(Any views expressed here are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)

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PvP, or “player vs. player,” is a phrase used often by shitcoin traders to describe this current market cycle. The sentiment it evokes is predatory, where winning comes at the expense of others. That is so TradFi. The express purpose of the crypto capital markets is to allow those who risk their precious capital to enjoy the fruits of being “early” into projects that hopefully will grow apace with Web3. But oh, how we have strayed from the enlightened path laid down for us by Lord Satoshi and then subsequently Archangel Vitalik with his very successful Ether initial coin offering (ICO).

The current crypto bull market visited Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana big time. However, new issues, which I will define as tokens launched this year, have fared poorly for retail. The same can not be said for venture capital (VC) firms. Hence, the PvP moniker is ascribed to this current cycle. The result has been the launch of a plethora of high, fully diluted value (FDV), but low circulating supply projects. Post-launch, the token prices sloshed down the toilet like a common piece of doo-doo.

While that is the sentiment, what does the data show? The clever analysts at Maelstrom did some digging to answer a few niggling questions:

After I delve into the data that answers those questions, I want to offer some unsolicited advice to projects waiting in the wings, hoping the markets will turn around so they can launch. To bolster my arguments, I want to highlight a project within the Maelstrom portfolio, Auki Labs, that bucked the trend. They didn’t have CEX on the first date. Instead, they listed a relatively low-FDV token starting on DEX. 1 They want retail to make money with them as they are hopefully successful in their journey to build a real-time marketplace for spatial computing. They also abhor the egregious listing fees that the major exchanges charge and believe there is a better way to give more value to end users rather than to the other big bosses who live in my neighborhood in Singapore.

The Sample Set

We looked at a sample of 103 projects listed in 2024 across the major shitcoin exchanges.

This by no means is the total universe of all projects listed in 2024, but it is a representative sample.

Pump Up the Jam!