Memecoin madness is breaking the Bitcoin halving cycle

Liquidity seems to have skipped a few steps and gone from Bitcoin straight into memecoins amid a “weird” bull market, say observers.

Crypto industry analysts are calling the current Bitcoin halving cycle the “weirdest” bull market on record, following a premature Bitcoin all-time high and a massive rush into memecoins. 

On April 1, Chainlink community liaison Zach Rynes aka ‘ChainLinkGod’ said “this bull market has been weird” in a post to his 171,000 followers on X.

Historically, bull runs would see liquidity flow into Bitcoin before moving into Ethereum and other high-capitalization coins and finally moving down the chain.

However, the market “skipped a couple of steps that we have seen with previous cycles,” with flows going from BTC straight to memecoins which is “a bit unusual,” commented Rynes.

Memecoin total capitalization surged to $70 billion on April 1, primarily driven by pumps in newly launched tokens such as Solana-based ‘dogwifhat’ (WIF) and Book of Meme (BOME), and older memecoins like Pepe (PEPE) and Bonk (BONK).

The Coinbase layer-2 network Base has also become a hotbed of memecoin speculation.

The recently launched Base-native token DEGEN is one example, having skyrocketed an eye-watering 2,800% over the past month. The memecoin is an unofficial token that was distributed to the community on the decentralized social network, Farcaster.

Rynes added that market fundamentals are not playing much of a role at the moment:

“There’s some retail money that’s entered, but nowhere near the levels we’ve seen before; we’re in an attention economy based on specific narratives, not real fundamentals.”

The sentiment was echoed by Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano on April 1, who said that after around a decade in crypto, “I can say with full confidence that this is, by far, the weirdest bull market crypto has ever had.”

He added that retail is not here “in any meaningful way” until the entire market goes up together:

“Not these isolated sector-specific pumps that are very obviously pushed by crypto natives and just involve a hot ball of money rotating around.”

Related: Memecoin presales hit ‘peak degeneracy’ with over $100M raised in 3 days

Another factor adding to the weirdness of this market cycle is that Bitcoin has reached an all-time high before the halving. In previous cycles, the Bitcoin all-time high arrived the year after the halving.

The asset hit $73,734 on March 14 and the BTC halving is just 18 days away now, due on April 20. Analysts have already predicted that the pre-halving retrace is over.

On April 1, technical analyst Moustache highlighted that BTC had reclaimed a key Fibonacci ratio level seen in previous cycles, but this time it was before the halving.