MicroStrategy’s Endgame: Here’s What They’re Up To!

Ah, MicroStrategy: the company that aped into BTC like King Kong in 2020 and has been beating its chest ever since. The company whose co-founder and former CEO is the biggest Bitcoin bull on the block. The company you’d likely never heard of pre-2020.

It seems that no month in crypto is complete without MicroStrategy announcing another eye-watering BTC purchase. It buys so big and so often that it now holds over 1% of BTC’s total supply and it doesn’t seem to be done yet. So, you might be wondering just how this relatively obscure company managed to get so thoroughly orange-pilled; where it got the money to buy all this BTC, and what it’s hoping to achieve through stacking sats so relentlessly.

Well, in today’s video, we give you the answer to those questions and more besides. We examine MicroStrategy’s pivot to Bitcoin, look at the effects its uber-bullishness has had on the market and ponder the question of whether or not the whole thing could be a disaster waiting to happen. Laser eyes at the ready.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

After a relatively quiet week, it looks like the market is ready for more volatility. On the crypto-specific side, it looks like the outflows from Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin ETF have finally started slowing down. At the same time, the inflows have started picking up again, and it’s likely that they will continue to increase for the next couple of weeks.

That’s simply because the Bitcoin halving is only about 20 days away now. It’s not entirely clear how the spot Bitcoin ETF investors will react to the halving, seeing as this is the first time this institutional cohort is participating in the market when this catalyst is in play. What is clear is that Bitcoin whales are already accumulating, and that alone should be enough to boost BTC.

It’s not just the Bitcoin halving either. Many crypto projects appear to have big milestones coming up in April. For example, some of you may have heard that Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNET will be merging on the 2nd April. If you go through the list of crypto projects you’re holding or following, chances are you’ll find other big milestones for them too over the coming month.

Pro-tip: you can see all upcoming crypto milestones on CoinMarketCal (not a typo). As more retail investors enter the market, you can bet that these milestones will start to move prices more. For now though, the relative lack of retail participation means that many of these milestones may not move prices as much as you might think. Keep that in mind for April.

On the macro side meanwhile, there will be a trove of economic data released next week, mostly related to employment. A bunch of Fed officials will also be speaking, effectively providing a real-time reaction to this data. Chances are that they will stick to their dovish tone, so it should have a neutral to positive effect on crypto and stocks, extreme data surprises notwithstanding.

The catch is that the geopolitical clouds continue to darken. In the Middle East, Israel is reportedly planning on cutting Palestinian off banks from the global financial system this week. It also sounds like Israeli forces are planning to press ahead into the city of Rafah, though it’s likely this won’t occur until after the 9th April, when the UN ceasefire decree expires.

In Europe, Ukraine has been hitting Russian oil refineries, which has reportedly been causing oil prices to rise. Logically, this runs the risk of causing a resurgence in inflation, which would result in central banks keeping interest rates higher for longer. However, some would argue that the real reason oil has been rising is because of robust economic growth caused by fiscal spending.

In China, the government has reportedly blocked the use of American-made microchips in government operations. The news comes shortly after the CCP started restricting the use of iPhones. This foreshadows an escalation in the ongoing trade war between the US and China, which would likewise result in more persistent inflation and higher interest rates.

With all that said though, it looks like central banks around the world are starting to lower interest rates, despite inflation technically not being at their 2% target. It goes without saying that this also runs the risk of causing inflation to rise, but history shows it would take many months for the central banks to respond. In the interim, markets will likely keep going higher.

🐕 The Meme Coin Growth Hack 🐕

In the early stages, what is the one factor that most influences a crypto project’s success?

Is it a fairly-distributed token, excellent utility, or visionary founders?

Well, if you were to ask us, we’d tell you it’s a ‘cultish’ community.

The thesis is simple - crypto markets essentially run on attention-driven speculation.

However, in an information-rich world, there is no scarcer commodity than attention. This means that projects have to continuously innovate when it comes to capturing that attention.

Projects that manage to retain this captured attention for the longest time end up creating what we like to call a die-hard or indeed cultish community.

Apart from their obvious effect on maintaining positive sentiment toward the project, a loyal community helps founders take a shortcut towards building out the one thing early-stage startups need the most - a distribution network.

An efficient distribution network compounds the amount of attention flowing into your project, which in turn compounds the capital flowing in, which in turn compounds the size of its community and so on.

In the early stages, this is a positive flywheel that’s arguably more impactful than the quality or technical efficiency of the underlying product itself.

Thus, over the years, crypto builders have been experimenting with different methods to grab this attention. Some of the more popular ones have been yield programs, airdrops, revenue-share, decentralised governance and even larger-than-life Twitter personas.

As the seasons change, so does the attention ‘meta.’

For founders building this cycle, the attention meta seems to be meme coins. And, honestly, this makes sense. Meme coins as a category have historically seen the greatest number of cultish communities within crypto.

While they’ve been shunned by crypto founders in the past as nothing more than a fad, it appears some serious builders have begun looking at the meme coin community’s flaming degeneracy as a hidden tool to bootstrap attention for their projects. Interestingly, this includes both early-stage and late-stage projects.

On that note, there are two approaches to the meme coin growth strategy – either build off an existing meme community (the go-to-market or GTM approach) or create/incubate an emerging meme coin community (we’d like to call this the ‘cool uncle’ approach).

A few examples of ‘serious’ projects employing the GTM approach include Berachain (a defi-focused layer 1 chain), BONKbot (a Solana-focused Telegram trading bot), and Shibarium (an Ethereum layer 2 network).

Berachain in particular is one of the most hyped defi-infra projects of recent times. It even attained unicorn status after raising over $69 million at a $1.5B valuation, in a funding round co-led by Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures. However, the project traces its origins to a 2021 NFT project called Bong Bears. This project, over time, built a strong community that laid the foundation for the hype which surrounds Berachain today.

Similarly, BONKbot played a huge role in facilitating the recent Solana memecoin rally. In a recent Unlayered Podcast episode, BONKbot co-founder Karol goes into detail about the various challenges they faced in scaling the project during the surge in adoption last year. We recommend you check it out, it’s truly insightful.

A few examples of serious projects employing the ‘cool uncle’ approach meanwhile include the Telegram-Notcoin pair, the Farcaster-DEGEN pair, and Avalanche’s ‘Community Coin’ initiative.

During the past quarter, both Notcoin and DEGEN have been the primary catalysts for the adoption of TON and Farcaster/Base respectively. DEGEN, in particular, has been instrumental in supercharging adoption beyond Warpcast within the Farcaster ecosystem. From being used as a medium to tip other users, to being used as currency to wager bets on prediction games, and even becoming the gas token of its own native layer 3 chain, DEGEN has done it all within the span of a few months.

The main difference between projects that use the GTM approach and those that employ the cool uncle alternative is that the former prioritises driving value from the product to the underlying meme coin community, while the latter prioritises driving value from the meme coin community to the underlying project or chain.

As for which approach will do better, we believe they could both be equally effective. So, don’t fade either one this cycle.

🔥 Hot Deal of The Week 🔥

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So, which one do you choose?

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🔮 Video Pipeline 🔮

* CoinGecko Report: Everything You Need to Know About RWA
* How To Buy Bitcoin? Best methods revealed!
* K33 Report: What drives Bitcoin’s price?
* How To Research Crypto: Our Top Tips

🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* DePin: Why This Will Be Big in 2024
* Avalanche (AVAX) Review: Third Generation Blockchain
* Bittensor Review 2024: Decentralized Machine Intelligence
* Radix Review 2024: Addressing DeFi's Pain Points
* Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash: Difference Between BTC and BCH

Press Releases

* XCAD Network Launches Web2-Friendly CEX for Creator Tokens, Bringing Liquidity to Watch2Earn Movement

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

Don’t fall into the temptation of investing in every other coin or token. Beware the “spray and pray” approach. Diversifying too broadly is a direct hindrance to you achieving your return goals.

“Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.” - Warren Buffet

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.