Optimist Weekly Recap 10/12-10/20
Mini Bear
Another week in the Headline Supercycle has made for a scalper’s paradise. Trump’s TACO/Sandwich behavior with China, the BTC gully, and the 10/10 crash enforce a very aggressive game within crypto as BTC trades at the bottom of a longstanding trend (since Aug. ‘24). If you’ve been active on CT, you can feel it. A lot of anger, no sustainable bids, everybody seems to be round tripping or losing… but there are always plays, Optimists stay winning.
I’m not interested in leveraged swings at this moment, but the R:R on accumulating good spot bags is looking good here. The strategy has been to scalp projects running explicitly on attention, and take profits into conviction bags with staying power. One of those bags is still PUMP.
Despite folks calling for the death of the trenches, you cannot deny that the casino is still running. I think people overindex on high marketcap runners that hit the TL, or the recent lack thereof, for PUMP sentiment. Spend a day in the microcap trenches, and you will see that the game is still very much alive. Revenue (and buybacks) stay above $800k/day. They recently announced an ICM update in collaboration with ICM.RUN and DEV.FUN to bring ICM to Pump.fun, and are actively strengthening their streaming eco with clipper incentives. Clippers are the lifeblood of streamer distribution in my opinion. Channels like FreshNuts for Overwatch or Behemeth for OSRS keep people involved and up to date, without being actively engaged. Something like that will emerge for Pump too, and Alon is incentivizing it.
Tl;dr: Rev is strong, they buy back ~$800k/day, and they continue to build. I think price is depressed because everyone is, and will continue to put profits from scalps into it as a high-risk store of value until proven otherwise.
Avici
Another very interesting project that Optimist’s have accumulated is Avici. Avici’s token launched via MetaDAO last week, and the platform is a non-custodial neobank on Solana with over $1.2M in spend on their cards. There are no payment limits, users can send/receive funds, and even export your private keys; it really is your money. Looking forward, they plan to implement a ZK credit score to bring the bank to life.
Avici will serve as the “bridge between decentralized financial institutions and businesses/merchants, handling credit rails, onboarding, and UX. It’s the natural next step for a maturing onchain economy.” Neo/Crypto banks are hot. You have XPL, Tempo, and the new Peter Thiel backed “Erebor.” Avici is a quality way to express this trade, and, unlike XPL, they don’t use their token as incentives. It’s a working product, no built-in sell pressure, and they’re just getting started.
Zora - The New Game
One of the strongest tokens since 10/10 is Zora, unofficially Base’s lovechild. Zora is a social media platform where every creator is a coin, and every post is a coin tied to said creator. All of this gets paired with the ZORA token. Think Virtuals if you’re familiar.
Coinbase is pushing this hard. They’re running a Believe Fund (free money) to deepen liquidity on creator tokens and incentivize activity, just bought rights to the UpOnly podcast for $25M, likely resurrected on Zora, and Trading Rewards (free money) for traders interacting with the platform’s top creators.
I don’t know why the sentiment is generally horrible towards Zora, but I think it’s undeserved. It has a flywheel, the app continues to improve, and even my own fiancee, who has 0 crypto knowledge, has made a few hundred dollars just posting our dog. That is what attracts participants. Nobody wants to tell their friends to start trading memecoins because they’ll probably get dog-walked by Uxento spammers. Now, you can easily get on Zora and post away. You either make money or you don’t, and the traders keep the risk to themselves. Perhaps the first stop on a new euthanasia coaster? Either way… worst case scenario you’re farming the BASE airdrop.
Notable Mentions
Nock - https://x.com/nockchain - PoW chain funded by Delphi that’s just getting started.
ARES on TRX, Disney (Tron movie)/Justin Sun (SunPump launch) /Elon (Ares/Tron mode in Teslas) collab, tokenized.
ZEC still moving
Binance life got its Binance Listing, 4 next?