Welcome to the Beluga Brief, where we deliver data-driven insights to your inbox every week, spending our time in the crypto trenches and combing through thousands of crypto news feeds so you don’t have to.

As the Beluga Brief grows we’ll try out new content sections and schedules to find what is best for our readers — since Memecoins are all the rage these days, we’ll be adding a section to cover all the craziness in the market from Marc Andreessen-funded AI memecoins to the most profitable traders turning $100 into millions. If you have other suggestions for things you’d like us to cover, feel free to leave a reply on our Twitter!

What happened today?

As the memecoin casino rages on and Bitcoin dips, Solana hit a new all-time-high vs. Ether today. SOL remains holding around the $170 mark at time of writing, virtually one of the only major coins still in the green after BTC dropped as low as $65,000. As we mentioned in Monday’s edition there was a clear sentiment shift among traders to the negative side earlier in the week, which coupled with a drop in the S&P this morning led to this poor price action. The good news is that Bitcoin seems to have bounced off the top of the channel which we’ve been watching for months now, and if we can hold this level things should be off to the races pretty soon.

The biggest headline of today saw Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan, who has been falsely imprisoned by the Nigerian government since February, have the charges against him dropped and will now be released from jail. Throughout the 8 months the US citizen struggled with injury and illness, while Nigeria held him over money laundering allegations against Binance itself, not Tigran. While it took way too long for this situation to resolve itself, it seems members of the Biden administration finally stepping in made all the difference.

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

• Solana hits record-high vs. Ether, outperforms Bitcoin as AI memecoin frenzy and surging revenues fuel rally

• Bitcoin may have hit short-term price top ahead of US Election, analysts say

Alt Coins

• Maker wants to rebrand again

• Scroll’s token declines 32% as whales scoop up airdrop

Regulatory

• Binance exec released from Nigerian prison after 8 month detention

New Launches

• Uniswap’s permissionless bridging goes live across nine networks

• Arbitrum-based crypto derivatives trading protocol Variational raises $10.3 million in seed funding

Miscellaneous

• Vitalik Buterin slams Michael Saylor after ‘batshit’ backing of institutional Bitcoin custody

Memecoin Corner

AI meta rages on in the world of memecoins, with market leader $GOAT reaching a new all-time-high today of $800M market cap; for more context on how quickly this has happened, the $GOAT token did not even exist 2 weeks ago. Founder and CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong interacted with the AI bot behind $GOAT, Truth Terminal, on Twitter today seemingly indicating his intentions to equip the AI model with it’s own self-custodied wallet. To this point all its onchain actions have been managed by a human, so if this goes through it would at minimum be a very cool experiment to watch from the sidelines.

With the incredible price appreciation of $GOAT of course comes myriad scam copy cats, all trying to get their piece of the pie. The market feels quite frothy now as a result of these pump and dumps and blatant copies, which usually indicates it will soon cool off and we’ll see a rotation to other narratives. Since AI memecoins have sucked the liquidity out of the more established dog and cat coins so quickly, we might see a movement back there to revert to the mean. Most of the money flowing around in this market is from crypto-native traders rather than normies which means the money moves rapidly once new narratives start — if you’re actively trading in the memecoin trenches this is important to keep in mind, as we’ve seen more coins go from $15-20M mc to 0 in the last week than I remember seeing in a long time. If we take a look at $MOODENG for example, which was by far the hottest coin around only a few weeks ago, it currently sits under 7 cents after reaching a peak of $0.35 at the end of August.

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