Gm, legends. 

We've had a mixed bag across the markets so far this week and there isn't too much major market-moving news coming out. It almost looks as if the market is dazed and confused, and in need of direction. Bitcoin is sitting pretty at around $23,000, Ethereum floating around $1,650, while the SPX is holding 4,100. 

But is it over for Bitcoin? Has the pump and run-up finished? Regardless of what happens this week, today, we're looking at February Narratives to keep an eye out for. Including the big news at ETHDenver to Bitcoin NFTs (they might just surprise us). Plus Google has invested heavily in AI.

Let's take a look!

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Here's what's inside today.

🔥 The big topic. February's top crypto narratives whilst Bitcoin loses momentum.🗞 Hot crypto news. Ark Invests $1.4m BTC target, China FUD is no more? John Ray, FTX CEO is paid $690,000 AND MORE.👀 Updates across the bloc. Arbitrum fist bump airdrop rumour was false, Panoptic making big announcements at ETHDenver, Trader Joe launches OFT for Layer Zero and goes live on Arbitrum and BNB AND MORE.🛡 Chart of the day. Is it over for $BTC? Or just a shake-out?

🧵 Thread of the day. DeFi Research Ignas digs deep into five hot early-stage projects to add to your watch list.

🔥 The big topic.

February's top crypto narratives as Bitcoin loses momentum

The pump is done. Could Valentine’s Day bring tears to crypto as the CPI numbers get announced?!

Is it over? Or just the beginning?

After 365 days of pure stomach-wrenching pain, Bitcoin saw 32 days of upwards momentum with close to a 50% gain.

The New Year opened with what was, in hindsight, an opportunistic $16,549 for Bitcoin. And as bored traders began piling in, BTC peaked at $24,280 on February 2nd. 

Was it an echo bubble? A bull trap, maybe?

Or the start of something far more spectacular?

As Crypto Cred points out, it's irrelevant.

One of my favourite traders once told me: “Ignore the noise and just look at the chart. Ask yourself would you go long or go short?”

Here's the daily chart so you can make your own analytical decision.

PS. watch for the 50EMA (light blue) and 200EMA (red) to cross. That’s considered the “golden cross” of technical analysis… pamp it! (more analysis in the chart of the day)

Now February’s arrived, will it truly be the month of romance? Or will we have broken hearts across the board as the month-on-month CPI and Core CPI numbers are released?

February's Crypto Narratives

In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of this month’s narratives. 

ETHDenver #BUIDLathon & Festival

Everyone loves a crypto conference for the free t-shirts, snapbacks and alpha. Just check out what happened when Jedi and Dan went to Solana Breakpoint. 

Conferences tend to pump tokens as the game of speculation increases dramatically with rumours or project announcements flying around crypto Twitter.

All eyes are on the Polygon team as they had a sensational 2022 bringing on BIG partnerships and building the Polygon zkEVM. Just picture for a second if the Matic price action and VC movement into Matic is an unexpected zkEVM mainnet update.

Both Arbitrum and Optimism will be attending, too. Could you imagine the smell of a double air drop?! 

BTC NFTs and Marketplaces

Bitcoin NFTs. We wrote about these last week as the Bitcoin maxis were getting mad over Ordinals, Bitcoin’s first NFT Collection.  

However, zoom out and look at the potential size of the adoption.

Blur’s heavily anticipated second airdrop has spurred on the NFT marketplace narrative with the likes of $LOOKS, $X2Y2, $NFTB, $JPEG, $NFTX, $BEND and $SUDO (wen?!) all making moves.

Let’s not forget $AVAX in all of this with the recent Amazon partnership to release their NFTs

Arbitrum vs OP vs ZK Narrative

Folks are speculating that the $ARB airdrop is a “fistbump” away, while the Arbitrum ecosystem continues to pump with the likes of $GMX, $MAGIC, $Y2K and $GNS all making strong moves.

The narrative around ZK is getting more traction and the ZK/Matic threadors are out in full force right now. Will Polygon announce mainnet at ETHDenver? And if so will it pull in the likes of $MINA, $LRC and $IMX?

Could StarkWare’s $STARK airdrop be coming soon? We’re asking the question after the team recently announced that StarkNet Prover will be open-sourced.

Optimism fits right in the middle as it is Arbitrums main competition with its own airdrop coming soon. And the price action we’ve seen recently may suggest something.

What else to look out for?

This feels long in the process but $CRV crvUSD could be around the corner.

LSD tokens and Ethereum. With the Shanghai update coming in March it would be wise to not count out another rotation into both. 

Twitter takes to Ray Dalio's comment on crypto and highlights the fact that Frax’s Frax Price Index token, $FPI does exactly that.

Google has invested another $300m into AI firm Anthropic which was previously funded by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. The AI narrative is strong right now and with continued technological advancement may be around for some time.

Rumours of Synapses $SYN token launching on Binance have been flying around, and price movement and whales may suggest something is happening. Plus, Synapse will soon be moving to its own app chain like $dYdX.

Is Berachain right around the corner at 4:20 THC?! While this is not confirmed as of yet there are a number of rumours circulating Discord and Twitter that it FINALLY isn’t a fake chain. Berachain ecosystem and native tokens would be worth watching here.

Our Take

So whether February will leave us infatuated or brokenhearted remains to be seen. What we do know regardless is there’s a ton of potential. And that’s all that counts.

🗞 Hot crypto news.

🐮 Bullish

WeTransfer Partners with Minima to launch NFTs on the Layer One's peer-to-peer mobile network, allowing users to mint NFTs direct to their mobile devices.

AAVE just became more secure. The AAVE CEO stated that the latest security update "Silos the risk away" with its new feature "Isolation Mode". That's along with a new portal feature which allows assets to be moved cross-chain faster and adds a new high-efficiency mode, allowing LSD ETH Bulls further leverage their positions. 

Did China get the FUD wrong? If you've been around long enough you'll remember the consistent China FUD that would tank the markets. Fast forward to 2023 and the former central bank advisor Huang Yiping is calling for a re-evaluation of the ban. Maybe, just maybe this news could pump the markets?

Plus Ark Invests crazy $1,480,000 Bitcoin Price Target!

🐻 Bearish

SBF can contact ex-employees after he tried to contact FTX General Counsel Ryne Miller last week through an encrypted messaging application. Sam has been granted permission to use WhatsApp on the grounds that monitoring software is installed on his mobile phone. 

DCG's Grayscale sell-off. It's reported that DCG is selling at a heavy discount after an agreement was made on Monday with creditors to "sell its subsidiary Genesis crypto trading business as well as its lending arm". This is while Genesis goes through its chapter 11 restructuring. Recent share sales have focused on its Ethereum fund.

New FTX CEO banks $690,000 for his first week on the job as he took over the helm from former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. When breaking it down, John Ray would have had to have worked 75 hours per week, including Christmas, at his usual $1,300 hourly rate. Merry Christmas, sir!

👀 Updates across the bloc.

Project Updates

ARBITRUM. $ARB did not launch yesterday despite all the fisting-bumping rumours. 😤

CONVERGENCE FI. This one has only recently come on the radar, so DYOR. They have just released their first medium article titled "Sagittarius 0x* ignition." TLDR Convergence is a blend of "Curve, Convex, and Olympus behaviours to achieve what we call the “Govearn” mechanism.

GAMMASWAP secured $1.7m in seed round funding. Led by Skycatcher, investment has come from the likes of coinflipcanada, quattro, 0x_d24 and more.

PANOPTIC. If you've not heard of these they are the perpetual, oracle-free options platform. @Jesper, CEO, dropping alpha hints that announcements may be coming at ETHDenver towards the end of this month.

POLYNOMINAL PROTOCOL. Derivatives protocol built on top of Synthetix has just launched its beta testing on Optimism. You can sign up here. It goes without saying that it's always good to use a burner wallet. 

SYNTHETIX. The Eltanin release has begun and Synethix will be adding 22 new synthetic perps to the books and will be adding @Kwenta_io & @DecentrexHQ to their front end.

TRADER JOE is now available on Arbitrum and BNB, while also launching an OFT. aka Omnichain Fungible Token, for Layer Zero. This gives $JOE the opportunity to become a truly native, multichain token that can be bridged 1:1 across any chain.

UNIDEX EXCHANGE is having a revamp of its Swap and Perps exchange and the team have dropped hints that Options are the next thing to be aggregated on the platform. 

Governance Updates

A16Z voted NO against using Wormhole as the bridge from Ethereum to BNB in a recent UniSwap governance proposal. This has essentially turned into the battle of VCs as A16Z and Sequoia have a large investment in Layer Zero, while Jump Trading has a substantial ownership stake in Wormhole.

BUBBLEMAPS. A deep dive into A16z's recent governance proposal unearthed "bullying" and identified how they control such a LARGE portion of what happens across 11 different wallets. 

DROPS NFT. A governance proposal has been passed to list Miladys giving instant loans with 65% LTV and 2x leverage.

UNISWAP DAO. The DAO has spoken and UniSwap will be deploying V3 on the Boba Network after the vote was approved. This gives UniSwap a stronger presence in the Asian markets with Boba Networks' significant presence in the region.

🛡 Chart of the day.

Is it over for $BTC? Or just a shake-out?

Bitcoin, you're playing with our emotions right now.

The 50 and 200 EMAs are inching closer to creating the golden cross which is a bullish sign that some algorithms are programmed to act on. 

BTC is sitting on a key area of support right now with the daily RSI starting to curl to the upside, printing an ever so slightly higher low. It could be make or break for Bitcoin

Bull case. Hold strong in this area and watch as the Bitcoin bulls make a play to the upside for Valentine's Day back up to the $24,200 zone. Break that and the sky is the limit.

Bear case. We get faded by the Bitcoin bears breaking hearts, sending us back to test the $21,000 and below region, with their price target back in the $18,000 zone to capitulate the late long positions.

Coming up this week

By the time you read this, the market will have digested J Powell's words in Washington. A lot of chit-chat this week, so watch out for a hawkish vs dovish tone which may dictate a direction leading into CPI numbers on February 14th.

🧵 Thread of the day.

Sticking with narratives, Ignas digs into 5 early stages DeFi projects to keep an eye out on. TLDR. Diva Labs, Elixir Protocol, Architect XYZ, Vest Exchange and Blue Fi.

And on that note, thanks for reading, catcha apes in the next edition!

grant, jedi & dan 🫡

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