask everyone reading this to switch off any part of their brain that thinks like Michael Burry when assessing the price of crypto assets.
The yearly top is nowhere in sight.
Ethereum: slowly, then all at once
Ethereum is widely regarded as one of the more cursed coins of the current market cycle when it comes to price action. Where BTC is up 300% since the start of 2023, ETH is only up around 175%.
This is especially frustrating when you consider that Ethereum is a much smaller asset compared to BTC (roughly 30% of the size) and has been relied upon by many as a higher volatility beta play to BTC in past cycles.
But the wonderful thing about Ethereum is that when it does decide to teleport, it does so quickly and violently.
In a recent conversation I had with Tangent Ventures analyst
— I was led to the understanding that the market is simply not looking long-term enough with Ethereum.Forgive me as I once again invoke the BlackRock card.
Midway through last month BlackRock launched a tokenized money market fund on the Ethereum network, which has since attracted over $240 million in fresh capital. Larry Fink is on TV, touting the benefits of public blockchains for tokenizing assets.
A quick glance at the current price of ETH ($3200) tells me that the market brutally underestimates how good this news is for Ethereum in its quest to establish dominance as the decentralized world computer.
Again, I’m not in the business of making surgical time-based predictions. As I’ve said before, I’m really not that smart and I only look at long-term trends, simple catalysts and broad, sweeping narratives to inform my sentiment on markets.
Solana - about to get stupider
This month we’re expected to see well over $1 billion in fresh liquidity dropped on the Solana ecosystem by way of several major airdrops.
Lending platform Kamino Finance, cross-chain bridge Wormhole (dropped its token yesterday), Parcl, Tensor and also possibly Drift, are all most likely going to airdrop tokens to users by the end of the month.
Just today, Wormhole airdropped $850 million in Wormhole ($W) to eligible users. That’s $850 million worth of a fucking governance token.
If you think people aren’t going to use even 10% of this value as a little extra slush fund for shitcoining, you are sorely mistaken.
TLDR: there’s a boatload of fresh money landing on Solana. Don’t expect the dispersion to play out overnight, this kind of thing takes a few weeks to make its way into the trenches.
If you thought Solana memecoins had been absurd already, I would say that things are only going to get much, much stupider in the coming months.
NGMI Capital Updates
One of the CIO’s most significant positions, Dream Machine Token (DMT) finally put in some serious numbers. The CIO has been building this position since August and he must admit, it feels very good to be vindicated to this degree.
After months of irritating volatility and downright depressing price action, DMT finally decided to put in a series of god candles, taking its price from $45 to as high as $130 — a cool 169% gain in 72 hours.
So for the new readers of this “newsletter” — DMT is the native token of the Sanko ecosystem. Sanko is a hybrid streaming/gaming platform that uses DMT to power all of its applications.
The proof is in the pudding with DMT. Myself and four other Australian degenerates actually use the sanko.tv platform to stream a weekly crypto podcast and I can attest to it being a novel, quality product.
The most important thing to note with DMT is that the Sanko team will be releasing a Layer3 network in the coming weeks, with DMT being the native token for all activity on that chain.
Note that the CIO is not saying that DMT is the future of all the world’s financial activity. What he is saying — is that if you take what happened on the other most recent Layer 3 network on Base: DEGEN and extrapolate it out to Sanko — things start to look absurdly good for DMT in the coming weeks/months.
Look at the comparison chart of the values of all Layer3 networks below and tell me which one looks the most undervalued.
Memecoins: brutal and unrelenting
The CIO has enjoyed another fine week of shitcoining on the Solana blockchain.
Solana memecoins are a dangerous business, however, if you don’t mind donating a few of your hard-earned Solana tokens to the developers of rugs here and there the upside on funny coins can be magnificent.
Many claim that shitcoining is just buying profoundly dumb shit at a very low price and selling it when the number goes up so much you feel physically ill.
This is partially correct.
Memecoins are brutal and unrelenting business, so it’s crucial to understand what valuations your specific derivative of dogshit can typically run to and figure out if/when you want to take profits and miss a 100X or if you hold and vanish your money.
Then there’s also assessing whether or not you’ve stumbled upon a new meta and stand to make squillions of dollars, or if it’s just some ninth-tier derivative of ShrekWifCatHatBagDogInu69420 you just got extremely lucky on and should probably sell the bulk of the second you’re in meaningful-profit-territory.
It’s typically the latter.
Portfolio
The CIO is currently holding personal long-term positions in the following coins. (These are listed by order of approximate weight)
Solana (SOL)
Ethereum (ETH)
Bitcoin (BTC)
Dream Machine Token (DMT)
Celestia (TIA)
Pendle (PENDLE)
Dymension (DYM)
Creso Wallet (CRE)
Pyth Network (PYTH)
Prime (PRIME)
Stacks (STX)
Vector Reserve (VEC)
The CIO also enjoys a little bit (A LOT) of on-chain gambling. Here are his current degenerate shitcoin holdings:
Popcat (POPCAT): Popcat to $1 is pre-ordained. Return to this post in a month.
ZYN (ZYN): You mean to tell me this isn’t a minimum $500 million token?
UpsideDownCat (USDC) on Solana: The CIO is so far underwater he’s scuba diving but he is committed to seeing this to 1 gorrilion dollars or zero.
Circle (CIRCLE) on Base: Fun ponzi with inbuilt burn mechanism. Study safemoon.
Welsh (WELSH) on Stacks: Generational Welsh.
Zeek Coin (MEOW) on ZkSync: Mascot coin of ZkSync eco. Still looks good (and just wait for the ZkSync drop)
Positions are roughly in order of weight. One day the CIO will get around to organizing this better. But not today.