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OVERVIEW

Alt-pocalypse? 🤔 

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

Source: Santiment

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

Source: TradingView

NEWS
THE END IS NIGH 😱 

Depending on how long you’ve been in the crypto space, headlines like the ones below that pop up with increased frequency often hint at a bottom coming in soon. 🧠 

The doom scrolling headlines over the past week continue to grow. 🪴

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Crypto News 📰

🚀 Justin Sun Goes “Gas-Free”

Next week, Tron will let USDT transactions skip the usual TRX gas fees. Sun wants big companies to adopt stablecoins without worrying about transaction costs, and he’s eyeing Ethereum and other EVM chains for future expansions. CryptoBriefing.

🚨 Zilliqa’s X-Bridge Exploit

Hackers minted bridged ETH and BNB without locking real tokens, netting about 531 zETH and 2.2 zBNB. Zilliqa paused everything, told ZilSwap to shut off zETH trading, and is launching a new token contract. If you accidentally bought the compromised tokens, you might be out of luck unless you contact them. Zilliqa.

🔥 DeFi: Rebooting Capitalism

DeFi’s making markets open and trustless, giving everyone a shot at the table—no more old-school gatekeepers hogging the chips. But big regulators like the IRS are nosing in, threatening that “wild west” vibe with new reporting rules by 2027. If DeFi can strike a balance between freedom and compliance, it might just revive capitalism’s original spirit. Cointelegraph.

🥷 Ethereum Foundation’s Exec Director Shifts Gears

Aya Miyaguchi is stepping down as Executive Director to become President, hopinh for bigger institutional outreach. Vitalik Buterin hinted at a leadership revamp after the community griped about Ethereum’s competitiveness and scaling delays. Now the EF gets a fresh structure—let’s see if it calms the critics or stirs another round of drama. Bankless.

SPONSORED
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Next to dogecoin and Shiba Inu, there was $PepeCoin in 2016, cementing itself as one of the earliest memecoins in existence.

PepeCoin has much to offer and with even more to come, it is re-envisioning what it means to be “just a meme-coin”. While memes are good value drivers and do maintain culturally relevancy, many tokens which solely rely on this trait alone.

PepeCoin, a cryptocurrency ecosystem that’s equal parts meme-fueled madness and cutting-edge, disruptive tech.

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*3rd Party Ad. Not an offer or recommendation by Stocktwits. See disclosure here. 

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
Years Of Pain For 30 Days Of Pleasure, For Even More Pain 🤕 

Ever wonder why crypto traders and investors are so resilient? They endure endless pain for brief moments of joy—only to be thrown back into the cycle of suffering again. 🩹 

Polkadot

DOTUSD Monthly Chart – Click to enlarge.

It’s been 3.25 years since DOT made a new all-time high, but returning to $11.88 in March 2024, things looked good. But eight months of sliding lower and lower was painful. Then last November: boom, a +126% gain.

But since then, nothing buy a slow slide south. Painful? Yes? Normal? Yes? On the bright side, Polkadot is doing better than its peers.

Cosmos

ATOMUSD Monthly Chart – Click to enlarge.

Similar psychological situation for the bulls on ATOM’s chart. The November 2024 rally and close was an eight month high. But that month of hope didn’t wiped out the pain that Cosmos hodlers have faced for nearly four years.

To add insult to injury, the joy of November’s gains have been wiped out. And if things don’t improve over the next three days, the February 2025 close could be a new 4.5year low.

Avalanche

AVAXUSD Monthly Chart – Click to enlarge.

Pretty much the same story here. AVAX has already wiped out all of the November 2024 gains. And now, unless something changes over the next three days, February 2024 will be the lowest close in 14 months. 

Tezos

XTZUSD Monthly Chart – Click to enlarge.

November 2024 was both a 26-month high and the best performing month in XTZ’s history. But the hopes of more upside movement have been slowly crushed. -60% over the last three months.

Mina Protocol

MINAUSD Monthly Chart – Click to enlarge.

I really don’t know how much needs to be said about this shit show. A double whammy of all-time lows and, probably, the lowest monthly close ever on track. 

It’s a blood bath out there – but it’s a bath crypto traders and investors are used to. 🛀 

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
Some Interesting Price Action Developing This Afternoon 🧠 

Remember the dominant interior trendline that we’ve been looking at since April-ish of 2024?

BTCUSD Daily Chart – Click to enlarge.

Bitcoin closed and remains below it. But that’s not what I find interesting. It’s this:

BTC Dominance Chart (Daily) – Click to enlarge.

Bitcoin’s dominance chart has basically performed a 180-degree move from yesterday. 

And, finally, the altcoin market cap (excluding BTC and ETH) is out performing the total market cap by 310% today.

Total Market Cap (TOTAL), Altcoin Market Cap (TOTAL2), Altcoin Market Cap (Excluding BTC and ETH, TOTAL3) – Click to enlarge.

Was the broader crypto breakout lower just a major fakeout? Altseason soon? Wen Moon? Let’s see how the last few days of February behave. 👀 

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

🔥 Tenamint On SKALE: Sports Fandom Goes Gas-Free

Tenamint just launched on SKALE, letting fans flex their sports knowledge by predicting outcomes in NBA, NFL, MLB, and more. No gambling, no crazy gas fees—just good ol’ “Pick’em” style. Since SKALE is gasless, you won’t kill your wallet making a million prop bets. SKALE.

🤖 MetisVM: Prepping AI for Blockchain

Metis is rolling out a brand-new, pumped-up virtual machine that wants to handle AI workloads on chain without frying your GPU. It’s EVM-compatible but with tweaks like parallel execution, JIT compilation, and state caching. Bottom line: they want to turn AI + blockchain from a hype phrase into something that actually runs at scale. Metis.

📡 GraphTally: Micropayment Channels For Machines

The Graph handles millions of queries daily, but paying indexers individually on-chain is insane. Enter GraphTally, a trust-minimized “one-way channel” system that lumps thousands of micropayments into a single ECDSA verification. That means near-zero overhead and easy on-chain settlement. If you’re building unstoppable machine-to-machine data pipelines, you need something like this. The Graph.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, and Lending Protocol News 🏦

🤑 Astar’s dApp Staking

Astar is letting you stake tokens on specific dApps you love, giving you yields while devs get a continuous drip of funding. Think of it like crowdfunding with direct token flows. Stakers get passive rewards, devs don’t starve, and the Astar ecosystem avoids the typical reliance on big VC backers. Everybody wins. Astar.

🔐 WonderFi’s ZK Chain & Wallet

WonderFi hopped onto ZKsync’s Elastic Network to drop its own L2 chain and an easy-peasy wallet. By harnessing zero-knowledge tech, they say newbies can do DeFi stuff without dealing with gas tokens or being forced to memorize 12 seed words. It’s “freemium,” so expect no-cost basics, plus optional paid features for heavy DeFi degens. ZKsync.

⚙️ Chainlink Build & Scale: Dev & Chain Love

Chainlink’s ramping up “Build” to help devs and “Scale” to supercharge blockchains—fostering a synergy they call “the Chainlink Effect.” Builders get early access to data services and marketing hype, chains get devs to stuff their ecosystem. Everyone uses Chainlink oracles. Everyone’s happy. The unstoppable flywheel keeps spinning. Chainlink.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

🦄 SEC drops Uniswap investigation without enforcement action

🤖 Fetch.ai launches ASI-1 mini, merging AI with blockchain

🤦 FTT pumps after SBF tweets from prison

👍️ Bybit registers with Indian authorities, restores services in the country

👨‍⚖️ Sen. Dick Durbin introduces legislation to combat crypto ATM fraud

🎮️ Ubisoft responds to Assassin’s Creed shadows leak

🟩 Polygon could lose over $300 million in TVL as Aave votes to halt lending on PoS chain

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in ADA, IMX, COPI, MIN, AGIX, ALGO, DOGE, ZEC, AVAX, XTZ, and NEAR. 📋