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What happened today?

The market is largely green today as we recover from the brutal price action of last week, which saw billions in liquidations on Bitcoin alone. Interestingly, we’re seeing more strength in alt-coins than BTC — as you can see in the heatmap below, alts are green across the board with many up 10%+ today, while BTC actually sits slightly down over the last 24 hours.

Seeing such a strong bounce out of alts especially with how weak they’ve been this year is very encouraging for the alt-season we’ve all been waiting for. Additionally, the success of HyperLiquid’s HYPE token so far should act as a massive signal to teams that have been waiting to drop their own token — this cycle has been plagued by horrible launches with obscene inflation rates, massive insider allocations and all the usual shenanigans, and so the success of HYPE which cut all of that out is a great sign.

Biggest Headlines

The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!

The Majors

• Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF buys fall 90% amid crypto market plunge

• Metaplanet snaps up more Bitcoin in biggest single buy to date

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Dogecoin tumbles over 25% as memecoins battered by crypto pullback

Regulatory

• Hex crypto founder Richard Heart hit with Interpol red notice

• Crypto-friendly Sen.-elect Bernie Moreno assigned to Senate Banking Committee

New Launches

• Binance and Kraken lead $10 million investment into rapidly-growing decentralized stablecoin Usual

Trading Talk

As we mentioned in the recap above, the alt market looks really strong right now despite last week’s dump. AI is still the focus of basically every sector of the crypto market, which if that sounds odd let me explain further: we have the big players like TAO or RDNT which support infrastructure used by real entities, and then we have what are essentially chat bots packaged into shiny memecoin-style tokens. For some reason, the latter is what people have really latched onto and for that reason AI “agent” coins are dominating the meme space right now.

In my experience it’s a lot easier to pick ecosystem plays for these coins than it is to pick an individual winner, and there is no better example of this than the Virtuals Protocol on Coinbase’s Base network. Since we first discussed Virtuals in this newsletter at about $0.30, their token has risen to over $3 at time of writing representing billions in liquidity entering the ecosystem. Many of the tokens launched by the platform, such as $LUNA and $GAME, have risen to hundreds of millions in market cap meaning massive gains for those who caught on early.

While I still think there is a big opportunity for trades to be made within the Virtuals ecosystem, it’s worth remembering most of these are at the end of the day just chat bots. My Twitter feed has now become filled with AI slop tweets from these “agents” and sentiment towards them has definitely started to shift negative because of that. Since most of them don’t do anything but Tweet, these things trade on attention rather than utility - it’s important to keep that in mind while trading these coins

Tweet of the Day

It seems that the DPRK has made their way to HyperLiquid…

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Check out our recent articles on why Berachain is the biggest launch of 2025, and found out which coin we think might get their ETF next!

The content on this site is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. While Beluga strives to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information, there may be discrepancies when comparing our data to that of financial institutions, service providers, or specific product websites. Always consult with a professional before making any financial decisions.

Will McKinnon is the Head of Content for Beluga and has spent every day for many years trading coins. For that reason there are too many to name, however his largest holdings by a significant margin are Ethereum and Bitcoin. NFA DYOR