“Oh boy, another Emiri rambling. We really have to listen to this guy again?”

Yeah, yeah, I know. But I’m down two pints at the pub and have nobody else to talk to, so you’re stuck with me.

The premise of this is simple. I’ve been doing crypto for a little over three years now, and other than the pub, this is the only thing I spend time on in my life.

Therefore, it only makes that every week, as I sit at the pub, I recap all of the major events that took place, give you my thoughts on it, and also let you know what I’m looking at for the coming week.

This is all plucked from our news, on blocmates.com and you can follow all of that on Twitter, too.

Going forward, this will be every Friday in the newsletter, with myself and Lavina taking turns. So best make sure you're subscribed - click here to do that.

Pretty simple, right? So, let’s get straight into round one of the Emiri pub chronicles.

Lord Vitalik in all the headlines

CT was rife with “celebs in crypto” talk for a full day, which felt like a painful month. Out of all the scams, Iggy Azalea stood strong with $MOTHER, which eventually ran to $100M.

My personal GOAT Vitalik chimed in with the below tweet, making the valid point that bringing on celebrities by simply saying, “Make a coin and shill it to your followers, it’ll be so cool, ahah” is not a logical way forward.

Instead, more productive avenues should be explored. But, of course, in typical CT fashion, Ansem’s Avengers assembled to attack him over a perfectly valid point.  

I personally think the whole celebrity thing is brain-dead. If they want to be in crypto, they can do so. Everything is public. Figure it out yourself. If you like it, you stay. If you don’t, then leave. Simple as that.

But beyond the celebrities and memecoins, Vitalik also donated 30 ETH to the legal defense fund of the Tornado Cash founders. This is a pretty bold move for such a public figure, but you have to respect it. Standin’ on business, as the kids say these days.

I, too, believe that the Tornado Cash devs were treated unjustly, so I’m glad they’re getting support from prominent figures in the Industry.  

Now, as much as I am a fan of Vitalik, which is weirdly an unpopular stance nowadays, he has only one thing left to do. PUMP THE DAMN COIN.

Roaring Kitty is truly back

On-brand with the memecoin frenzy, the stock market GCR announced his comeback with a bang.

He unveiled a $200M position in the GME stock including equity and options, and posted an UNO reverse card meme. Sure enough, just like our actual GCR does with crypto, the stock market GCR pumped the hell out of the GME stock and was in almost $200M profit at one point.

In classic crypto fashion, the people took something not related to us and made it ours. The GME memecoin on Solana absolutely turbosent, pumping around 670% after his tweet.

Another coin that did well off the back of this was Kitty, the coin named after Roaring Kitty himself, pumping around 750%.

Personally, I’m salty because all of this happened while I was asleep and I missed it all, so I will cope and seethe as usual.

But now let's switch gears and look at some of the more serious stuff.

Adoption is still taking place; don’t be fooled.

If you frequent the cesspool that is CT, your views on crypto might be completely clouded. All you see is talk about memecoins, and trading vaporware. Every major proponent on CT only talks about how this industry is a joke, and nothing will come from it.

The main issue is that they only look at things that will make them money. But there are signs of adoption taking place behind the scenes, which are great for the industry but not necessarily something you can trade off.

So, let me list a couple of things going on, and then you can see how “dead in the water” the industry is:

• Tether has made an $18.75M investment in XREX. The purpose of this investment is to better facilitate international payments through USDT, where XREX can handle the regulatory side of things.
• The current Hong Kong administration, after launching the ETFs, has said they will take steps to make DeFi more accessible and safer for the general public.
• The US Treasury Department said they have no intention of banning any cryptocurrency mixing services.
• Mastercard went live with its crypto credentials program and has started the pilot version where transactions can be sent.
• Nansen identified a $650M ETH whale wallet as belonging to DBS. This could very well be false, but it is also highly likely correct, given how big the crypto market is in Singapore and the recent infusion of institutional money into the industry.
• Coinbase went live with its Smart wallet, which means it is now easier than ever for retail to participate on-chain. Base SZN is not a meme.
• Bitpanda tied up with Deutsche Bank to process fiat transactions.

These are just some major headlines, but you get the point. Bullish things are happening.

Don’t look to traders for their opinion on adopting a new technology because they only care about things that make them money at the moment.

What to look forward to?

Now, I’m keeping my eye on a couple of things.

On-chain

With on-chain stuff I think there are two chains to keep an eye on. Binance chain and Fantom.

BNB has just hit a new ATH and looks primed to pump extremely hard. Based on this, you can expect a BNB on-chain season, which should be pretty nuts.

Currently, I have my eyes on THENA as the velodrome/aerodrome of the Binance chain, $NMT as the AI pick, and $PUMP & $FLOKI as the top memecoin picks.

Other than that, I’ll be keeping an eye out for new stuff that pops up.

With Fantom, their Sonic upgrade is coming soon. Sonic will be like Solana but EVM, with the added benefit of having Ponzi master Andre Cronje pulling the strings. I’ve yet to decide where to allocate for Sonic, but I will keep a keen eye on things.

Politics and TradFi

The US elections are pretty close, and we gotta keep a close eye on the developments there. Political GCR, Mr.Donald Trump may be facing jail time, but we need the Orange man to get elected for the sake of our bags.

A16z has set up an election fund, and Ryan Selkis from Messari is actively aiding Donald Trump from the crypto side of things. Trump set up crypto donations for his campaign and received around $100M. He also has a wallet that was bombarded with over $10M in memecoins.

If Trump is elected, it’s bullish for everything, but of course, you will likely want to own Trump-related things like the TRUMP coin and his NFTs.

As Trump's chances of getting elected start to get more real by the second, you see a major shift in TradFi sentiment as they all tail Mr.Fink into crypto.

As much as people hate it, I think you must have eyes on ETH.

It is going to be an institutional chain where Fink will shill the staking and passive income to other TradFi companies, who will package it and sell it to their customers.

There are honestly many angles that can be taken; we just have to wait and see which one they choose to use for ETH this time around. But I would not want to be sidelined from a highly likely institutional money pump with decent political headwinds.

Sports Stuff

The NBA Finals are on now, the Cricket World Cup is on, and the Euros are starting soon. Personally, I would say sports betting is the easier option here. But if you’re like me and want to turbo degen, simply do both.

Now I’m a football guy, so I only have Euro coins. I’m backing the English boys. I feel the tingle in my balls this time. It’s theirs. So I’ve bought a couple of England-based coins, which are too low of a marketcap for me to shill, but the general idea is that we have a sports summer on our hands, and some of the coins might do well.

That’s all

Thanks for reading the ramblings of a bored, slightly drunk man. I hope this helped you. I will be posting these every other week and will do my best to give you the best insights into what to look for in this chaotic market.

Anyway, until next time. Peace.