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In his latest market rundown, Amsterdam-based trader and educator Michaël van de Poppe warns that “retail isn’t here in the markets as of yet” and notes that the widely-followed Altcoin Season Index is still languishing around 29—well below the 50-point threshold that would signal a rotation out of Bitcoin and into the broader market.
Against that still-cautious backdrop, Van de Poppe argues that the recent 38–42 percent rebound in the ETH/BTC pair is the first concrete sign of capital rotating down the risk curve, echoing on-chain data that show Ethereum clawing back ground after months of under-performance. “We’ve had a 40% return against Bitcoin in just a week,” he says, “and therefore the blue chips or the large caps are the ones to watch.”
Crypto Watchlist: Top 5 Altcoins
Van de Poppe’s thesis rests on a classic money-flow model: funds move from Bitcoin to Ethereum, then to large-cap altcoins, mid-caps and, finally, into the smallest caps once animal spirits truly take hold. With that framework in mind, he singles out five names that he believes sit at different rungs of the risk ladder, each with a specific macro- or sector-level tail-wind.
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The first pick, Chainlink (LINK), is Van de Poppe’s “easiest play” on institutional adoption because “we require oracles to provide data in the web-3 space to connect between web 2 and web 3.” The analyst emphasises that LINK’s bitcoin-denominated chart is “still at an all-time low,” suggesting asymmetric upside if a true altseason materialises.
Next on the large-cap list is Aave (AAVE). Van de Poppe calls the decentralised lending protocol “a large cap which implies less risk,” but adds that the market is under-pricing its role in bringing bank-grade yield products on-chain. Notably, the token has attracted high-profile flows this cycle—Donald Trump–linked World Liberty Financial disclosed cumulative AAVE purchases alongside LINK and ETH earlier this year.
Moving down the capitalization spectrum, the analyst turns to Wormhole (W), a cross-chain messaging and liquidity layer he describes as “being used to transfer between the chains,” with revenues that cycle back into the protocol. He flags its selection as exclusive bridge infrastructure for multiple real-world-asset initiatives in which “tokenised T-bill funds” migrate across networks. Wormhole’s fundamentals received a liquidity boost when Binance listed the W token with four trading pairs on 3 April 2024, broadening access for retail and institutional desks alike.
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For investors willing to venture further out on the risk curve, Van de Poppe highlights Peaq (PEAQ), a layer-1 focused on DePIN and the machine economy. “It’s the largest ecosystem within the machine economy and … finally waking up again,” he says, citing on-chain data that already show more than 50 companies and six-million devices active on the network. He argues that growing transaction counts and cross-industry partnerships make PEAQ “interesting for an investment thesis” at current valuations.
His smallest-cap mention is Alkimi (ADS), which he dubs “an advertising project” whose revenue “has gone 4x from $1.2 million to $5 million” even as the token corrected from $0.50 to $0.10 during the recent macro-driven sell-off. Alkimi positions itself as a decentralised ad exchange designed to cut supply-chain fees and provide on-chain transparency, a use-case the company claims can slash CPMs by over 200 percent for advertisers.
Van de Poppe closes with portfolio construction advice rather than price targets. “The larger the market cap, the longer it’s in business, the larger your allocation can be because the lower the risk involved. The smaller and newer the project, the smaller the allocation,” he says.
At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $3.18 trillion.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
