What you see in the screenshot is the retail money of this cycle. The paradigm that BTC starts the market, followed by BigCap alts, then SmallCaps and finally the rest like memes and nfts is gone.
It is memecoins and pump & dump shitcoins that are attracting the most attention after BTC. In the previous cycle, during covid money printing and low interest rates, the narrative was that people were looking for value in cryptos. They were looking for what was going to be successful in a year, in three years, in ten years.
These days, with high interest rates and high inflation, that narrative has changed and it's questionable whether we're going to see any altseason this cycle at all.
Retail is not looking for value. It's looking for a fairy tale. Everybody wants a quick 20x. They're buying shits and they're hodl rugpulls.
I see it everywhere. Discussion forums and groups, cabbies talking about it, even the barber I've been shoving crypto into for a few years has started buying it. I've seen some of these newbies' portfolios.
DOGE, XRP, PEPE, DogWifHat, SHIB, etc. Nothing the least bit conservative to be found there.
I set up an Hive account for my Barber. He didn't find it the least bit strange that paying $1.49 to activate on hivedex.io and send ~$5 just transactionfee for DOGE payment. He said he didn't mind cuz I have a few thousand of them after all.
Cryptos and altoins overall are a casino. In the few years I've been at it the play has changed rapidly. Anyone who wants to compete in the market need to adapt.
Solana has become the most trending smartchain of this cycle and many a die-hard Ethereum fans has run away to SOL. I don't believe it was becouse a fundamental of Solana. Rather, it's that SOL has become a hatchery of memes that are pushing this cycle along. And also by the fact that ETH doesn't benefit from its layers2.
Ethereum as the alt king that the altcoin community relies on to get the altseason started is facing multiple problems, which include FUD messages about foundation behavior. In summary, they themselves have not behaved as expected of Ethereum users. They didn't use lending and defi and employed incompetent people in questionable positions. Along with die-hard fans, some developers quits, and popularity remained behind expectations even after the US ETH etf launch.
AI agents took the initiative behind memecoins and more than a few skin in the game speculators moved activity in that direction.
A few people in my area buying Microstrategy stock on futures with leverage. At the time, I myself considered it a better bet on a risk/reward ratio than buying a dying Ether or other fundamental coins.
Altseason soon canceled