The Castle Chronicle: Optimist > Doomer
PLUS: Which Hyperliquid trader should you follow?
Welcome to Edition 153 of The Castle Chronicle!
Gm all! Welcome to 2026!
It’s a new year and a new Chronicle, and we’re back again with some great reads! The Chronicle is going to be receiving a new year, new me facelift soon, so get ready for that!
This week:
🔍 Market watch - Waiting for a decisive move
Which Hyperliquid trader shall you follow (or not)?
Everything Changed (Again) And This Time, You Didn’t Want To Believe It
🔍 Market Watch
Gm frens!
Looks like we’re gonna start 2026 exactly where we left 2025 off - in a consolidation. And this is an important one for me, because I will follow price whichever direction it breaks out to.
Price Action
The BTC 1W chart looks overall bullish to me. I would call this price action re-accumulation. By now, the wave of selling looks to be absorbed, and we’re expecting demand to come back again.
If, however, price breaks down convincingly, it would signal a change in direction for me, as supply will have overpowered demand at a critical moment. At that point, I’ll switch my bias short and look for opportunities to the downside.
It’s a waiting game now. I’m looking for a strong, convincing move to either side - a weekly candle close out of the consolidation. Once that happens, I’ll be willing to put some risk behind it. You’ll see my relative strength analysis again, and we’ll look for beta plays. But until then -
Risk responsibly, and I’ll see y’all next time!
Courtesy of 0x_Vlad - trend-based momentum trader
Not following what I’m talking about? Check out my quick cheatsheet to understand how I approach a chart.
Which Hyperliquid trader shall you follow (or not)?
I recently saw one post from pvp.trade about the updated Hyperdash they just shipped.
After acquiring it in november, pvp has really taken the Hyperdash platform onto whales & power user tracking on the Hyperliquid orderbook.
With it, you can easily track some addy related to known individual on Crypto Twitter.
The app offer, as well, to deposit on a wallet that will copy trade OR countertrade it. An interesting feature imo.
You can scroll on & have fun.
The 2x section that I like the most of this new dashboard are the display of the positionning by all time PNL
& by wallet size
Writting this on January 5th, it really feel the market gonna pump :P
Anyway, have a gud week and check the dashbbbooard, its a dope product that can truly be useful & make you more profitable.
From CL, with love
Everything Changed (Again) And This Time, You Didn’t Want To Believe It
If you’ve been around in crypto for as long as I have, you’ve probably noticed how many different forms our industry has taken. For the longest time, we’ve shapeshifted and twisted ourselves into various narratives, trying to find the best product-market fit.
This means we’ve gone from Bitcoin only, to the rise of Ethereum and the beginning of DeFi, to permissionless token creation, and now to our current form: payment/money rails via stablecoins. Like a snake shedding its skin, crypto has grown with each new iteration.
While this has been good for users who are adept at trading narratives and quickly shifting to the next big idea, it can be hard for others to adapt to. Many have gone all-in on one idea or trade, only for the space to abandon the idea altogether, leaving it gasping for air.
The best example of this I can think of is this: all the people who made a memecoin their personality and full-ported the token, only for it to crumble, eroding their net worth and credibility. While memecoins have been a feature of crypto for a long time, they didn’t really hit their peak fervor until 2023-2024.
We all know how that ended, but there’s still a subset of people who refuse to believe that “meme szn” has ended, and keep buying the bottoms of these tokens that are destined to plummet -99% over and over again.
The failure to adapt to a changing landscape has jaded crypto participants, leading many to quit the space altogether.
I believe that this is a short-termist doomer mindset, a nihilism brought on by their inability to react to a fundamental shift that crypto is undergoing.
Like Dougie DeLuca says in this article:
”Crypto” as a self-contained world is dying. The technology is about to dissolve into everything else, and the people who mistake the old bubble for the end state are going to get left behind.”
There is a whole cohort of people who are mistaking our current market for past cycles, and that is causing them to miss the forest for the trees.
What Went Wrong?
“All that glitters is not gold.”
The above phrase means that not everything pretty and shiny turns out to be so. This perfectly describes what happened to our industry.
Once upon a time, crypto builders’ #1 priority was to create better financial systems and infrastructure for the good of the world. We strove to develop better money, a more inclusive system, and our best protocols/inventions came from this line of thinking.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DeFi were all born from these processes, and are our best offerings to the financial world.
But then we strayed from the path.
We made crypto into our very own Las Vegas with the shiny neon casinos, luring in users with the promises of riches. Protocols targeting user dopamine became the next VC darling, packaged under the disguise of “trading everything.”
Kenchang saw this too in his article, stating: “The reality hit me like a fucking truck. I am NOT building a new financial system. I built a casino. A casino that does not call itself a casino, but it is the biggest, online, multi-player 24/7 casino our generation has ever concocted.”
This is just the reality of our current state. We’re just perpetuating gambling in a shinier armor and this doesn’t feel like crypto’s purpose. To me, this explains the current state of disillusionment.
All these products and protocols are vapor, bringing nothing to the table.
Now, could these products attract users from outside the crypto space? Sure.
But do we want their first impressions to be products that will drain them dry? Do we want them to evaporate the first funds they bring onchain?
I don’t think so.
Collectively, we’ve chosen to give prominence to trash instead of giving the real builders their flowers. It’s hard to build in this space, and people are so obsessed with turning an immediate profit on any project that they don’t take the time to watch them succeed and build out something worthwhile.
And yet, that is exactly what we have to do! It’s time to believe in something again, instead of letting nihilism reign supreme.
We should be championing DeFi, privacy, neobanks, payments/stablecoins, and ignoring the parasitic applications vying for our attention.
If we stop investing in uninvestable things, then we can move the industry forward.
What Do We Do Now?
First and foremost, we cannot give up. We’re in one of the greatest industries of all time and get to participate in a financial revolution that most said wasn’t possible.
Take a step back and look at what we’ve accomplished!
Bitcoin is a household name, Ethereum is the home of DeFi, and we’ve got institutional money coming onchain in droves. While we may have lost some of the original cypherpunk magic that drew us to crypto in the first place, it’s impossible to say that we haven’t made an impact.
There are even banks talking about coming onchain! Once one of our biggest detractors, now forced to involve themselves because it’s career suicide if they don’t.
That shows the power of what is being built in DeFi/stablecoins, that even our biggest enemies need to come and play or risk losing ground in the future.
The point being made here is that crypto is going through its most bullish shift in its history!
The sad part is that a lot of crypto users chose to go the degen gambler route and chose to be in the trenches, wasting their lives away on memecoin pump and dumps. If more people stuck around in DeFi instead of chasing riches, the retail perception of our industry may be different.
Hell, more people would’ve kept more of their gains if they had moved funds into Aave instead of PumpFun.
But it isn’t just about belief.
It’s about action.
As active investors in crypto, you have to be nimble and constantly restructure how you invest in the market. It’s obvious that most people haven’t done this, and instead have bag-held things destined for zero a lot longer than they should have.
This market is maturing and becoming more like TradFi every day. The institutional investors and funds coming into this space aren’t going to buy Fartcoin or dogwifhat, they’re going to look for teams that are building real businesses and things that they can easily identify and value.
The next wave of the crypto industry is going to look vastly different from what came before, and you have to realign how you invest with these shifts. Things don’t always stay the same, and that is doubly true of nascent markets like ours.
So, sure, maybe crypto is dead. At least the version everyone used to know.
But it’s not the time to give up, far from it.
In a world of doomers and gloomers, be a giddy optimist.
Schizo out!
In our newsletter, we may discuss projects or tokens in which we hold positions. While we aim to provide informative content, our views are not financial advice. Please conduct your research and consult professionals before making investment decisions. Crypto markets are volatile, and past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Invest responsibly, and be aware of the risks. Your capital is at risk, and we do not accept liability for any losses.