This Week Onchain 5/13

5/13/23

Trying out a new segment here. Will go over the latest developments in the onchain world, high level smart money movements + positioning + anything else that I think is interesting over the past week. **Note for paid subs, I’ll release a deep dive Sunday morning on an upcoming project launch (no token yet) that I think is worth checking out.**

Memecoins Fizzling

Memecoins have been drawing all attention and liquidity away from most alts, leading to pretty brutal sell pressure across most projects despite ETH’s slight fall from the highs of $2,100.

Smart money has been swapping mostly into stables + ETH derivatives over the week, with some small degen inflows into White Lotus (and even smaller in FOUR).

Source: chainEDGE

Smart money stablecoin holdings have also been on the rise per Nansen (up 500bps), bottoming at ~15% on April 15th.

Source: Nansen

One final note on memecoins. I have seen a lot of threads blow up about “this wallet made $2mm on PEPE, here is what they are buying now”. The problem with this is that most users do not spend 10 minutes looking at these wallets for their historical behavior. Using PEPE as an example, there are wallets that sniped very early buys (within 15 min of liquidity), who are actually worth paying attention to for launches (people in my discord know the ones), there are insiders, there are bigger whales that bought with size later into PEPE’s evolution (worth following) and then there are people that just got plain lucky. The problem here is that a majority of the biggest dollar gains (outside of blacklisted wallets) were either PEPE insiders or dumb luck traders that are not a renewable source of alpha for you, and will likely end up losing you money. And the really early wallets actually ape around block 1 on every launch, so to copy them, you need a bot of your own. For memecoins, I think its more profitable to either go the bot route or the influencer front-running route → you can learn more about and find a pretty good influencer wallet from my last whale watching issue.

With PEPE losing some steam and numerous CT folks launching their token, it looks safe to say that this little meme run is going to cool off for some time. Things are obviously getting out of hand, with $3-4mm sent directly into this person’s wallet for a presale.

Milady Madness

Elon tweeted about the Milady NFT project, which sent the floor price from ~3.8 ETH to ~7 ETH at the top. Yours truly was able to take advantage of the move, picking up a few ETH at onchainwizard.eth.

Meanwhile GCR also took advantage of the (exit) liquidity, bringing his realized PnL on the project to ~933 ETH (per Cielo).

BTC Fake News (Again)

A large amount of BTC went on the move again, with some folks mistakenly tagging this as the US government, which led to a sharp 5% decline in BTC on 5/10.

So far, it seems that this is not the US government - > a good dune dashboard to see their holdings + activity can be found here.

Source: Dune

Additionally, some have speculated (and I agree) that this wallet took advantage of the size of BTC and timing to match Silk Road sales (similar to the March 14th dumping). The potential manipulator sent the exact balance that the US sold prior (9.8k BTC), but 1 month later.

Source: https://twitter.com/summersthings/status/1656830544863191040?s=21

Other Interesting Stuff

• Smart money trader Machibigbrother has been loading up on PEPE, buying ~$330k worth of the token over the last week.

Source: chainEDGE

• Immutable Capital (0x65b1b96bd01926d3d60dd3c8bc452f22819443a9) picked up $100k worth of GMX via swaps this week

  • They’ve historically traded GMX very well, with nearly $400k in realized gains from the token over the last 6 months

• Smart money trader 0xd062ab63bb4f7af7e59b85defc3c90bfa9b81e6e bought ~$178k of CHR over the last week and is farming in the ETH/CHR (volatile) pool (200%+ APR)

Feel free to drop anything interesting you came across, deep dive requests, questions, etc.

Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.