Portfolio MoM: +9.6%
Portfolio YTD: +71.3%

BTC MoM: + 11.3%
BTC YTD: +61.6%

Roundtrip season

Wasn’t cognisant of it while going through it, but my biggest mistake of the month was holding on to the belief that we’ll start to see the golden bull run once BTC flipped $67K. This implicit bias caused me to hold on to my bags for too long and roundtrip.

I went heavy in AI bags pre-NVDA earnings. Earnings was bullish. I held. Twas the top.

I started meme wallet on Sol did a clean 5x by rotating from one meta to the next. Bled all the way down below original stack.

Musical chairs is a tough game to play. I want to hold on to some cycle-long bags but how the cycle has played out so far is showing that the only real “long term bags” you can hold are BTC. Personally also can’t find the conviction in anything in this market right now. Probably too jaded & need to reset myself.

As BTC continues to hover in the 60K range, this seems to be the most pertinent question at the moment. I see three possibilities:

I. We’ve topped for the cycle & we’re now in complacency -- “we just need to cool off for the next rally”. This means that we’re going to slow bleed back into the next bear market lows.

The lack of excitement around the tech after BTC breaking ATHs shows an apathy towards crypto. We’ve reached an equilibrium on money entering the space -- those who want to deploy have deployed, and those who want to stay away will continue to stay away. This will lead to time-based capitulation and attrition until the space matures further.

II. We’re going (so much) higher, we’re now in consolidation / bear trap / media attention territory.

Celebrities are launching memecoins, institutions are buying our bags, and crypto is being mentioned in political debates. These are signs that we’re building up towards the fabled “parabolic portion of the bull run”.

III. The last possibility, which I’ll just mention for completeness, is that we’re in a long supercycle (what a cursed word).

We’re in a new paradigm now & we can throw our mental models for 4-year cycles out the window. There will no longer be cycle tops and bottoms, and we’ll see something more like a slow burn up as the world accepts crypto as a new asset class.

It’s easy to get lost in the chop and lose sight of the big picture. Assign reasonable probabilities to each potential outcome and use that as a guiding light to your decision making in this chop.

Personally, I think each possibility has merits. Gun to my head, this is what I think:

I. 23%
II. 69%
III. 7%
IV. None of the above 1%

Given this, I should be largely bullish with a tinge of caution that it’s over. This is a helpful exercise for me to regain my bearings especially since I’ve been overwhelmed by my feelings of jaded-ness recently.

The toughest mental hurdle for me has been the lack of excitement around crypto. A big part of why I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole is because I loved what it stood for. I genuinely believed it was the future.

But in this cycle, we’ve recycled the same few narratives over and over and I think we’ve finally reached saturation.

https://x.com/LomahCrypto/status/1796388122063933618

https://x.com/lBattleRhino/status/1797004384896684423

To recap, we’ve gone through

• Memes (pepe)

• Gamble (RLB)

• TG bots (Unibot)

• Social (FT)

• Memes again (BITCOIN, SPX6900, JOE)

• Modular (TIA)

• Solana

• AI (TAO)

• Memes again (Bonk, WIF)

• Gaming (in smol, ILV SHRAP PRIME)

• DeSci (in smol)

• BTC eco

• Memes again

• AI again

• BTC eco again (runes)

• Memes again

• Social again (Ton, Degen, FT 2.0 & Friend)

• Memes again

• AI again (NVDIA earnings top)

• ETH ETF

• Memes again

• BTC eco again (in smol)

*not in chronological order & missing some stuff literally writing off the top of my head

The more times we rotate back to the same narratives, the less energy it has left. Each time we reuse a narrative without a “real catalyst” the game shifts from new & fresh to old, tiresome. It’s not just the fact that majors like BTC & ETH not making new highs = less money in the space pumping the coins. But also that we lack new narratives, or hopium, to smoke.

In this arena, the players are evolving faster than the game. This wasn’t the case in cycles past. It feels like there were much more 0-1 advancements in the money game, while this time we’re only getting better tooling and more of the same thing.

In the macro sense, if this doesn’t change, I think crypto will lose in the broader attention landscape. Perhaps that’s why we’re failing to attract new capital despite hovering near ATHs.

I’m not sure how this will play out. This is the main reason I think that we’ll get a more conservative “mania” (lol) this time if this continues. I also don’t like that there’s a sense of entitlement that we’re all somehow going to become rich from this cycle while most BTC holders are in profit at this level.

This train of thought will keep me grounded as we progress into the final innings.

Many of the top signals in past cycles are now happening mid-cycle. I believe its a natural function of the space maturing and it no longer being “early” for crypto anymore.

I believe we’re traversing the early-late majority chasm. Most, if not all, people have been exposed to crypto in some way after last cycle. Until we see crypto’s killer app (if we ever see it), I think it’ll remain as an alternative financial asset class.

I think it’ll take some time before we have a chance at real mass adoption, assuming all this experimentation amounts to something.

Right now I’m working through my own disillusionment with the space. I’ve considered taking everything I’ve made so far to the bank and leave happy knowing I’ve made a few years’ worth of salaries -- enough.

I’m at this weird spot where I’m still far from the goal that I started out with, but at the same time having achieved my goal of funding the next few years of exploration and the unknown in my life. It’s a lot less than the numbers I hear being thrown around in this space, but I’m happy to have been lucky enough to get here.

Somehow I can’t seem to walk away. I’ve taken a decent chunk out to cash (never to be re-deployed in crypto), and I’m tempted to keep playing. Somehow it’s no longer about the money. It’s almost like I want to see whether I can actually achieve something that I set out to do, because I don’t think I really believed that I could when I began.

Still working this out. Being stuck in the middle is definitely the worst of both worlds.