The Bitcoin Halving's Degen Bets

BTC Beta. The Bitcoin Halving is scheduled for Saturday, April 20, but HODLing BTC is far from an exciting activity for crypto degens! What plays can you make in advance of this event to get high-beta exposure to BTC and potentially capture enhanced upside (or downside)?

Historically, Bitcoin’s Halving has coincided with an immense appreciation in the price of BTC, attributed to a decrease in inflationary block rewards reducing miner sell pressure and allowing the coin to enter price discovery mode.

Many crypto traders anticipate that this year’s Halving will yield similar results, yet are not satisfied with BTC’s relatively muted return profile; for them, higher beta alternatives enhance volatility while affording the opportunity to continue holding spot crypto assets, eliminating the complications with leverage and risks of liquidation.

For those with large amounts of capital to deploy who are comfortable holding more illiquid instruments, investments in popular Bitcoin Ordinals, including Bitcoin Puppets and NodeMonkes, could yield massive returns if BTC pumps post-Halving.

Ordinal NFTs are denominated in BTC, meaning that their dollar price will increase with a surge in BTC, and an increase in the price of BTC would likely attract more investors to purchase them to capture enhanced upside to price movements.

Excitement is building for Runes, a novel token standard that will launch on the Halving and is likely to supplant BRC-20s as the chain’s official fungible token standard, but the enthusiasm may still be in its early stages, considering the standard has yet to launch.

While the first Runes have not yet been issued, that hasn’t stopped traders (and developers) from attempting to capitalize on the hype!

Runestones is a 112k Ordinals NFT collection created in March that has glommed onto the Runes momentum, not only by virtue of its similar name, but also because its developer has promised that holders will receive at least 3 different Runes memecoin airdrops.

One of the most popular liquid tokens offering upside exposure to Runes at the moment is PUPS, a memecoin based on but not affiliated with the popular Ordinals NFT project Bitcoin Puppets.

Currently, PUPS is based on the BRC-20 standard, but the recent announcement that it would be transitioning to the Runes standard sent token price pumping by nearly 100% and has gotten many traders excited that the token could enjoy continued tailwinds post-Halving.

Not only is the PUPS token available on Bitcoin, a bridged representation is available on the Solana network, the undisputed hottest chain for memecoin trading.

 Alternatively, some degens may opt to stick to the relative classics, preferring instead to ape the OG Bitcoin fungible meme token that started it all: ORDI. It is worth noting that attention appears to be rotating towards newer projects, demonstrated by the fact that ORDI is down over 40% in the month of April.

The application scene on Bitcoin remains immature, but for investors who prefer to ape more picks-and-shovels infrastructure plays with some degree of fundamentals, Bitcoin L2 solutions like Stacks Network (STX) or bridging infrastructure like Multibit (MUBI), remain viable plays to capitalize on the increased amount of attention that could flow to Bitcoin post-Halving.

While Bitcoin miners have historically offered enhanced upside to Bitcoin, they will likely find themselves struggling post-Halving after their revenues are slashed in half, making their stocks an investment that is best avoided leading up to and in the immediate aftermath of the Halving.