Monthly Market Roundup: March 2024
Disclaimer: Author holds ETH, SOL, TIA & PYTH and may have intra-day/week positions and/or airdrop allocations in other coins mentioned in the article. Views and opinions are that of the author alone and do not represent the views or opinions of Etherscan. None of this is financial advice. Always do your own research before apeing.
Note: This is the third ever Monthly Market Roundup so we’re keen to get feedback. We’d really appreciate you answering a few questions in this form.
March Madness ETF Rollercoaster
March was another volatile month, with market direction and sentiment largely dependent on ETF flows throughout the period. In the first full week, we saw >$2.2bn net inflows pushing BTC to new all-time-highs above the previous cycle top at $69k. Even despite a sharp 15% selloff on the first break of this technical level, the pullback was swiftly bought up and price made new highs before the weekend.
Strong net inflows continued into the second week, peaking at a record $1.05bn on March 12th before tapering off the rest of the week. This peak in net inflows also marked the top of price just shy of $74k, with price slipping to lows ~$64.5k by the weekend. The third week saw 5 consecutive days of net outflows, peaking at -$326m on March 19th, which also marked the local bottom ~$60.7k. Net inflows returned for the last week of the month, facilitating a strong bounce to close the month at a record high of ~$71.3k.
It was a less successful month for ETH price, with local highs of $4,090 still 18.8% off previous cycle top at $4,870. The pullback from these local highs was also more vicious, taking us to lows just above $3k before rebounding to close the month at $3,650. Meanwhile, the ETH/BTC ratio also dropped from a first week top ~0.059 to lows ~0.05 into monthly close, -15%.
This monthly close is the lowest we’ve seen since April ’21, particularly concerning for ETH bulls as the SOL/ETH ratio made new all-time-highs, closing the month up 49.2%. Another interesting datapoint is that the Dencun upgrade, arguably the most anticipated since The Merge to Proof-of-Stake in 2022, marked the picotop of the market on March 13th.
Airdrop Stimmis
Despite relative weakness in Ethereum’s native asset, the ecosystem had two 9-figure stimulus injections in the form of airdrops. First from volume-leading Perp Dex Aevo, launching at $3bn FDV with 11% of tokens circulating. Second being TVL-leading LRT protocol Ether.fi at $4bn FDV with 15.2% of tokens circulating. Both projects have followed up with second seasons of farming campaigns to continue incentivizing user retention in their highly competitive niches.
There were also plenty of airdrop announcements for April, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Most notably from basis-trade backed synthetic dollar project Ethena (April 2nd) and Wormhole (April 3rd), both of which carry 11 figure FDV’s according to Aevo pre-launch markets. With 5% and 16% of total supply expected to be airdropped respectively, these are likely to exceed March’s major stimuli. Other announced airdrops with high valuation expectations to keep in view include Tensor, rewarding use of their NFT trading platform and Nim Network, which will be rewarding a variety of users including DYM stakers, as well as communities of AI Gaming and Infrastructure projects such as Parrallel, Ocean and Gitcoin.
Aethir Checker Node Sale
Aethir, a DePIN sector project geared towards Gaming & AI, collected 27,911 ETH (~$93m) in the largest public raise of the year. Rather than tokens, checker nodes licences were sold. These allow the holder to verify transactions and earn rewards in the native token ATH in return and are non-transferrable for 1 year to reduce speculative participation. The token will have both transactional utility for network resources as well as governance utility in the Aethir DAO, while the raised funds will primarily be used to build out their Platform-as-a-Service layer and Sandbox Virtualization products on top of the existing bare-metal rental for AI. According to Calvin Chu, CEO of Impossible Finance — Aethir’s primary advisor, the sale more than doubled their expectations and was the largest the Launchpad platform has worked on to date. Impossible previously advised on the successful node sale of Arbitrum L3 gaming platform XAI and are currently conducting an IDO for RWA oracle Truflation.
Layer Cake & Memes
In rollup land, Metis was listed on Binance and successfully performed an upgrade to decentralize its sequencer, but ended the month with it’s token and tvl both 10% lower. Meanwhile, the tokenless Base saw an increase in tvl of almost 4x from 1bn to 3.8bn, buoyed by a frantic Memecoin season led by BRETT — a coin based on the character by Pepe creator Matt Furie and DEGEN, a Farcaster contributor airdrop, which in turn launched the first Base L3.
Beyond Base, it was a massive month for memes, with DOGE/USD and DOGE/BTC having their highest monthly closes since November ’21 and February ’23 respectively. WIF overtook BONK as the highest marketcap memecoin on Solana, ending the month at $4.6, up 455%. The community also raised $700k to display the meme on the Las Vegas Sphere. There was also the Slerf Saga, in which a $10m presale was followed by an apparently accidental burning of both seeding LP tokens and SLERF tokens to be distributed to presalers. Instead of going to 0, the token pumped to a high of almost $700m FDV with 100% of coins in circulation due to “reasons”. Strong evidence of the attention economy thesis in meme markets.
Other interesting metas to keep in view are a) catcoin/dogcoin ratio catchup play, led by MEW which climbed to >$800m FDV within 1 week of launch; b) badly drawn + wrongly spelt politicians, led by Jeo Boden ($BODEN) which closed the month >$300m FDV. Both these leaders, like WIF, were “fairly launched” on Solana with 100% of supply circulating at TGE.
Based on these observations, here’s a set of loose criteria to provide a framework in your memecoin “investing” decisions:
- Did it make you laugh or atleast grin when you first saw it? Is there any associated lore?
- How original or derivative is it? (e.g. Jeo Boden vs. CatWifHat).
- How good is the ticker? (e.g. $BITCOIN for HarryPotterSonicObama10Inu)
- Is the project honest about what the coin is (a pet rock meme), or is it trying to be something it’s not by tagging on utility or a roadmap?
- Fair distribution — what share of supply is circulating at TGE? How much does the team control?
Finally, the most provenant of Memes, Cryptopunk NFTs, had their 2nd (4.85k ETH, $16.2m) and 3rd (4.5k ETH, $16m) highest all-time sales in terms of both ETH and USD. Both were of the Alien variety, of which only 9 within the 10k PFP collection exist.
AI
A relatively quiet month for AI meta headlines, despite the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference, which hosted Near Protocol founder Illia Polosukhin as a Keynote Speaker. The major headline with price impact ended up being the announcement of a token merger between AGIX, FET and OCEAN into the new ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). The merger involves a community vote which concludes on April 7th. All 3 coins have pulled back significantly (>25%) since the announcement pump.
Another interesting development was the announcement of Neura, an EVM-compatible chain built with CosmosSDK geared towards the AI meta built by the team behind Ankr Network. The chain will integrate the ANKR token for payments and rewards, while leveraging BTC’s security via collaboration with Babylon chain.
Real World Assets & Adoption
Strong month for the RWA meta, with leaders ONDO and MKR making new highs, buoyed by a slew of positive news headlines including the launch of Blackrock’s $100m BUIDL onchain asset fund, Ondo’s allocation of $95m into the BUIDL fund, Ondo’s tokenized treasury note passing $100m in tvl and it’s announcement of 24/7/365 subscriptions and redemptions via USDC for the product.
On the adoption side, highlights include Southeast-Asian superapp Grab enabling e-wallet topups via USDC in Singapore and Sui partnering with Revolut to provide in-app education courses.
Regulatory Highlights
- Kucoin charged by US DOJ for Bank Secrecy Act and Unlicensed Money Transmission Offences.
- US Court allows SEC case against Coinbase to proceed, dismisses claims regarding Coinbase Wallet.
- London Stock Exchange begins accepting applications for Bitcoin and Ether Exchange Traded Notes (ETN’s), expects listings May 28th this year.
- SBF sentenced to 25 years.
Bid you good fortune and may your candles be evergreen.
