What's up everybody, this is Thomas Bahamas and we're back with another episode of Solana Weekly. Not the week I expected, with talks of the beginning of the bull last week, ETF released, and the market reacts by viciously dumping. We'll dig into why that happened and what else we have going on in these times of acceleration on Solana.
Sol Price: 86.12 - with a crash down to $78
SolEth: .03891 with a crash down to .035
SolBTC: .002167 with a crash below .00205.
Overall market sentiment: you look at this last week and we went from over $100 Solana down over 20% and think that this must be a bad trend. My friends, we must simply zoom out. On September 30th, we were below $20. Yes that's 4 months ago, we were 1/4th of the price of today. We're still in an up trend and a shake up in the market isn't unheard of. I remain bullish, kind of caught off guard, but bullish. You can never expect a pull back, but they come. The only person that seems to have seen this was our man Chris Burniske. Freaking oracle of a man, called the top basically.
The etf was in fact a sell the news event. But probably not for simply that reason. I think a lot of it has to do with GBTC and them relentlessly dumping hundreds of millions of BTC. This is a trust with a significant portion of the supply that was locked up and basically frozen in a shitty product. It was at a discount for the last few years, and had a 2% annual fee on it. A lot of the holders of this have held it for years and are in signifcant profit. One of the holders was Alameda that dumped over 1 Billion worth. When we get away from the fraud of the Sam's, I just don't know. But we are starting to see those flows slow down and a lot of them flow into the other "big 9" is what Eric Balhunas keeps talking about. The net is positive, so overall more buys than GBTC sales, but it's pretty daunting when you see a 600 million dollar transfer from Barry to Coinbase. This will slow down, and the access to BTC through a direct ETF is net positive and will be bullish for our bags, it's just not immediate. They have sent a total of 93,700 btc, or 3.85 billion since the etf was passed, still holding 519,399 btc or 20.84 billion. So these are very large numbers. Crazy that Bitcoin peaked at 49k and only dropped 10k to 39 from all that. Amazing amount of absorption of that dump.
Other catalyst's: people much smarter than me are saying that China is doing a ton of Quantitative Easing based on a lot of the sanctions and financial warfare that Biden has been using to weaken their economy. This has in turn led to a large amount of purchasing of American stocks and bonds pumping the Stock market to new ATH's. I believe they are looking at banning short selling as well.
Presidential campaign: Biden has to pump the bags in order to get re-elected or put some sort of positive spin on his political party.
To the happenings of the Solana market:
Paypal releasing their stablecoin on Solana. I see huge potential here, almost like a way to back into using crypto through traditional rails. Think pay with paypal, but you use their stablecoin. Use those couple hundred dollars you have sitting on Venmo to send direct to your crypto wallet. You can do that with Eth now, but I’m suspecting that you can do this with Solana soon and this could be the start of something big.
Drift releasing token/ points
Jupuary madness keeps going - mock jup
Tensor- nft perps or something like it. Sujiko warriors also launched from the same guy that launched the solana airdrop checker.
NFTs - both misunderstood and undervalued per the man himself - loomdart:
man i could rant about this for hours but people are so obsessed with every part of an NFT that somehow links to the realworld (branding, ip, gaming) but forget that predominantly all an NFT is is a collection of addresses that own a specific item (or a range of specific items) and iwo thats incredibly fucking potent, its the greatest social graph imaginable thats fully onchain and decentralised anyone can utilise and target it
in a more and more digital environment and economy with more and more shit going onchain this is so fucking valuable
there is no more crypto native thing imaginable
Helium just launched in Mexico with a huge partnership. Is this getting to mass scale? I think so.
Meme coin’s aren’t going anywhere, I tried to fade most but i actually just think they are going to crush now. Some of my fav are the Stanley cup, bib, Wif - the dog has a hat.
Bsktfi is something I’m kind of obsessed with right now as well, Solana, Eth, BTC and the latest meme tokens of Solana all backed in one token with insane farming incentives. Seems like a lot of chads are in it, still need to do more research, but I’m in.
Wallet talk - Backpack has been putting in some work and it’s performance is excellent. We’ve seen a on of activity on Solana and honestly it felt like things were lagging, I actually think what happened was that it was Phantom. Phantom has been slacking and has been acting slow af. I love phantom and it got me excited about Solana, but it’s not the top of the pack anymore. I think the experience on Backpack, the ability to lock your nft’s, the quickness in setting up a ledger is far superior. I also will gladly shout out to Solflare, they added servers when they noticed congestion, and the wallet is a delight. Powerful, easy to connect ledger to, quick, I actually think that both Backpack and Solflare’s focus on Solana has paid off. Phantom went super multi chain and has kind of fallen off. We need it to up it’s game or it’s going to offer a shit experience when we need to offer the best experience. Because of this I’m actually recommending backpack and solflare as the go to wallets now. Test them out, they are fantastic.
I think this will be a continued theme, there is no resting on your laurels in web3 and just because you were at the top does not mean that you will stay there. Teams move fast, users move fast, and crypto is true capitalism. Let’s look at Magic Eden, a titan. It took out all the other marketplaces for NFT’s on Solana. Then it (along with phantom) went multichain and stopped innovating. Tensor came along and offered a far superior product and now they are eating their lunch. Magic Eden is now fighting back with a rewards program and an airdrop of their NFT token. I’m going to claim what I can, but logging into Magic Eden feels like logging into AOL or an old ass bank site. We’ll see how they do, but this is fierce competition where they were the dominant player with over a billion valuation and Tensor was two cracked devs out of Canada that absolutely nuked them.
As a user in this market it’s an amazing time. Big protocols are fighting for retention of our business and finding ways to reward us for doing so. One of the reasons I started this podcast was for this reason, I thought that the user experience for Solana was simply unmatched. I could complain about an issue on Twitter and get something resolved. Early on in Jupiter’s early days I had a few transactions not go through and made some comment on Twitter about it. I had someone reach out directly within like 10 minutes to give transaction id’s to figure it out. Looking back it’s a no brainer that they were going to dominate. I had better access to any dev on any protocol than I had at my web 2 job haha. I felt like no one was talking about this and it was so unique to anything I had experienced before. Got me excited and hooked me, and I get pumped up to talk about it every week, so thank you for joining in and let’s see where this next week takes us.
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