This is the first cycle where retail is actually paying attention to unlocks. This is a good thing, and I hope they take this into account when making investment decisions. GCR literally had to gather a gang of neets to find this information last cycle.
A few points of perspective on this information:
1. This list is incomplete and likely only captures 1/3-1/4 of all FDV unlocks coming this/next year. Worldcoin for example would roughly double the FDV to be unlocked. Lets call total unlocks 300-400bn.
2. Only about 1/2 of the FDV is owned by investors/team on average. So lets say $200-300bn of potential sell pressure, which is a lot. Not all tokens will be sold, but a lot will, and that will weigh on all of them as a group as investors start to fear unlocks. My expectation is that they will sell off uniformly but a few will emerge as category winners that are decacorn+ outcomes after they bottom. You can either choose to see the failures or do the work to find the potential winners, in my opinion hand-wringing over the former is not valuable work.
3. Just like 2022, where DeFi unlocks drove selloffs but then the alt L1s started to move, the meta will move to coins with no unlocks (wave 2 coins like bera, monad, etc), or coins that are through their unlock schedules
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While BTC and ETH are now through their bear market supply overhang (FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, 3AC, GBTC) and into a panacea of new ETF demand
The hottest alts of 22'/23' are hitting the meat of their VC/team unlocks, and the darlings of last cycle look like value with no overhang
Unlocks are neither bullish nor bearish, just context, but there is a real sense of financial gravity when billions are to be sold in a single token
Important to remember we didn't have meaningful unlocks during the last bull outside of DeFi
Most coins unlocked during the bear, or with SOL, SBF bought most of the vesting portion in 2020
Its all new this cycle. Everything seems backwards. ETFs come first vs. last, majors clear overhang early, alts digest post BTC/ETH ATHs
You'll see this in the prevalence of catch up trades. Some low float high FDV coins will launch at $10-20bn, and the no overhang competitors already in the market will ramp to catch them, unencumbered by overhangs.
looking back through the fog of war, the data points that are revealed today uncover pieces of the puzzle from last year
if FTX was selling client BTC/ETH to buy SOL/FTT/SRM - this has large implications about what organic ETH/BTC price action looks like going forward
the absence of a fraudulent seller of BTC/ETH - on the order of billions/tens of billions
the absence of a fraudulent buyer of SOL - again on the order of billions/tens of billions
implies very different things about these ecosystems going forward
the alt L1 thesis of yesteryear was essentially an intellectual framework built around the first mover (SOL), whose initial price appreciation appears to have been driven by SBF's fraud
imo this is extremely damaging to the narrative that any alt L1 price action was organic
Comparing ImmuteableX and Polygon is a fascinating thought experiment from a L2 value accrual perspective
A. ImmuteableX: Charges no TX fees, makes 1-2% on all NFT volume (~$10-15M run rate?)
B. Polygon charges very low fees ($10-15M fees rr), takes no cut on NFT sales/volume
A. ImmuteableX has no DeFi ecosystem because that is where it accruals value from (% of primary, secondary sales)
IMX is a bet on a fast NFT chain with a native token and high take rate, that accrues value based on its sales, and has a revenue split with Starkware (weird)
B. Polygon has a robust DeFi ecosystem where it only monetizes through transaction fees, and the payment token will soon be ETH
MATIC is a bet on blockchain scaling solutions accruing value with no monetary premium, based on transaction fees alone
other than the canonical global settlement layer, whatever the best scaling solution is will simply be copied and/or bought by existing L2s/L1s and rolled out as X by Y
it really will come down to brand, BD, marketing on who wins the scaling wars
the best tech won't win
the best scaling solutions will be tech businesses that you can DCF and apply a multiple to
little/no monetary premium unfortunately as these protocols become mature
canonical global settlement layer and internet money is still the largest market, $10T mcap prize
whats wild to me is that immuteable x charges no transaction fees and only makes money on swaps on NFTs/fungible tokens
so scaling solution business models basically is a DEX as transaction fees collapse to 0?