My Crypto Ideas for 2024

Crystal ball gazing

Welcome to the alpha please newsletter.

Happy new year to you all! I hope you had a great holiday period and are ready to get right back to it in 2024. I figured I would fire out some thoughts for the year. This was a valuable exercise for myself, just to try and consolidate some thinking.

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I think 2024 will be a bullish year for the crypto markets overall. We have macro tailwinds (more liquidity, rates coming down + election year usually strong for markets), the BTC Halvening, imminent approval of the Bitcoin Spot ETF and the strong possibility an ETH Spot ETF could follow. Whilst I do think we have evidence of retail investors returning to the market, the majority still haven’t realized that crypto hasn’t died and that will happen gradually, then all at once, probably once BTC has broken ATHs.

These aren’t predictions, they are just ideas. I like ideas because they are more malleable and can change/adapt as more data becomes available. Plenty of theses will be invalidated during the year.

Worth bearing in mind that leaders tend to keep leading in a bull market, and you don’t really want to get stuck in coins that are lagging. Of course you want to have outside bets or may want to allocate to new tokens that launch mid bull, but largely speaking, the market has told you who the winners of the cycle will be, you just need to pay attention.

It should go without saying that I have no crystal ball and none of this is financial advice. I could get everything wrong, I am but a humble retail investor.

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Bitcoin

I’m of the opinion that BTC breaks ATH this year. I lean towards it happening in Q3/Q4. I would prefer for it to happen later in the year rather than Q1, as that would make me concerned that the cycle may top sooner and I would likely have to adjust my own selling timeline.

I do think the flows from the BTC Spot ETF will eventually have a huge effect on this asset class. I spoke about the impact of even a small % of US pension flows in this tweet.

The time is now right for financial advisors to put forward this spot product to their clients and suggest 1-2% of their portfolio be allocated. I would go so far as to say that any financial advisor that doesn’t make that suggestion will be on the hook should BTC go up 100-200% in the coming years. You can bet that each ETF owner will be doing everything they can to take as much market share as possible. Nobody wants their ETF to be dead.

Taking a look at the yearly chart reveals the four year cycle pattern.

Interestingly, 2023 was a much more bullish candle than 2019, which caught a lot of people off guard who were thinking that things would perfectly repeat. Cycles rhyme, but they aren’t exactly the same each time.

The other fascinating development with Bitcoin is the rise of actual activity on the network through Ordinals, L2s and BRC-20s. Bitcoin is now regularly doing more in fees than any other blockchain. This should add even more fuel to the fire in 2024, as people acquire BTC to take part in these new forms of speculation. We didn’t have this in the last cycle for Bitcoin so it is a major change and adds additional bid for BTC.

I should also say that I think we may get a ‘sell the news’ event on the actual launch of the ETFs, not approval. It seems that everyone who wanted to de-risk should have done so already, so a ‘sell the news’ on approval does seem less likely. This would probably be the last big dip you can buy before further up.

There is no avoiding the big Q1 dip after the run we have had.

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Ethereum + L2s

Ethereum had a tough time in 2023, but it is still the second largest crypto by marketcap, has a ton of catalysts in 2024 and should have a much better year. I think it will break ATH and outperform BTC.

The most obvious catalyst would be the market turning its head towards an ETH Spot ETF after the BTC Spot launch is done. Basically, re-run the ETF play again.

EIP 4844 will reduce L2 costs. We should see much more L2 activity as it becomes cheaper to transact. This will also lead to an explosion in L2 launches, as many have been waiting for this to happen before going live. However, I don’t think costs will come down as much as people are hoping they will.

The Ethereum brand is still huge, and many will simply passively buy the second biggest crypto because of the trust in this brand. If you walked down the street and asked random people which cryptocurrencies they have heard of, it’s almost guaranteed that you get the answer Bitcoin, and Ethereum as the second answer from the majority.

One of the most exciting catalysts should come later in the year with the launch of EigenLayer. Yield is probably still Ethereum’s biggest narrative. And re-staking your ETH to get juicy yield is going to be very, very attractive.

More detail about EigenLayer and strategy for that here:

The fears around re-staking are well documented by a lot of people, but this industry likes leverage upon leverage, or capital efficiency, if you will.

There are so many L2s now that it is impossible to keep up, and there will be opportunities for outperformance, but it’s not that easy to pick winners.

ARB and OP are the obvious two to bid, but you have some focusing on driving value in different ways, such as Mantle (MNT), who currently have the highest ETH yield in mETH (good ticker) and they have a billion dollar treasury to incentivise users.

I think there will be a StarkNet season once STARK launches. It’s probably the least Ethereum aligned L2 and an L2 worth spending some time airdrop farming on. A lot of good apps over there.

Particularly bullish on Eclipse as well - SVM on the EVM. Eclipse will be the cheapest L2 and also allows Rust developers to easily launch their apps to the EVM. Would try and get exposure to that when I can.

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Solana

Solana looks to be following what ETH did last cycle. It is my chosen major to denominate in this cycle. It had an incredible 2023, and will do well again this year, whilst not outperforming to quite the same extent, as it isn’t as contrarian anymore. I still think that Solana ends the year at 250-300. Solana really has endless catalysts still to come.

The recovery from sub 20 to finish the 2023 at triple digits was truly astonishing, but less so to those who had been using the chain throughout the year and didn’t fall for the “FTX are gonna dump this to zero bro” fud.

Solana is now doing more DEX volume and NFT volume than Ethereum on high time frames and this isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.

TLDR of catalysts.

In the short term, the liquidity injection from JUP should propel SOL further in Q1. Selling JUP acts as a natural bid for SOL, as a lot of people sell into SOL, which is what they denominate in. And this should be 1B of stimmies dropped to Solana users.

Mostly expecting Solana to continue to follow this timeline:

Phantom is probably the most user friendly wallet for new users and that should also ensure that Solana is the fastest growing chain by new users, as superior UX (easy to use/quick/cheap) matters.

Solana also likely still has a lot of eco alts that reprice relative to Ethereum. New launches like MRGN, KMNO & Tensor could be attractive opportunities depending on starting valuations. I also suspect we get a few large EVM apps launch on Solana this year.

I actually do expect Solana will have an outage in 2024, and that will be a good dip worth buying.

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Alt ideas

Just going to fire some random ideas at you.

Celestia

TIA is a new shiny coin that should act as an L2 scaling bid. As more L2s launch it becomes harder for the average crypto participant to decipher which L2 token they should buy, TIA is the easy asset for this L2 exposure, as 100s of rollups will end up using Celestia for DA. I also think staking TIA will return quite well with airdrops from projects using Celestia. That should make it an attractive asset with less downside as a result. TIA also has no unlocks until late 2024.

Dymension have already announced an airdrop for those that have been staking TIA. They utilize it for DA. Another project for your watchlist. Dymension standardizes rollups with IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol), similar to how tokens were standardized with ERC. RollApps are a new crypto primitive offering the rollup business model along with speed and scale under one unified experience

Alt L1s

The alt L1 trade seemingly never dies. As we are still in the early innings for blockchain technology then it makes sense that we continue to see speculation on future winning systems. Maybe that will change in the future, but I expect a number of alt L1s to do well again in 2024.

I think AVAX, INJ, SEI & KUJI will all continue to trend up.

Parallelized EVM should be a very strong narrative for a portion of 2024. You can already see SEI is moving as a result of that. People want to bid Monad, but can’t so SEI should get that bid for a while. Monad will be a big launch and depending on its starting valuation could be a good play.

Chainlink

I have written a ton of things in the past about Chainlink. A good thesis for LINK in 2024 “is that it is a 100x out of the money call option” on huge TradFi institutions utilizing CCIP. I don’t know when this all kicks off because banks do tend to move slow. The evidence is there, but timing is tricky. The below tweet is a very good explanation for why having an allocation to LINK in 2024 is a smart move and good crypto portfolio strategy.

Gaming

Prime

Gaming as a category will be a big winner. I am most bullish on PRIME, which is the token of Parallel’s ecosystem. Not only is the TCG very good, and one of the most impressive web3 games, but they also have Colony, which creates a new type of game utilising AI. It has obvious viral potential if they execute. So far everything from this team has been stellar execution.

There are also a ton of Parallel NFTs that can give you increased exposure. I personally like Parallel Avatars which will be used in Colony.

Smol thesis here.

Atlas & Polis

Star Atlas is one of the most exciting web3 games live today. It still has a long way to go, but the last time I looked in-game transactions were like 10% of all Solana daily activity. The quality and ambition of Star Atlas is very high. The game won’t likely be fully finished for years, but you can play versions of it now. The governance token of the game (POLIS) is sitting at around 100M market cap and looks like a decent gaming bet for the cycle should gaming truly go vertical. You can also speculate on the in-game token (ATLAS) rising based on demand as new players onboard, but the more passive bet is POLIS.

Treeverse

2024 is finally the year that Treeverse releases. This has been in development for a few years. I’m super bullish on the studio executing this + Loopify knows exactly what is required for a web3 game to hit the mark. Treeverse plot NFTs and Timeless avatars are ways to get exposure in advance. Treeverse should be one of the first big crypto mobile games to land.

DePin

Overall I’m very bullish on DePin as a category for 2024.

The Render Network is the first decentralized GPU rendering platform, empowering artists to scale GPU rendering work on-demand to high performance GPU Nodes around the world. RNDR could best be described as tokenized compute.

If you believe that we are entering into a world where AI leads to exponential growth in demand for compute, whilst having a shortage in GPUs, then having a network that can meet this demand would probably be tremendously valuable. RNDR is the token of this network and I think 2024 could be a breakout year for the Render Network.

Io.net offers Instant, permissionless access to a global network of GPUs and CPUs. io.net Cloud is a state-of-the-art decentralized computing network that allows machine learning engineers to access distributed Cloud clusters at a small fraction of the cost of comparable centralized services. No token yet, but should be on your watchlist. Built on Solana.

Helium mobile (HNT & MOBILE) might be the first successful non-speculative crypto use case that actually benefits a normal person in the real world. Anyone in the US can buy a Helium mobile package and pay $20 per month instead of $100+ per month which is the average contract cost in the US. We are seeing some really impressive adoption metrics and the incentive system flywheel is fully kicking in.

Teleport - Uber on the blockchain has been one of the use cases that the industry used to parrot to naysayers as what was possible with this technology. Well, Teleport finally makes this a reality. It is a ride sharing protocol launched on Solana. There is no token yet, but it was one of the most impressive talks I listened to at Breakpoint and I will be following it closely in 2024.

AI

TAO is the crypto AI leader by market cap (not including RNDR, which overlaps with the AI narrative). It has a cult-like following and dev community, and decentralised AI is a simple enough narrative, which is deserving of an allocation in this bull. I will let smarter folks debate the merits of Bittensor. Fundamentals take a backward step to narrative/stories in a bull market. And decentralized AI is a hell of a story.

OLAS is possibly the strongest second option for exposure to the AI narrative. Autonolas is a decentralized network of autonomous AI agents.

NFTs

This is further out on the risk curve. I’m certainly no NFT expert and am not really in the trenches with them, but I think NFTs boom again in 2024. I’m mostly exposed to major SOL NFT collections as I figured they would grow versus ETH NFTs.

I fancy Mad Lads to be the BAYC of this cycle and should get you the Backpack token at some point + additional ecosystem airdrops. Tensorians (Tensor airdrop), Claynosaurz (IP has mainstream appeal imo) and Quekz should all grow in SOL and USD terms. They should maintain their position as dominant collections on Solana. I also think many of these collections will continue to be included in airdrops.

I think generative art starts to take off on Solana as well, but will not make any picks there!

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Thanks for reading and would be happy to hear of any ideas you guys may have in the comments. I really hope you all have a great 2024!

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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Crypto currencies are very risky assets and you can lose all of your money. Do your own research.