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🌴 Summer narratives (& how to invest)

🌴 Summer narratives (& how to invest)

PLUS: Bored Apes plunge

Alex M.
June 27, 2023

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

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: every summer, a new theme emerges in crypto. What’s it going to be this time, and how do you invest in it?

Let’s dig in.

🥔 Today’s meat and potatoes

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Every summer has its crypto season.

In 2020, it was DeFi summer. Uniswap 10Xd in a matter of months, and $180 BILLION poured into banking-like crypto applications: borrowing, lending, etc.

DeFi summer

In 2021, we had Solana & NFT summer. Solana also 10Xd in 3 months, and by the beginning of fall, a picture of a rock sold for $3.6 MILLION.

yeah but it was an NFT

In 2022, it was crash-and-burn-in-hell summer. $LUNA collapsed in a week, 3AC imploded, and Celcius went toast. Bitcoin went from $45,544 to $19,297.

ouch

Later that year, SBF took all our money to try and gamble back his losses (spoiler: it didn’t work).

Now enter 2023…

It looks like the next few months will be dominated by news of ETF approvals (or rejections).

This has already pushed the price of bitcoin to yearly highs.

But if you want to throw some spice into that mix 🌶️ here are some things you could pay attention to…

1/ Staking 🏦

We’re going to show you how to stake in tomorrow’s email. It’s how you (and the big boys) earn yield on your crypto - notably on your Ethereum (around 5% annually).

And staking is exploding in popularity.

So far, the LIDO protocol is the big winner here. They have 31% of the entire liquid staking market, twice as much as Coinbase.

They also have a token - $LDO. Just saying.

2/ Bitcoin DeFi 🟠

Bitcoin will be the first recipient of institutional money.

But Bitcoin’s ecosystem is widening. There are two areas we’re keeping a close eye on:

Bitcoin NFTs (Ordinals)
BRC-20 tokens (mostly memecoins)

If NFTs are a leveraged bet on bitcoin, they could increase in value orders of magnitude faster than bitcoin itself.

We’ve written about both at length in the past, like here, here, and here.

To keep up with the space, this is a good Twitter list to follow.

3/ Coinbase 💱

Coinbase has a few things going for it:

it’s the largest regulated exchange in the United States
it will serve as custodian for many of the upcoming bitcoin ETFs (including Blackrock’s)
its stock ($COIN) trades on the New York Stock Exchange and is easily accessible in any brokerage account

Coinbase is the institutional gateway into crypto. In the last 5 days, bitcoin is up 2%, but $COIN is up 11% 👀

4/ Memecoins 🐸

Memecoins were all the rage this year.

In a few days, $PEPE rallied nearly 4 MILLION %. And last week, it doubled again.

Crypto UP = memecoins up even more?

It’s possible.

On top of that, NFTs like Bored Apes are at their rock bottom and could bounce back (others - like Azuki - are dominating).

Ethscriptions are another new experiment on Ethereum. But there’s no easy way to invest yet.

$GMX has become the darling of DeFi on Arbitrum ($ARB) - something we’ll cover soon. And Optimism ($OP) has become the place for Coinbase to build Base and Binance to build opBNB.

Solana’s the phoenix rising from the ashes that could burn mid-flight. It crashed 94% in 2022. It could 100x from here - or die a slow death by a thousand cuts.

It’s hard to keep track of everything. New narratives are constantly forming.

And most coins won’t touch their all-time highs again.

But that’s what we’re here for. As summer evolves, we’ll keep you up to date on everything that actually matters.

In the meantime, have a great week everyone.