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If you find yourself tempted to over-trade, now’s the perfect time to pick up a hobby.

How about disc golf. Or archery. There’s also always video games, magic tricks and stamp collecting — all of which are supposedly more attractive than crypto. Not that it really matters.

Whatever you can do to distract yourself from the existential doom that would come if bitcoin doesn’t stick this bounce, now that the tariffs war has died down for now.

Meanwhile:

• HYPE and MANTRA are by far the best performers on the front page this week, up 30% and 12% apiece.

• Ethereum is just 1,409 ETH ($4 million) shy of flipping inflationary since the Merge, which could happen in less than a day.

• USDC minted an additional $1 billion overnight, bringing it close to all-time high supply.

🍽️ The secret ingredient

Altcoin season might never return.

At least, not how you know them. It may be that the next altcoin season will be more of an altcoin glow-up. 

No more aping into random buzzy coins and turning a profit by the bull market top. Only a dozen or so high quality projects might give massive returns — coins with sensible tokenomics, realistic narratives and few enough vested interests that normal people stand to benefit early on.

How depressing.

I have an alternative theory: altcoin season is destined to return at size, purely because “crime season” is inevitable.

There’s been an uptick in calls for crime season since SEC chair Gensler stepped aside and Trump was elected, at least in my particular algorithm, with the phrase now effectively a substitute for “do whatever you like, as long as it directly benefits you and me.”

Crime season is not exactly exclusive to crypto. But in crypto specifically, it’s a return to peak degen behavior, as Virtuals agent AIXBT put it, whereby the name of the game is to make the number go up at all costs, even illegally. 

Defining “altcoin season" was fairly straightforward — comparing growth in altcoins versus bitcoin gives us three distinct altcoin seasons since 2016. The most recent one ended at the top of the November 2021 bull run, so we’re well overdue.

Crime seasons are less mathematical. They instead hinge on major news stories that symbolize the overall market vibe that gave cover to outright criminal enterprise.

The chart below plots crime seasons against altcoin seasons over the past decade or so. 

Grey shaded areas in the back show the market capitalization of crypto. Altcoin and crime seasons are represented by the colored bands.

Pink is for crime season, blue is for altcoin season, and purple shows where the two overlap — when crime season and altcoin season are happening at the same time.

The beginnings and ends of crime seasons are highlighted by the red lines. As you can see, there have been two separate — but huge — seasons of criminality in the past decade.

It’s a broad-brush approach, but to my eye, crypto’s first major crime season started when the first-and-best crypto ponzi BitConnect launched in February 2016.

The season eventually melded with Ethereum ICO mania and ran until April 2018, when the Feds came for the founders of Centra, the mostly-phony financial services crypto startup which raised $25 million. QuadrigaCX founder Gerald Cotten disappeared around eight months later.

The second crime season otherwise began when Sam Bankman-Fried founded FTX in 2019 — a domino that topped over into NFT bubbles, DeFi Summer, ransomware and flash loan attacks, as well as dog coin frenzies. 

Perhaps the greatest crime season to date, it all ended with the arrest of the Mango Markets hacker, Avi “profitable trading strategy” Eisenberg, in Puerto Rico on Boxing Day 2022.

Notice that on the chart, altcoin season has always happened alongside crime season, barring just a few months in 2019. In fact, the two largest altcoin seasons in crypto history occurred smack bang in the middle of crime season. 

The good news: crime season is pre-programmed. Humans always find a way to do crime (imagine what autonomous agents will do). So maybe altcoin season is equally likely.

The bad news: Crime season is inevitable.

— David

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Get ready — Unichain is launching soon!

Designed to be the home for DeFi and liquidity across chains, Unichain is an L2 that will launch with 95% lower transaction fees than Ethereum L1 — and will soon offer blazing-fast 250ms block times for near-instant transactions. As part of the Optimism Superchain, Unichain is built for interoperability and will support ERC-7683 for seamless cross-chain transactions beyond the Superchain.

Stay in the loop — visit Unichain.org and follow @Unichain on X for updates!

• Please, please, please let banks custody crypto, Coinbase begged. In letters seen by Bloomberg, the exchange is asking regulators to let banks offer crypto services.

• There’s a new partnership in town: Galaxy and BitGo are offering staking services despite their history. 

• ZachXBT has a new deep dive for us: Some Coinbase users are experiencing restricted accounts because social engineering scams are making off with millions of dollars.

🛣 Crypto’s crossroads

Blockworks’ head of research, Ryan Connor, thinks that we’re at a “crossroads” with fundamentals in crypto. 

“It's because the marginal investor coming into crypto as a result of legalizing crypto in the United States is going to be a traditional financial professional, not a degen,” he told me.

It can be boiled down to either the amount of market participants or those who control the capital. Both of these lead to the same outcome: Folks who want to see fundamental value in tokens.

“A lot of people in crypto still believe the primary driver of token price is ‘vibes.’ There’s ample evidence over the past, let’s say 18 months, that that’s increasingly not true,” he explained. That doesn’t mean that vibe trading isn’t a thing — and probably will still linger for a while yet — but those will remain in smaller pockets of the market, like memecoins. 

When you have scenarios of a “silly” token soaring and then crashing, it opens the door for fundamentals to play a bigger part as crypto matures. 

“Most token projects are early-stage, and because there's some opacity around governance models, we tend to just look at the top line first. As a general rule in TradFi, the earlier stage the project, the more you care about the top-line fundamentals as opposed to the bottom-line fundamentals. If you’re a high-growth tech company, you’re looking at sales growth, you’re looking at the [average revenue per user], and rate of change on those metrics,” Connor said.

Other fundamentals to look at, depending on the project, would be earnings, cash flows and dividend yields. For the most part, the TradFi metrics carried over will reflect what we see in high-growth tech firms. 

Right now, though, revenue is “probably the most important thing today,” and then you can pick and choose other metrics to apply depending on the token. 

One thing’s for sure: There’ll always be a place for vibes in crypto, but adding in metrics to monitor the success of a project only levels crypto up. 

— Katherine

From macroeconomic shifts to the evolving role of crypto in global markets, Mohamed El-Erian brings decades of financial expertise to the stage. Mike Novogratz, one of the earliest institutional investors in digital assets, unpacks what’s next for the space. And Anatoly Yakovenko, the mind behind Solana, breaks down how high-performance blockchains are shaping the future of finance.

DAS NYC is where the real conversations happen — no hype, just sharp insights from the people driving digital assets forward.

📅 March 18-20 | NYC

On our mind: Volatility