CQ Ben

In the past two bull markets, Bitcoin showed notable price weakness beginning around 480 days after the Halving. If the pattern holds, the current pullback may last another 2–4 weeks, with history suggesting a recovery and acceleration to new highs by around Day 510 — late September to early October.  

A recent report by TRM labs noted that TRON saw the largest drop in illicit volume throughout 2024. This achievement can largely be attributed to the T3 Financial Crime Unit - A collaboration between Tether, TRON DAO, and TRM labs to combat illicit activity associated with using USDT on the TRON blockchain.   

Post inauguration, President Trump and his team continue to make notable investments into some of the largest and most popular Crypto projects. World Liberty Financial bought an additional $9.8 million worth of WBTC on Thursday in addition to a $2.65 million purchase of TRX. Trumps activity throughout his first week of office is a stark contrast to the previous Biden administration and sets the stage for his pro crypto presidential term.  

The popularity of USDT on TRON has birthed the T3 Financial Crime Unit (T3 FCU), a collaboration between TRON, Tether, and TRM Labs to combat illicit activity using USDT. To date, this collaboration has frozen more than 100 Million USD of assets associated with money laundering, scams, blackmail, hacks, violent crimes, terrorism, and drugs. This collaboration is an important step to protect investors and ensure the permissionless nature of blockchain isn't abused by malicious actors.  

With the release of Coinbase’s own wrapped bitcoin product (cbBTC), there has been a discussion across the crypto community as to which product is best for users. While many of the topics surrounding these tokens are still being discussed; including proof of reserves, audits, address blacklisting, etc. It is clear that Wrapped BTC (WBTC) is still the king as weekly activity reaches an all time high and surpasses activity levels unseen since past bull markets.  

Throughout 2024 around 98% of the activity on the TRON network could be attributed to Stablecoins. This trend has had a major shift since the release of Sun.pump on August 9th. SunPump is a TRON-based platform that allows users to create memecoins centered around communities. The popularity of this application has resulted in a massive change in network usage where stablecoin activity now only makes up around 75% of the token transfers compared to 98% just a month prior.  

Traditional blockchain metrics like active users and transaction count often lack the context that explains what type of users are interacting with the network. One metric that gives more detailed information about user activity is what I call user retention rate; or what percentage of users transacting on one day also transacted on the previous day. In the case of TRON, throughout July around 30 percent of the active users each day also transacted on the previous day. This shows that a large portion of TRON users are not just active, but they are also finding enough value in the network to keep them coming back each day.  

TRON has exhibited a resilient user base as active users have grown since the start of the year and maintained near all-time high levels despite market uncertainty and sell pressure across the broader crypto market. I argue that the unique applications across the TRON ecosystem such as payments, stablecoins, and real-world assets have allowed the network to retain and grow its user base as other networks have struggled to find their footing.  

Since the beginning of 2024 TON has outperformed bitcoin by 118% while other popular layer-one chains have struggled to find strength. One of my favorite ways to invest in altcoins is to isolate which projects have a positive trend against both their USD and bitcoin values. Of the major layer 1 blockchains TON and BNB are the only assets that have managed to meaningfully outperform bitcoin this year. In my opinion, TON’s relative strength against bitcoin coupled with the network effect of Telegram make it a crypto worth monitoring this bull run. My checklist before investing in any crypto project: - Strong on-chain and technical fundamentals (transactions, active users, applications, tokenomics, etc) - Token in an uptrend against its USD value - Token in an uptrend against its BTC value