Nigeria has lifted restrictions on bank accounts for crypto firms, and Japan seeks to exempt companies from tax on unrealized crypto gains. Meanwhile, Hong Kong is teasing us with a Bitcoin spot ETF, and the list of bullish news for crypto can be further lengthened. We are in a bull market, and bull markets are about bullish news and insane price spikes.

Every day, there are all sorts of shitcoins pumping 400% or 500%. However, when you look at them while carrying the thought of "how would it be to have a position on such a coin," you realize that despite the pump, it would be nearly impossible to be on any of them. 99% of them are listed on dexes, usually a couple of them, and with very low volume.

Big money is to be made in crypto with micro caps and small caps at the moment. The days when Bitcoin and Ethereum could make anyone rich are gone, unless you go long on any of the two near the bottom, avoid getting liquidated, and have the patience and strength to HODL up.

I owned, at some point, a small stack in probably every coin in the top 50 that we currently have. I've held many coins over the six-plus years that I have in crypto, but despite that, I still entered the 2022 bear market poor as fuck and have been struggling to stay afloat ever since. The current bull market might be life-changing to me... Maybe...

I've kind of stopped watching YouTube videos on crypto lately because I realized most of the people making such content are not that smarter or more educated than I am when it comes to crypto. Most of them are full of suppositions and very little certainty.

Some of them were almost certain a couple of years ago that Solana would be "the next Ethereum killer." Well, it's already a good couple of years since the narrative surfaced the world of crypto, and Ethereum is still alive and well. As a matter of fact, ETH has had quite a nice rally today, and BNB did good too.

Solana, on the other hand, had to puke some of its market cap as it has seen a quite decent rally over the past few months. Although Solana might not kill anything in the near future, it reminds me of Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Let's start with Ethereum, though...

ETH went live in 2016, if I remember correctly, and it served as the foundation for all sorts of ICOs and shitcoins. If it wasn't for Ethereum, we probably wouldn't have so many shitcoins in this space right now. So yeah, thanks Vitalik for blessing us with that.

ETH started its journey as a tradable digital asset at around $8 valuation back in early 2016, and it reached a peak of $1,400 by the end of 2021. It had a magnificent rally thanks to all these crappy projects that bought ETH so that they can build their shitty coins and launch their ICOs. Ethereum as a chain, though, is not just the foundation for garbage coins.

But enough with Ethereum...

Binance Chain was launched at the end of 2017 and didn't get to experience the euphoric phase of the 2017 bull market quite lengthy, but the early investors sure cashed in some juicy profits with it. BNB spent a lot of time in the $15 area during the 2018-2019 bear market, but once its utility kicked in properly, it simply skyrocketed to as high as $686 in May 2021.

Its success was mostly due to NFTs, MEME coins, and all sorts of crappy projects being built on the chain, and that's what Solana is doing right now... I don't like Solana as a project; its fundamentals are pretty weak, the network is almost always congested, and as far as I know, it's not decentralized.

However, if you look at all these meme coins such as BONK and whatever that are putting in insane rallies lately, they are all (or at least many of them are) built on Solana. Solana is basically doing right now what Binance Smart Chain did in 2021 and Ethereum in 2017. That's why it had already a significant multiple months rally despite altcoins not currently being in a proper altcoins season.

Its bear market low was something like $8 (pretty much the same price ETH had when it was launched), it topped at around $250 back in 2021, and who knows how high it will go this bull market. Probably something in between $600 and $1,400. Probably...

The takeaway is that every cycle we have some sort of platform for all sorts of speculative garbage in the crypto world, and if you are smart enough to speculate that you can make decent money by either buying the native coin when there's blood on the streets or opt for some of the "not so shady" coins built on that platform.

Personally, I don't own any Solana, but I do have some RAY and DIO, which are SOL coins, and thus far, at least in the case of RAY, I'm happy with the performance. Following the hype during late stages of a bull market is not advised, but being able to read where the hype will be is a skill that many of us should learn to develop.

Thanks for your attention,
Adrian