Alpha: Narratives, Catalysts, New Launches

Gm. After a short break, we’re back at it. This is going to be a sort of an everything guide to give you current narratives people are focused on, upcoming catalysts, new launches and smart money favorites - which will be dripping with alpha. We will also release our Bot Szn (Part 2) research on Friday.

The State of Things:

It feels like a very “hot and fast” money market for onchain tokens. Narratives start and die within a day for some tokens, and even more patient holders of the “Crypto Index” aka RLB, DMT, OX, BITCOIN and UNIBOT have been punished recently. UNIBOT and DMT in particular have seen very weak price action in this small dip in majors, with UNIBOT down 38% from ATHs and DMT down ~49%.

The “BRO DU” even lift Index in general is down mid 30% from the ATH, but there seems to be a rotation into an even newer “good coin index” going on (more on this later).

Smart money is pretty well allocated at this point, with Nansen reporting their Smart Money is holding just 13% of their portfolios in stablecoins.

Source: Nansen

While chainEDGE smart money has been seeing a similar drawdown in stable holdings, but also an increase in non ETH holdings, suggesting risk appetite is still there.

Source: chainEDGE

While CEX traders are getting bored with ETH essentially dead flat for a year, there has been pockets of degeneracy going on with onchain tokens, which has been spurred by the collective wealth effect of 8-9 figures in combined realized gains in meme coins like BITCOIN, PEPE and rising prices in RLB, OX and UNIBOT. This newfound wealth is trying to find new metas to ape into, especially after the weakness in majors pushing the “favorites” down 35%.

One of the biggest narratives right now is around the social platform FriendTech on BASE, which has exploded in popularity over the last few weeks. There has been nearly $70mm of volume traded already on the platform and over 110k “users”.

Source: https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/friendtech

This SocialFi meta has led to interest FT tooling tokens and FT competitors. The non exhaustive list of tokens that haven’t died yet in this narrative include:

• QR / Qrolli

• SHARES

• FRIEND / Friend Room

• $SNIPER (on BASE)

• SB / SharesBot

• PERPS

• 0xF

There are also a bunch of new projects (no token) that have popped up within the last month for this meta, including:

• https://twitter.com/friendtech_bot

• https://twitter.com/friendlendtech

• https://twitter.com/FriendTechFarm

In the onchain trenches, we have seen a rotation towards a new “index” of good coins in the last 2 days. We’ve seen smart money biding into:

• SHIA

• HILO

• ATOR

• OLAS

• LINQ

• EMP (to a lesser extent)

These coins have shown incredible strength during this recent move down in majors, and most of them are at or near ATH.

If you ever feel like you are late to these emerging narratives, trades or rotations, you should check out chainEDGE if you haven’t already. After 3 years of feeling like I was always behind in the onchain trenches, I built a tool to easily stream and follow the swap activity of the New Smart Money, which have abnormal and consistent trading wins over the last 6 months. As a (biased) daily user, it has helped me catch emerging coins and narratives better than any other tool or process. A very recent example is our “New Launch Pro” smart money cohort showed a relentless perma bid on RAS / RastaKitty, which is now up 6x from when I spotted it and up much more from our initial signal:

In terms of DeFi narratives, we’ve really only seen good price action and/or smart money flows in:

• HILO - which is a binary predictions platform trading at a $18mm FDV, that a wallet rumored to be Su Zhu has been perma bidding (and is now the #1 holder). Join the chainEDGE free alpha TG for more info

• HMX - the perp DEX on Arbitrum

• And then the TG derivatives narrative which has been led by AXE.

  • Newer projects within this category include:

    • $GBOT

    • $GUISE

Other interesting new projects that I think smart money is interested in (but haven’t launched yet) that I noticed over the month include:

• https://twitter.com/CapsuleHeroes

• https://twitter.com/fruitsquarex

• https://twitter.com/FilamentFinance

• https://twitter.com/keepers

• https://twitter.com/grvt_io

• https://twitter.com/BetFi_Token

I’ll cover more about the Bot Szn Narrative in Friday’s research post, but it is safe to say that the hype/euphoria/excitement around the sector has cooled off, with most of the non-Unibot tokens in the category down 75%+ in the last month. Unibot’s usage has stayed strong despite this, with the project now comfortably 95%+ of the DEX trading bot category.

Source: https://dune.com/whale_hunter/dex-trading-bot-wars

Unibot has seen smart money outflows over the last month, including sell pressure from the rumored Su Zhu wallet.

Source: chainEDGE

Catalysts:

After the $1bn of liquidations on Friday, BTC and ETH’s upcoming catalysts include:

• Grayscale’s ETF case verdict (soon?)

• Blackrock ETF approval decision on September 1st

• 12 ETH Futures ETF approval on Oct 12th

Other upcoming catalysts include:

• RDNT launching on ETH mainnet 10/3

• Shibarium has launched and now they are trying to restart it

• Unlocks upcoming for LDO ($14mm), AVAX ($97mm) and YGG ($3mm)

Alpha for You

I’m much more active in the OCW discord which is exclusively for paid subscribers of this newsletter. With chainEDGE up and running, the community has printing solid gains onchain including:

• Calling SAINT at $50k market cap, which was a 90x at ATH and still a 42x

• Calling shares at $1-2 (went on to $50)

  

And lastly some smart money alpha for you:
chainEDGE New Launch Pro smart money (which means top 6 month PnL traders that buy in the first 2 days of a token’s life) are still actively buying RAS (and also SHOV)

Source: chainEDGE

An example of our daily research summary (shared 14hr ago to chainEDGE users).

And lastly, 7 day smart money movements

As always, share any comments, questions, content requests, etc below. Happy hunting.