StacyMuur

10 APIs every crypto trader & researcher should be using ↓
DefiLlama: TVL, fees, revenue, stablecoins, yields
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Dune: custom SQL queries, dashboards, analytics
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Helius: everything Solana
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CoinGecko: prices, market caps, historical data
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Polymarket: prediction market data, odds, events
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Alchemy: EVM onchain data, logs, transactions, websockets
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DEX Screener: token pairs, liquidity, trending tokens
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GeckoTerminal: DEX trades, pools, OHLCV
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CoinDesk API: prices, market data, social insights, news
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CoinPaprika: fundamentals, price, historical data
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Anything I’m missing?

Everyone is curious if now is a good time to enter alts.
Honestly, it's super hard to answer with certainty.
This is where we currently stand:
→ Altcoin Season Index: 37
→ Fear & Greed Index: 39 (was sitting at 5 in Feb)
→ BTC dominance: 56.6%
Compared to 2022, there's no structural collapse driving the fear.
No Luna, no FTX, no contagion.
Instead, it's all macro.
Tariffs, Fed uncertainty, and risk-off rotation are pushing capital into stablecoins and BTC.
Institutions now dominate volume, and they don't rotate the way retail did in 2021.
The classic BTC → ETH → alts cascade was retail FOMO, a

The leading chain in RWA holders is @plumenetwork.
Surprising, right?
It has more RWA holders than BNB and Solana combined:
Plume → 259K
BNB + Solana → 226K
The reason: SkyLink.
It's Plume's cross-chain yield distribution layer that lets users on other chains hold Plume-native RWA positions across 16 networks.
When you look at average RWA per holder, the distinction is obvious:
Ethereum → $94,000
Plume → $1,354
Plume is optimizing for reach, while Ethereum is optimizing for capital.
These are two completely different bets on RWA adoption.
IMO, Plume needs to attract more institutional capital

The BTC perp/spot ratio has barely dipped below 5x in a year.
Most days, it's closer to 10.
The derivative is the primary market.

Celestia raised their last round at a $1 billion valuation.
Now at $330 million, with all metrics going to zero.
"Stake for future airdrops"

The trader segmentation looks nothing like it did 3 years ago.
Distribution was very balanced around Nov 2023:
• Whale: 4-22%
• Dolphin: 8-22%
• Fish: 34-62%
• Shrimp: 14-50%
But this balance shifted heavily in favor of whales over time.
By Mar 2026, the change is massive across every category except dolphin:
• Whale: 63-88%
• Dolphin: 2-24%
• Fish: 3-11%
• Shrimp: 1-11%
Retail was clearly pushed out.
The only ones left are institutional players and bots driving DEX activity.
This imbalance won't be easily changed.

If you do $100K+ volume on Polymarket, you're in the top 0.77% of traders.
It takes just ↓
200 trades for $500
500 trades for $200
1000 trades for $100
You can easily hit $100K in a month with a $5,000 deposit by vibe coding a scalping bot for 5/15m markets with Claude.

The entire Solana DEX trader base since 2023 would fit inside Dubai.
Cumulative unique traders since Nov 2023: 1.52M.
From the chart, we can see that recurring traders are holding up reasonably well given the current market conditions.
But first-time traders have been declining for the past 3 months straight, and are now at new lows.
Three things keeping new traders out:
→ DeFi onboarding is still painful
→ Sentiment is low
→ CEXs are easier
Solana needs a fresh narrative or a real bull market to wake up.

Solana's DEX trading volume is near all-time highs, but most of it is coming from bots.
In January 2025, humans and bots were still competing in volume:
→ Real traders: $56.3B
→ Bots: $68.3B
By March 2026, the picture looks completely different:
→ Real traders: $6.7B
→ Bots: $134.1B
The 60/40 split flipped to 95/5.
It's clear that the market optimized for speed. Manual traders can't compete with systems that can react in milliseconds and run 24/7.
We also have AI agents that are further accelerating this shift. Their share will only grow from here.
If you're still trading manually, you're fall