GM Legends,

The great rotation continues, Bitcoin → Ethereum → Majors → Alts → Microcaps as PEPE sucks the liquidity out of the market with Bitcoin down at $28,884 and Ethereum goes sub $2,000

What a week! Apes have turned $251 into $1m+, Gensler gets his…handed to him and the biggest wallet-draining operation ever seen stole over 5000 ETH.

Keeping it light-hearted let’s take a look at how PEPE is stealing the limelight from DOGE on 4/20.

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Here's what's inside today.

The big topic. 

🐸 Why is a frog meme coin all anyone can talk about?

DeFi insights & project updates.

🖼 Arbitrum DAO pass AIP 1.1 & 1.2
📅 Velodrome proposal resubmission to become “STG Hub on Optimism”
🦧 Degen corner: How 1 trader turned $251 into $1.14m with PEPE

Hot off the press.

🐮 Fetch.AI to launch AI trading products 
🐻 Metamask denies 5000 ETH exploit claims
👨🏻‍💼 What the FED?! Mark these dates off!

Plus Twitter reads from @0xsurferboy, @avocado_toast2 and @twobitidiot!

🔥 The big topic.

🐸 PEPE Crowned KING of the MEMEs on 4/20

I’m baffled, confused, salty and happy, all at the same time. It’s been a crazy old week in crypto. Bitcoin has been hovering around the $29,000 mark, ETH is just up there chilling at around $1,900-$2,000 and certain baskets of altcoins have been rallying, whilst others are pretty meh…

But there’s one little frog coin that has captured all the headlines, threadoors and even cut through to the mainstream media… Pepe.

But, how did we get here… again?

The age-old cycle of Bitcoin dominance followed by a cool down usually leads to altcoins running as traders look to rotate into assets that will (for the short term) outperform BTC. When done well, this ALT/BTC ratio allows a user to then rotate back into Bitcoin with a larger position due to their profit capture from the altcoin rotation.

This was the infamous dynamics at play towards the final leg of the 2017/18 bull market.

A brief timeline of events…

Bitcoin topped on the 11th of December 2017 at $19,798

Info: The TOTAL3 Chart - This is the total market cap of crypto excluding BTC and ETH.

TOTAL3 which is the market cap of all crypto excluding BTC and ETH continued to rally 123% across the full index of assets for 3 weeks after Bitcoin topped on the 8th of January 2018…

This was a product of the altcoin-Bitcoin rotation as traders looked to push their capital into assets outperforming Bitcoin at the time.

The problem is when altcoins are being driven up like this following such rotations, the prices and valuations of such assets become less and less attractive to buy. Users then seek riskier assets that often come with low liquidity and low valuations and thus take less capital flows to increase the price.

The inevitable happens when neither Bitcoin, Altcoins and nor shitcoins become outperforming assets and users either get stuck with selling to cash or bag holding to 0. ZERO.

FYI - DOGE Topped on Monday, 8th of January 2018…

Why am I telling you all this?

Enter PEPE.

Well, we have had one of the most impressive meme coin pumps in as long as I can remember. As I am writing this (seething) - Pepe Coin (PEPE) is up 3,900,000% in… wait for it… 96 hours.

Let’s put that into perspective:

A $10 buy, in the first few blocks, would be roughly $3,900,000… ($3.9 million)...

Obviously, this would be difficult (near impossible) as nobody would be aware (apart from insiders) and it is likely sniper bots go some at this price but not much… plus the initial seeded liquidity won’t have been there to add larger sizes until later.

So, just because the price has moved up that much, doesn’t mean that anyone would have captured all of this move from the first block… Additionally, starting liquidity would have contributed to some price/market cap.

That being said, the best evidence I have found is this tweet below… a $27 buy is now worth $731,916… or a 27,108x.

Lmao, only in crypto.

Again, you would have had to buy the bottom and sell the top (which is impossible).

The sad realisation is those that can actually hold through that much of an increase in PnL, are the ones that tend to never sell. Diamond hands on the way up and the way down. It’s Shitcoin’s Razor.

We put out a Tweet asking for some stories of sweet sweet gains. As you’d expect there are some horror stories of those seeing it, fading it and now considering pivoting to becoming an AI investor.

Here are some heartwarming stories about some users who hit the jackpot. I am in no way salty that I missed this…

And another…

And another…

Here is another we receive from a follower on Twitter in our DMs. An initial buy-in at a $500k market cap which is over 200x at the time of writing 🤯.

Now a message from our Sponsors at Subway. Just kidding, but Subway if you are reading this you can sponsor us for 12 white chocolate and macadamia cookies a week.

This is all great and all, but there is a wallet lurking in the shadows which is in some serious profit capitalising from inexperienced traders, relatively low liquidity and the dreaded high slippage… his name is Jared From Subway.

Jaredfromsubway.eth seems to be the operator of an MEV bot that is, ahem… sandwich-attacking users on a lot of meme coins at present. Who knew being a sandwich artist could be so profitable?

To give you a taste of the sheer amount of transactions that are being performed by our boy Jared, here is a screenshot of his wallet activity.

The most ridiculous thing about this is the Txn fee section on the right-hand side… at the time of writing, there are over 192,000 transactions and counting… we could even be outlandish and attribute gas prices being so ridiculously high to this one man and his sandwiches, often hitting $70 per transaction over the past few days.

TLDR on Sandwich Attacks:

In a nutshell, what is happening here is when a user is pressing the buy button on Uniswap to buy PEPE or whatever else meme coin derivative is happening right now, they usually have to set their slippage (the tolerance on how much they are willing to accept price movement between sending the transaction and confirming the purchase), these transactions sit in the memory (mem) pool for a few seconds prior to being confirmed and committed to a block…

This is when Big Jared from Subway comes in with his MEV bot and buys a shit tonne of the same token and pays much more in gas (hence his Txn fees being so high) for the validators to prioritize his transaction over our victim.

In the next transaction our user finally gets his order filled at a much higher price (remember he set his slippage tolerance too high and Jared exploited this fact), the transaction/block (usually directly after) Jared proceeds to dump his much larger position taking no directional market risk on his short-lived meme coin purchase.

Here is an illustration of how this works…

You can often prevent this by using a DEX aggregator like 1-Inch, Matcha or CowSwap. These aggregators have MEV protection built in and often hide your transactions from the meme pool so that Jared and his stupid sandwiches can’t see the details of your order.

So, what is all this a sign of?

Well, the micro-cap shitcoin space has been in the gutter for the best part of a year. Projects would reach a $400k market cap and then fade into non-existence. This one just cut through and grabbed the mindshare of the crypto space like nothing we have seen in years.

The Pepe memes are synonymous with crypto but we have only really seen variations of dog coins explode. This time the meta has changed.

I don’t mean to alarm anyone and I certainly don’t endorse any of what I have just written but to put this into perspective, SHIB during the 2021 bull run hit $43.5bn, which is roughly 35x larger than where PEPE is today.

Right, time for a disclaimer because that was a lot of shitcoin talk. I don’t own any PEPE, and none of the blocmates team owns any PEPE, we are all coping severely hard today and will be considering our very existence if this thing continues.

The micro-cap and meme coin space is full of bad actors, undisclosed shills and more often than not is an insider's game. We do not endorse or condone anything mentioned above. If you don’t know what you are doing you will lose all your money and will never get out of your parent's basement. So don’t say I didn’t warn ye.

👀 DeFi insights & project updates.

The World of DeFi

• Delphi Digitals’ latest additions to their research suite include Alpha Feed, Premium Video, Curated Dashboards and more to supplement and complement their long-form research articles. (Twitter)
  

• Kyber Network’s unclaimed rewards can now be claimed following last week’s vulnerability. (Twitter)
  

• Merit Circle is launching a web3 focussed subnet powered by Avax called “Beam.” (Twitter)
  

• Metavault Trade team up with Velocore on zksync. Ahead of the $MVS token launch liquidity will be provided on Velocore. (Twitter)
  

• Mux Protocol an on-chain dex reach $5BN in trading volume. (Twitter)
  

• Olympus DAO partners with Lido Finance introducing “Boosted Liquidity Vaults” where your staked ETH gets a boost. (Twitter)
  

• Rocket Pools Atlas upgrade was a success, reducing the barrier to entry with 8 ETH mini pools. (Medium)
  

• Sparta DEX releases a sneak peek of the Spartan NFTs which will be at the heart of the DEX ecosystem. (Twitter)
  

• Synthetix update their weekly $OP incentives, 10,000 during week 1 and 300,000 during weeks 4-20. (Twitter)

Governance Updates

• Arbitrum DAO passes AIP 1.1 which proposes reporting to be done on the 7.5% of the $ARB tokens distributed to the Foundation’s “Administrative Budget Wallet” and AIP 1.2 which proposes amendments to be made to the constitution based on community feedback. (Snapshot)
  

• Balancer's proposal to deploy on Coinbases “Base” network will go into voting on Apr 20th which if passed will bring Balancer’s strength to the network including ve8020, boosted pools and LST’s. (Snapshot)
  

• Velodrome received positive feedback on the original “Becoming the Stargate Hub on Optimism” and has been resubmitted into voting for round 2 and will require 70% in favour to pass. (Snapshot)

📊 Degen Corner.

$PEPE

Was it Smart Money? Insider Money? Or just downright Lucky Money?

Regardless of what it was this wallet turned $251 into $1.14m (at the time of the post).

The question is, can they sell? will they sell? and how much will they be able to profit as the liquidity pool sits at only $2.4m.

The fastest seller wins.

🗞 Hot off the press.

🐮 Bullish News

• What’s a16z’s Orange Circle all about? In a teaser Tweet by engineer, Noah Citron posted a “🟠 “where Jesse Pollack later replied “🟠 🔵” which could be a subtle hint that whatever orange means is going to be launching on Base. (Twitter)
  

• Shapella is still bullish as over 1 week later deposits out weight withdrawals as Ethereum becomes deflationary. (The Block)
  

• Fetch.AI to launch AI trading products for DEX’s to allow DeFi users to use AI agents to execute trades. (Coindesk)
  

• FTX Reborn as Tribe Capital considers bringing the shamed and broken exchange back to life with a $250m revival raise giving users a small sense of hopium. (Cointelegraph)
  

• Gensler, rekt. As he stutters his way to painfully digging his own grave as even he couldn’t quite find the words to state what Ethereum actually is.

🐻 Bearish News

• Metamask denies exploit claims saying they are “not specific to Metamask” as over 5000 ETH is drained as highlighted by Twitter user Tayvno. (Cryptoslate)

• MEVs strike PEPE and pump gas prices as the MEVs spend millions to front-run traders in their attempt to turn $150 into $1m. (Coindesk)

• Donald Trump V2 NFT trading card collection goes live and momentarily surpasses the Azuki and Bored Apes. Has the top just been signalled? (The Block)

👨🏻‍💼 What the FED?!

It’s getting closer to the “Sell in May, go away” so whilst there might not be a lot in the calendar for the FED we should still expect market volatility as options expire and traders potentially front-run the psyops of May being typically a down month for BTC.

Next week in the FED.

🐥 Twitter reads.

@0xsurferboy takes a look at one of the hottest perp dexes to recently launch… Mux Protocol.

@avocado_toast2 gives his random thoughts on how the market actually works.

@twobitidiot for president?

And on that note, thanks for reading, catch’a apes in the next edition!

blocmates team 🫡

🤝 A final word.

A quick word from our super awesome sponsors who help us make this all possible...

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