👀 Crypto's unexpected winner

GM everyone. This is 2036, the crypto newsletter that pays you.

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: last week, most of crypto cheered Ripple’s partial win in a US court: XRP sold on exchanges were not deemed securities. But we think the biggest winner wasn’t Ripple.

Let’s dig in.

🥔 Today’s meat and potatoes

Get smarter on crypto in 2 minutes

Every crypto bull market has special “narratives” - trends that explode in popularity.

• In 2013 it was bitcoin

• In 2017 it was Ethereum

• In 2021 it was NFTs and Layer 1s

Most savvy crypto investors know the importance of being early to the next big narrative.

It’s where the big money is made.

In the last bull market, Layer 1s - alternative blockchains to Ethereum and Bitcoin - absolutely ripped.

In 2020, bitcoin went from ~$5,500 to ~$20,000.

And then “alt-season” started - the season for all non-bitcoin coins.

In 2021…

• Cardano ($ADA) went up 19X 

• Avalanche ($AVAX) went up 40X

• Polygon ($MATIC) went up 154X

• Solana ($SOL) went up 173X

a.k.a people made fortunes from being early to the Layer 1 narrative.

Obviously, everyone is trying to figure out what the next sustainable narrative is.

Memecoins skyrocketed earlier this year.

And Layer 2s (like Optimism and Arbitrum) are likely to do well around the time of the next Ethereum upgrade later this year or early 2024 (more on this tomorrow).

But while Ripple (XRP) pumped to the moon last week, it’s possible Solana could be the real winner of last week’s ruling.

Solana was on the SEC’s list of coins that could be potential securities. But thanks to the Ripple ruling (= most coins sold on exchanges will not be securities), that’s likely no longer the case.

And investors are paying attention.

Solana is the only Layer 1 from the former bull market that’s gaining significant price momentum.

It’s up +179% YTD.

But it’s still ~90% below its previous high of $259.

In comparison, bitcoin and Ether are just ~56% and ~61% below their all-time highs, respectively.

That means Solana potentially has a lot more room to run.

And Solana is in a much better position than during the last bull run.

It’s only been down once this year - compared to 14 times last year.

1% better every day, right?

Solana also supports more transactions per second than any other chain.

So sure - Solana has its risks.

Over 8% of the total tokens are locked by SBF’s former hedge fund and will unlock in 2025 all the way through 2028.

And the chain got popular for NFTs and games, which have been down terribly this year.

But we still believe Solana is worth paying attention to.

And that’s what we’ll pay you to do today.

🍨 Dessert

Stories to read if you have FOMO

1/ RFK Jr. will back the US dollar with bitcoin if elected (he’ll also exempt profits from capital gains taxes)

2/ Congressman Ritchie Torres asks SEC chair Gensler to stop his attack on crypto

📝 Task

Earn $15 in SOL for a simple crypto task

Phantom is the de facto Solana wallet. It will allow you to hold SOL, buy NFTs, play games, etc.

So our task today is a classic Wallet Wednesday with a spin… in the Solana ecosystem.

We’ll tally all the participants in a Google sheet and mathematically choose a winner at random who’ll receive $15 in SOL.

We’ll announce the winner of today’s task in Friday’s email.

🖼️ Crypto meme of the day

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