Author: Martin Young, CoinTelegraph; Compiler: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
Crypto industry analysts call the current Bitcoin halving cycle the “weirdest” bull run on record, following Bitcoin’s premature all-time high and a massive influx into Memecoin.
On April 1, Chainlink community liaison Zach Rynes (aka “ChainLinkGod”) posted to his 171,000 followers on X that “this bull run is weird.”
Historically, bull runs have led to liquidity flowing into Bitcoin, then into Ethereum and other high-market-cap tokens, and finally down the chain.
However, the market “skipped some steps that we’ve seen in previous cycles,” with flows moving directly from BTC to memecoins “a little unusual,” Rynes commented.
Source: Zach Rynes
The total market value of Memecoin soared to $70 billion on April 1, mainly driven by newly launched tokens such as Solana-based "dogwifhat" (WIF) and Book of Meme (BOME), as well as old memecoins such as Pepe and Bonk.
Coinbase Layer 2 network Base has also become a hotbed for memecoin speculation.
The recently launched Base-native token DEGEN is an example, which has surged an eye-popping 2,800% in the past month. memecoin is an unofficial token distributed to the community on the decentralized social network Farcaster.
Rynes added that market fundamentals aren’t playing much of a role right now:
“There’s some retail money coming in, but nowhere near the levels we’ve seen before; we’re in an attention economy that’s based on a particular narrative, not real fundamentals.”
On April 1, Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano echoed the same sentiment, saying that after about a decade in the cryptocurrency industry, “I can say with confidence that this is by far the weirdest bull run that crypto has ever seen.”
He added that retail won’t show up “in any meaningful way” until the entire market rises together:
“It’s not these isolated drivers, they’re clearly driven by crypto traders, it’s just the rotation of hot money involved.”