Parsec Weekly #96

A farewell trench update

---

GOOD MORNING CRYPTO MARKET ENTHUSIASTS, an extra special gm today and I hope you’re all doing well. As I write this, BTC is currently just 1000 trumpbux away from $100k. The corn’s performance since the election has been nothing short of astounding, up nearly 44% in less than three weekly candles.

Slammed down from 74k on the Sunday night before the election, this weekly wick might just go down as the biggest bear trap in history.

Before we get into it today I’m going to write a couple of soppy paragraphs. Today is officially my last day at Parsec, it’s a happy, sad and exciting moment all wrapped into one. In the last three years my life has changed dramatically, I went from a university drop out that didn’t know what he wanted to do, to someone that my younger self would be incredibly proud of. “What would me X years ago think about who I am today?” - A scenario that I often thought about when I’d have those moments of doubt, and I encourage anyone reading this to do the same. Progress, progress, progress.

In the two years that I’ve worked at Parsec I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge and know-how, whilst establishing myself in an industry that two years ago, I knew very little about. I wouldn’t be in this position today if Will hadn’t taken a chance on me, I was hungry but I had very few skills and even less knowledge. I have infinite gratitude for him and the rest of the team for taking me on and showing me the ropes. There is no second best industry.

I’ll still be around, I’m just taking some time off to travel with the missus and ride out the bull market.

---

Alright let’s get into it, one last ride, and what better way to wrap it up than a little spiel on the recent happenings in my favourite sector - the trenches.

I still call them that but lately it feels like they’ve graduated into something else. They’ve been far less PVP and we’ve seen huge growth in average volume, velocity and market cap ceilings, as well as the sheer number of coins able to be sustained at one time.

This was the real trenches, I don’t know what we should call it now. In late 2023 you’d be lucky if your shitter was doing over $2m of volume a day, today we had a beepleAI coin that shot swiftly to nearly $10m mcap and did $50m of volume in half an hour, and this was just ONE random coin today, not even particularly noteworthy.

When you’ve been conditioned in a much harsher market where the slightest sneeze of a celebrity talking about crypto is received as a top signal, and comes true, it can become hard to adjust. Especially when these signals are currently everywhere you look, but as a once wise Zhu once said “Something something signs of froth are indistinguishable from signs of adoption”.

A few weeks to maybe a month ago as we were starting to see some prime risk on trench conditions I started checking in on DEX volume, at the time we were approaching the March highs, now we are well and truly passed them. Last weeks volume candle on Solana was more than double the highest candle in March, fifty five billion dollars.

We also have the Coinbase and Phantom apps nearly topping the charts in their respective categories, I think phantom reached #1 in finance yesterday. To top it off we also have insane holder growth on seven day old Tiktok adjacent coins, signalling the return of the zoomer.

In case you’re unaware, this image is a tiktok trend, a coin was created for it which went from zero to a half a billion in market cap in 7 days, whilst gaining 120k holders. This is unprecedented holder growth, for reference ten month old WIF is at 200k holders, GOAT is at 64k.

So in short, it does seem like retail are finally back this time. But as we all know, things can stay frothy for a long time in a bull market, and considering BTC only broke ATH three weeks ago I think we have a long ways to go.

We introduced the masses to crypto last cycle. Mum, Dad, Grandma and your Uber driver all downloaded the apps and threw some money in last go around. We had major brands shouting WAGMI on the timeline, celebrities buying million dollar NFT’s and the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender. We need to think bigger in terms of top signals this cycle.

---

A few quick words on the current trends before I wrap it up. AI agent coins have rocketed in popularity and valuations over the past month. GOAT, FARTCOIN, ZEREBRO, AI16Z are top in mindshare within the sector.

They held strong and had some pretty incredibly up only charts for multiple weeks. Similarly to the relationship between BTC and alts, the majors would rally then cool off and allow newer coins to run, each time breaching new market cap levels we didn’t yet know were possible. After a few days to a week of a silly amount of coins running all together to 8-9 figure valuations, the market would get shaky again, everything would dip, money would flow back into the majors and only the strong new coins would survive.

I just wrote a big paragraph detailing what happened with ai16z and then deleted it cause I realised it’s unnecessary, all I’m trying to say is that I’m a memecoin trader by heart but AI coins have been surprisingly intuitive for me. I had a niggling feeling about execution risk and it came true. It reminds me of when your NFT founder would do something stupid back in 2021. There is no execution risk or promises to deliver on when your coin is pure memetics.

Anyway kez is out for now, thanks for listening to me yap for two years and good luck out there soldiers.

---