⛽ Exit pump

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If only the US government hadn’t shut down. Maybe then we might’ve already had some brand-new ETFs.

Although not all ETFs are created equal. Litecoin and hedera ETFs are said to be close to debuts, but I wouldn’t expect the market to respond with as much long-term enthusiasm as bitcoin and ether funds, or the potential solana and XRP ones, for that matter.

That doesn’t rule out the most entertaining (and most likely) outcome of all:

Crypto’s most hated rally.

😡 You hate to see it

Yesterday, tier-one Ethereum bull Tom Lee labeled the ongoing run for stocks “the most hated V-shaped rally.”

That's on account of the sidelined investors and analysts who were skeptical that the AI boom would keep the stock market plowing on after the S&P 500 dipped 17% at the end of Q1. 

The S&P 500 is now up by almost a third since then, and bitcoin by close to 60%. 

Crypto’s most hated rally is different. It’s a more guttural thing around here. The coins that we individually hate, for whatever reason it may be, are probably different. 

Maybe it has something to do with crypto's tribal nature. Or that most of the lore for the past decade or so has been written through the abject cesspool that is Crypto Twitter. 

Either way, you’d be hard-pressed to find even the most level-headed investor, analyst, researcher, journalist or podcaster that didn’t secretly detest one coin or another.

My hypothesis: We are headed towards something that will look very similar to altcoin season upfront. But it won’t be exactly what it seems.

Zcash was the canary in the coal mine. There was no real reason for ZEC to go 3x in a matter of days, beyond Gainzy liking the chart setup and timely bull posts from Naval, Chris Burniske, Mert and others. But it did.

1000x podcast host Avi Felman recently said something similar. Zcash’s privacy tech may be powerful (and valuable for a multitude of reasons), but Felman didn’t see “why the world would suddenly wake up to this and start going, ‘Oh my god, we really need some zcash right now.’

“But what it tells you, and me, and the audience about the zeitgeist of the moment…is ‘Wow, maybe things are about to get…’ — remember when four or five weeks ago, I was talking about how things in the final leg get insane. It’s stuff like this, and this is probably the beginning of the insanity.”

You might say that BNB’s monster 50% move since the start of September, from $880 to over $1,300 on the back of CZ’s influence (both on X and through DAT funding) lines up with that thesis.

And depending on how your gut feels about BNB Chain, maybe that falls under your own personal most hated rally framework.

(FWIW, when I wrote about crypto’s most hated rally around a year into the current bull market, that piece counted solana, luna, FTT, BAYC and pet rock NFTs, among others.)

Here’s the thing: perhaps all the coins you love to hate will start pumping. But it’s more likely that they’re simply reverting back to the mean. 

It’s easy to forget that bitcoin has drastically outperformed most other coins at the top end of the market over the entire cycle to date. Which means bitcoin ratios for almost all top-50 coins are down significantly, many since even the top of the last bull market in late 2021 and, for some, the bull market before that.

Of course, that only really matters for anyone who might have roundtripped — they could’ve held bitcoin instead and made huge gains. 

In those cases, this isn’t so much an impending altcoin season as it is an exit pump that’s long overdue.

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