The Hunter's Codex: The Definitive Proof-of-Work Lowcap Masterclass

Why this codex exists

I arrived in this market in 2016, when roughly 150 altcoins existed and small caps were bought on exchanges most investors avoided. Ten years and four cycles later, my archives hold eight annual "best lowcaps" presentations, five spreadsheets, a backtest, and a long list of calls, some brilliant and many wrong. This codex turns all of it into one method.

Its purpose is simple. Any crypto investor, beginner or seasoned, should be able to understand how a proof-of-work lowcap is born, rises, peaks and dies, and what that means for research, entry, sizing and selling. Instead of a list of tickers, you will find mechanics, numbers and rules, each one traced back to a dated source or to a mistake I paid for.

Proof of work only, on purpose

This codex deals exclusively with proof-of-work lowcaps: coins with their own chain, secured by mining, usually fair-launched, and discovered on small exchanges long before any major listing. Tokens issued on another blockchain and memecoins are deliberately excluded.

Two reasons justify that choice. First, PoW coins share one hidden variable that tokens do not: miners receive new coins every block and most of them sell. Emission is therefore a permanent supply of sellers, and it shapes every phase of a rise. Second, a single register keeps the statistics comparable. Mixing a mined privacy coin with a launchpad token would produce averages that describe nothing.

The evidence behind the numbers

The figures come from three layers of evidence. To begin with, my own archives from 2019 to 2026: annual presentations, scoring grids, the August 2026 backtest of 35 project-cycle episodes, and the research files published on this site. Next, a calibration base of 51 rises from 39 proof-of-work coins across three cycles, rebuilt from complete CoinGecko daily price histories collected on 13 October 2026, cleaned of one-day outliers. Finally, monthly TradingView charts for Bitcoin, dominance, ETH/BTC, OTHERS.D and TOTAL3 on the same date, plus CoinPaprika and NonKYC charts where CoinGecko starts too late.

Every data point carries an implicit label. A fact is a dated public figure, while a model is a calculation from explicit assumptions. An inference is my reading of several signals, presented as an interpretation rather than as proven causality. Finally, a gap stays empty: no number is invented to fill it.

The codex in ten numbers

If you only read one section, read this table. Each line is a rule, a number and the evidence behind it.

1. What a proof-of-work lowcap really is

A lowcap, in this codex, is a mined coin whose market capitalisation sits roughly below $50M when it enters your radar, and often far lower: tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at the very beginning. Its life follows a recognisable path. It launches, frequently without a premine, on a mining pool and a Bitcointalk announcement. Then it lists on a small "incubator" exchange, climbs a ladder of distribution, and either finds a crowd or disappears.

That ladder matters more than most investors think. I describe it with six rungs, from L0 to L5. At L0, coins only exist in miners' wallets and OTC trades. L1 is the first incubator exchange, today typically SafeTrade or NonKYC. L2 and L3 bring intermediate exchanges and a stable trading pair. L4 and L5 are the large global exchanges. Each new rung opens access to a new population of buyers, so each one is a potential catalyst.

Incubators change names with every cycle. In 2016 they were Bittrex and Cryptopia. Later came Qtrade, Stex and Xeggex, and since 2025 SafeTrade, NonKYC, Cexius and Ourbit have played the role. The function never changes: an incubator is where a lowcap finds its first price discovery, long before the crowd arrives.

2. The two questions you must never merge

For years, I asked one question: is this project good? Is the technology original, the team competent, the community healthy? I gave Grin 17 out of 20 in 2019 and rated Nyzo A+ in 2020 and 2021. Neither delivered the multiple I expected. Grin fell from $2.86 to $0.41 in May 2020, then to $0.06 in 2023.

What changed my thinking was a backtest. In August 2026, I coded 25 project-cycle episodes from 2017 to 2025, factor by factor, and compared winners with losers. The result is brutal.

Hence the first principle of this codex. Always ask two separate questions. The first one: is the project good? Then the second: is there still price discovery left to make? Only the second decides the trade. The first works as a filter, never as an engine.

The unit of analysis is the episode, not the ticker

The same coin can be an excellent call and then a terrible one. OctaSpace at $0.35 in August 2023 rose about x6.9 to its peak of $2.43 on 9 July 2024. The same OctaSpace at $1.75 in September 2024, after its first arc, then lost about 96% of its market cap. Nothing changed in the project; everything changed in the phase. Consequently, I now reason in project-cycle episodes: one project, in one cycle, at one phase.

At the beginning my analyses focused on a project's potential value, innovation, utility and future adoption. Today I am aware that 99% of the crypto market is short-term speculation within a bull cycle.

Personal note, "Crypto Lowcap experiences", October 2026

3. Reading the market regime

Five monthly charts are enough to situate the regime. None of them predicts anything, yet their combination tells you whether capital has started rotating toward small caps. Research builds the list; the regime pulls the trigger.

On 13 October 2026, Bitcoin traded around $83,570, about 34% below its all-time high of $126,210 set on 6 October 2025. Dominance remained at 60.4%, far above the 39% floors that accompanied the altcoin seasons of 2018 and 2021. None of the five thresholds was crossed. My verdict is therefore selective accumulation: the right time to build the list and the first micro-positions, not the time to add heavily.

4. The lowcap calendar

Lowcap peaks do not fall at random. They cluster, at variable distances from the Bitcoin halving and from the Bitcoin peak. The chart below places the cycle peak of every rise in the calibration base on a single timeline.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable. Waiting for dominance to collapse before positioning can make you miss an entire wave. The calendar must be read project by project, from the launch date and the phase, more than from the halving alone.

Seasons can be sectoral without being general

The privacy wave of 2025 proves it. Zcash rose about x20 in 89 days from August 2025, and only then did the small privacy caps follow, exactly as Ethereum used to open altcoin seasons. Meanwhile, Bitcoin dominance stayed high.

Three lessons emerge. The leader opened the season. Second acts stayed modest (Firo x8.6, Pirate Chain x6.2), except for nearly dead coins with empty order books (Ycash x44, Zclassic x53): brief parabolas, impossible to capture without already being there. Above all, every season has a locomotive, a larger project that attracts attention and implicitly sets the ceiling of its followers. Watch the locomotive every week: when it breaks, the followers usually break with it.

5. The hunter's clock after a peak

The hardest part of a cycle is not the rise. It is what follows: absorbing a setback, finding the energy to start over, and above all selling the failed bets of the previous cycle instead of letting them freeze capital, attention and hope. My archives are clear on this point. The positions I carried from edition to edition cost me more than my selection errors.

Note the second lesson of this table. The delay between launch and peak shortened sharply in 2023: 5 to 19 months, against 27 to 32 months in 2021. In short, the wave came faster, so the advantage of being early grew accordingly.

Where to search

• Where projects are born: the Bitcointalk Altcoin Announcements board, the "new coins" pages of pool statistics, mining profitability calculators, GitHub repositories.
• Where attention starts: X accounts that post rarely but well, project Discord and Telegram servers, miners' channels.
• Where first discovery happens: the incubator exchanges of the moment, then the first intermediate rung.
• What to look for: a narrative in formation, tokenomics that will have issued most of the supply before the window, a team that manages the speculative vehicle, a launch timed with the cycle.

6. The eight phases of a new lowcap

Every new PoW lowcap I have followed for ten years goes through the same eight phases, even when it skips or compresses some of them. The figure below draws the path of the median rise of the calibration base: a first push of x4.6, a retrace of 60%, a main wave of x15 from the retrace low, an echo at 65% of the peak, then a median decline of 98%.

7. What 51 proof-of-work rises say

The calibration base contains only proof-of-work coins launched as lowcaps or that became lowcaps, in the same register as my research: privacy, CPU and GPU mining, fair launch, useful compute. For each rise, the base is the cycle low before the peak; a "push" is any rise of at least x2 from a low, interrupted by a retrace of at least 45%.

8. Parabolas and staircases

Recognising the profile early changes everything: how long you can wait, how deep a retrace can go, and how fast you must sell.

9. The arithmetic of lateness

This is the simplest and cruellest law of the segment: the multiple still available equals the total multiple divided by the multiple already consumed. First pushes do not only cover part of the path. They set the ceiling of everyone who arrives afterwards.

The sample confirms the order of magnitude. In multi-push rises, the total multiple divided by the first push equals x9.3 in median: whoever buys at the top of the first push keeps, at best and in median, a tenth of the path of whoever was present on the base. That is also where risk peaks. Hence the only coherent answer: be present early, in the size of a micro-option.

10. The launch-price trap

The first price of a new PoW lowcap is not a reference. On NonKYC, Neurai started above $0.016 before losing more than 99%; its November 2023 wave peaked at $0.0069. BlocX printed $0.50 on 26 July 2023, then never exceeded $0.25 during its real wave in December. CoinGecko data shows that these cases are not isolated: they are the rule for launches that are over-publicised or late.

11. The smartest tokenomics of past cycles

Successful tokenomics must reconcile three contradictory demands. Distribute fast and fairly to build a wide holder base. Contain inflation early enough not to discourage buyers. Above all, make the end of heavy emission coincide with the opening of the cycle's window. A few weeks of delay can be enough to miss everything.

Six design rules drawn from these cases

1. Distribute 50 to 90% of supply before the expected window of the cycle.
2. Bring inflation below about 100% within the year and below about 30% when the wave comes.
3. Prefer frequent, progressive reductions (micro-halvings, chromatic emission) to rare shocks.
4. Keep a readable and moderate developer allocation (0 to about 20% of the block), never dominant.
5. Avoid models where masternodes lock most of the float.
6. Launch 6 to 15 months before the window, not after it opens.

Masternodes: from the narrative of 2017 to the brake of 2026

Zcoin and PIVX succeeded in 2016-2017, exactly when masternodes appeared. At the time, the feature was itself a narrative, new and hype-generating. Once that narrative was consumed, only the drawbacks remained: concentrated supply, a reduced float, little natural volume since holders let their nodes run. Today, I consider a model dominated by masternodes clearly negative. The right question becomes: who receives the reward, how much is locked, and who besides node operators has a reason to buy?

12. The Parano1d case: from crazy bet to speculative genius

Parano1d illustrates better than any other case the weight of tokenomics in the calculation of potential. An entry at $0.00185 corresponded to a tiny market cap of $8k to $10k, about 4 to 5 million coins in circulation. However, the planned emission would have taken supply to 160 or 180 million coins within two years. After about 10 million coins were distributed in the first weeks, a hard fork reduced that two-year horizon to about 39 million. The founder explains the design choices behind the protocol in our Parano1d interview.

13. Speculative fundamentals: the five ingredients of winners

In May 2020, I wrote down for the first time what I was really looking for: not the altcoins with the strongest fundamentals, but those combining objective and subjective, rational and irrational criteria that attract speculators. Our collective research sheet of September 2024 later gave it a name, pumpamentals: speculative fundamentals assessed at the same level as technical ones. No winner in my archives combines all of the ingredients below, yet each one combines at least four.

The ten-second pitch and the hybrid story

A story that does not fit in ten seconds will not travel. Nyzo had an original consensus, exemplary governance and a kept promise to return funds to its community. Outside the initial circle, nobody had a simple reason to talk about it. Zephyr, by contrast, won in 2023 because it joined two known technologies, privacy and a stablecoin, into one rare proposition. Hybrid pitches travel best: two familiar ideas, one rare combination.

Catalysts lift constraints

A real catalyst lifts one of four identified constraints: access (a new exchange rung), supply (a tokenomics change, the end of heavy emission), credibility (an audit, a delivered mainnet feature) or attention (a locomotive, a relay outside the circle). It must be measurable otherwise than by the price. The right listing, moreover, is not the most prestigious one; it is the one that opens access to the population of buyers of the moment. In 2023, skipping MEXC when it concentrated intermediate investors was an unrecoverable distribution mistake for several projects.

14. Seven failure modes, five ways to die

My disappointments were not random. They fall into seven recurring modes, and several projects combined two or three of them, which explains the severity of their trajectory.

Beyond failure modes, a PoW lowcap can die in five ways. Technical death: a halted chain, an unpatched exploit, unresolved forks. Monetary death: emission that demand can no longer absorb, or undue supply creation. Organisational death: the lead developer disappears or the organisation dissolves. Access death: blocked withdrawals, delisting, a single exchange that closes. Speculative death: the network lives, but the market no longer listens and no new audience forms.

15. The Hunter's Grid: five gates, seven criteria

For years, my grids averaged everything. A brilliant team could compensate for a consumed story, and a clever consensus could hide a toxic emission curve. The result was a good average score on projects that were dead on arrival. My Hunter's Grid works the other way round. It starts with five gates that must all be green, then ranks the survivors with seven weighted criteria, in the order that ten years of archives taught me.

The order of priority is deliberate. Narrative comes first, because it is the engine of every rerating I documented. Innovation comes second, but only as fuel for the story: my backtest showed that technical quality alone barely separates winners from losers, whereas a new, demonstrable feature gives the narrative something to say every month. The team comes third, because it feeds the story, ships the releases and makes people believe. Tokenomics then decide whether the rise is even possible, and the entry valuation decides how much of it is still yours.

Step 1 · The five gates: absolutely green, or no position

A gate is binary. Green means verified and passed. Red means eliminated, whatever the rest of the file says. Amber means "not verified yet": the project goes on the watch list, and no position is taken until the gate turns green. Being ruthless here is the whole point: the gates encode the mistakes that cost me the most.

One narrow exception exists for gate G1: the deferred first act, an older project whose great price discovery never happened (Zano before 2025). It passes only if its market cap never exceeded about $10M, and then only as a micro-option. Every other older project is red.

Step 2 · The seven criteria, in order of priority

Projects that pass the five gates are then scored from 0 to 5 on seven criteria. The weight converts each score into points, for a total out of 100. Notice what is absent: daily volume and liquidity. Volume sizes the order; it never chooses the project.

Step 3 · The verdict and the size

The verdict combines the gates, the score and the phase. Size is never a matter of enthusiasm: it follows the table below, then shrinks if too many uncertainties remain open.

16. What will go wrong anyway: the uncertainty register

Even a project with five green gates and a score of 90 carries uncertainties that no analysis can remove. Development can stall, a release can slip by months, a hard fork can introduce a bug, a hack can create coins out of nothing, a founder can leave, a Discord can be hacked. Pretending otherwise is how investors end up surprised. The professional answer is not to avoid uncertainty, but to price it through size and to watch it on purpose.

The rule is simple. Each month, count the ambers. With three or more, halve the size of the position, whatever its score. A single red triggers the kill switch. In other words, uncertainty does not decide whether a project is good; it decides how much of your capital is allowed to depend on it.

17. Entry valuation without equations

Forget formulas. Three numbers are enough: today's price, today's circulating supply and the supply expected in twelve months (from the emission schedule or the explorer). With them, you can answer the only valuation question that matters before buying: if this project becomes a winner, is there still room for a large multiple?

Three questions, in plain words

1. What will the market cap be in a year if the price does not move? Multiply today's price by the supply in twelve months. That is the real starting point, because dilution raises the cap even when nothing happens.
2. What market cap would a x20 require? Multiply that diluted cap by twenty.
3. Have past winners ever reached that level? Compare it with where PoW winners stopped: about $40M for the floor, $100M for the median of a selective regime, $270M for the upper quartile.

Take an example. A coin trades at $0.01 with 100M coins in circulation and 250M expected in a year. Its cap is $1M today, but $2.5M in a year at the same price. A x20 would then require $50M: within the band of past winners, so gate G4 is green. The same coin at $0.05 would require $250M for a x20: possible only for an upper-quartile winner, so G4 turns red in a selective regime.

The cap at first listing tells you who already got paid

The market cap at which a project first appears on an aggregator is a decisive clue. A coin that lists directly at tens of millions has spent its discovery at birth: early miners and insiders hold the multiple, and latecomers fund their exit. That is exactly what the launch-price trap of chapter 10 measured. Always ask at which cap the first public price was printed, and measure everything from the base that followed, never from that first print.

18. How far can it go? Two simple readings

Two different questions deserve two different readings, and neither needs a formula.

Reading A: where the winners stopped. If this project becomes one of the winners of the cycle, which market cap did comparable PoW winners reach? I use four levels, and I place each project on one of them according to its narrative, its innovation and the speed of its first move.

Reading B: the typical steps of a rise. From the base, a first push usually brings x4 to x8. A retrace of about 60% follows. Then the main wave adds x9 to x30 from that retrace low. If the first push was already huge, assume the main wave will sit in the lower half of that range.

When both readings agree, the target is robust. If they disagree, the more modest one becomes the working target, and the higher one becomes an option, kept only with a small residual. Time matters too: a parabola that makes no new high within about four months has probably ended, and a staircase whose next step is late by more than six months loses its status.

19. Diagnosing the phase comes first

The best demonstration of this chapter comes from my own archives. Two lists, drawn up by the same analyst with similar grids, produced opposite results. The difference lies almost entirely in the phase of the projects at the moment of selection.

The speculative fundamentals of September 2024 were often excellent: Zephyr and Nexa were rated very well positioned. They could do nothing against a consumed phase and a regime without rotation. That is precisely why gate G1 now eliminates them before any score is computed.

20. The analysis routine, step by step

1. Freeze the data on one date: price, circulating supply reconciled with the explorer, supply in 12 and 24 months, market cap, exchanges.
2. Run the five gates. One red ends the analysis; one amber sends the project to the watch list.
3. Score the seven criteria from 0 to 5, starting with the narrative.
4. Locate the base (the consolidated low after the launch compression) and measure how much is already consumed.
5. Diagnose the phase with the clues of chapter 19, and the probable profile: parabola or staircase.
6. Check the entry valuation with the calculator: diluted cap in a year, cap required for a x20, position against the band.
7. Read how far it can go with the two readings of chapter 18.
8. Fill in the uncertainty register and count the ambers.
9. Read the verdict and the maximum size; halve it with three ambers or more.
10. Write the plan before buying: split entry, sales in market cap, kill switch.

Worked example: Project X (fictional)

Project X is a PoW coin launched five months ago, with no premine. Its consolidated base sits at a $60k market cap. A first push took it to $600k (x10), then a 50% retrace brought it back to $300k, a low held above the base: the project is in P4. Current supply is 10M coins, 18M in 12 months and 21M in 24 months.

21. The entry price, phase by phase

As an illustration only, here are the size categories I use: a micro-option up to about 0.5% of risk capital, a trial position about 0.5 to 1%, a conviction position about 1 to 3%. Two ratios complete the entry decision. Daily volume divided by market cap tells you how much you can buy or sell without becoming the market. Emission divided by volume, in turn, tells you whether new supply is absorbed: above 30 to 50%, the miners are the market, and the price can only rise if an outside buyer arrives.

22. Selling in waves

The durations and multiples of Part III serve first and foremost to sell. Below is an example of structure, not a universal rule. Write it before buying, then adjust it to the profile.

23. Kill switches: the thesis has an exit door

A thesis without an invalidation condition is not a thesis. Concretely, a kill switch is a precise fact, written before buying, that makes you sell everything without discussion.

• Broken base: the P4 retrace exceeds about 75% or breaks the P2 low.
• Time exceeded: no new high after twice the typical duration of the profile.
• Emission not absorbed: supply doubles, the price halves and volume falls.
• Access cut: a single exchange closes or suspends withdrawals.
• Technical incident: exploit, unresolved fork, undue supply creation.
• Extinguished narrative: the theme no longer circulates outside the initial circle.
• Vertical without relay: x10 or more in a few days without verifiable news on a dormant coin. Sell into the rise, never buy it.
• Late copy: a fork or clone of a winner launched after its first push. Do not enter.

24. The grief of the cycle, and the restart

Every cycle ends with a moment few people talk about. The bull market is over, often on a setback for small caps, and everything must start again. Three things are required, in this order. First, sell all the failed lowcap bets of the previous cycle, which are almost always in failure, instead of letting them freeze capital and hope. Next, write the post-mortem of the cycle: what worked, what did not, and why. Then rest, and get back to work early enough to spot the new wave before its first pushes.

The third obstacle is the most underestimated. Analysing a new project takes hours: documentation, explorer, code, community, emission. Re-evaluating a known project takes minutes and offers the comfort of familiarity. My successive editions show it: the list barely renewed itself as long as the market did not force me. The novelty premium, however, is the most powerful engine my backtest measured.

The biggest obstacles to success aren't the market: emotional attachment to your bags, sunk cost and confirmation bias, the laziness to dig into new projects every cycle.

Post on X, 2026

25. Fifteen biases, read in my own writing

Cognitive biases are rarely visible in your memories, but they show very clearly in your own texts. The table below relies only on wording written at the time, each bias paired with the antidote that now exists in my method.

Attachment, the most expensive cost of my career

The Zcoin episode deserves to be told plainly, because it contains everything. My position went from $0.4 to $120. I did not sell. The bear market took it back to $4. I finally sold, not because a rule told me to, but to detach emotionally and be able to buy Pirate Chain, which then did about x600. The final rotation was the right decision. What cost me dearly was everything before it: no exit plan at the top, then the paralysis that prevents reallocating.

Loyalty is a virtue. Not in your portfolio.

Post on X, 2026

The halo effect and the affinity bias

My most optimistic sheets almost always concern the most competent teams. The reasoning was always the same: a good team will not disappear, so the investment carries little risk. Yet the survival of a project says nothing about the price paid, the dilution to come or the existence of future buyers. Similarly, I have defended financial privacy since 2016, and I will continue whether projects rerate or not. My archives show, though, that this conviction sometimes dictated my rankings. The formula that closes this chapter was born from that observation.

26. Being right too early is being wrong for the trade

In 2019, I already cited Snowblossom ("quantum resistant") and Mochimo ("post-quantum currency"). The quantum narrative only became a market theme in 2025-2026. Being right seven years too early is being wrong for the trade. The freshness of a story is not measured by its accuracy, but by the market's receptiveness at the moment you buy.

The opposite trap exists too. Equilibria did about x740 from low to high in October 2021, in my table of the largest pumps. I honestly attributed it to a chance encounter with a pump group: "pure luck". A good outcome from a bad reason is not a skill, and treating it as one is how the next mistake is prepared. Judge your decisions by the process at the moment of the decision, not by the result alone.

27. What I would tell the investor of 2016

I would give him no ticker. Instead, I would ask him one question: which part of this story has the market not heard yet? I would tell him that the best technology rarely wins the cycle, that the crowd always arrives but never where the price is still low, and that the projects he loves most are often those he will have to let go first.

I would also tell him to write three lines before every purchase: why now, at which market cap I sell part of it, and which fact would make me sell everything. Those three lines would have spared him his biggest losses, and they would not have cost him any of his finest successes.

28. The 2026 cycle in practice

On 13 October 2026, twelve months after the Bitcoin peak, the market remains in selective accumulation. Yet the PoW micro-caps of my research universe have woken up. Most of them touched their low between mid-August and late September 2026, then accelerated in October. Meanwhile, the two projects embodying the new stories opened the way: Pearl, useful proof of work applied to AI, printed a new high at a $570M market cap, and Quantus, a post-quantum PoW, went from $13.90 to $170 between 13 September and 9 October.

That is the signature of a sectoral season, exactly like the PoW wave of 2023 and the privacy wave of autumn 2025. It does not depend on dominance, but the regime will set its amplitude. The hunter's clock places us at the junction of two phases: the wave of PoW launches (6 to 18 months after the peak) and the first pushes on incubators (12 to 30 months).

The projects I follow, their dated snapshots and their scenarios are published and updated in Project Watch, and you can compare your own expectations with the community in The Cycle Call. For the deeper mechanics of asymmetric returns, read The Hidden Anatomy of Asymmetric Lowcap Returns and Before the Crowd.

29. The twenty questions before any purchase

1. Have I sold all the failed bets of the previous cycle, and written its post-mortem?
2. What is the market regime today according to the five signals?
3. How many months since the previous peak, and has the launch wave begun?
4. Which narratives are forming, and which ones are already consumed?
5. What is my thesis in one dated sentence, without mentioning a future peak?
6. Does the pitch fit in ten seconds, and could a miner repeat it without betraying the technical truth?
7. Has the market already paid for a large price discovery on this story?
8. On which rung of the L0-L5 ladder does the project stand, and how many "first times" remain?
9. What will supply be at 12 and 24 months, and which market cap requires a x20, a x50, a x100?
10. Will most of the emission be behind the project when the window opens?
11. Who receives the daily emission, and where is it sold? Do masternodes lock the float?
12. What is the base, as opposed to the launch price?
13. In which phase is the project, and is it a parabola or a staircase?
14. How much is already consumed, and does a x20 still fit within the band of past winners?
15. Are all five gates of the Hunter's Grid green, and what score do the seven criteria give?
16. Which feature is live on mainnet, and which one is still only an announcement?
17. Who maintains the code if the lead developer steps away?
18. Which size can I take without depending on a single exchange or crushing the order book?
19. Are my sales written, in market cap, before buying?
20. Is my kill switch written, and are my coins off exchanges between operations?

30. Twenty-two rules of the lowcap hunter

The whole codex, condensed into rules you can reread before each decision.

Rules of analysis

1. Always separate the quality of the project from the price discovery that remains.
2. Reason in project-cycle episodes: the same coin can win one cycle and fail the next.
3. Look for the story the market has not heard yet, not the best technology.
4. Demand a ten-second pitch that can be repeated without betraying the technical truth.
5. Calculate supply at 12 and 24 months before looking at the chart.
6. Convert every target into a required market cap and compare it with real winners.
7. Treat inflation as a cost of time, not as a veto.
8. Prefer low remaining supply at the start of the cycle to a "fair launch" label: the launch date is part of the tokenomics.
9. Treat a model dominated by masternodes as a brake: concentrated distribution, dried-up liquidity.
10. Classify promises as announcement, test, mainnet and production.
11. A catalyst must lift an identified constraint and be measurable otherwise than by the price.
12. The right listing opens access to the buyers of the moment; it is not necessarily the most prestigious.
13. Use volume to size your orders, never to choose a project.

Rules of discipline

14. Read the market regime before adding: research builds the list, the regime pulls the trigger.
15. Write your sales before buying.
16. Write the fact that would make you sell everything, then apply it.
17. Redo every thesis on a blank page once a year, as if you were discovering the project.
18. Never leave your coins on an exchange.
19. Always distinguish fact, model, statement, inference and gap.
20. Conviction on the cause, discipline on the trade.
21. After a peak, sell the failed bets, turn the page and resume analysis within six months.
22. Enter before the first push as a micro-option: the remaining multiple equals the total multiple divided by the consumed multiple.

31. Test your reflexes: eight situations

Knowing the rules is easy; applying them under pressure is not. Before reading each answer, decide what you would do.

Glossary

Formulas, for the curious

Methodology and sources

The base of each rise is the cycle low before the peak, and the peak is the cycle high (cycles: 2016 to mid-2019, mid-2019 to 2022, 2023 to 2026). A push is any rise of at least x2 from a low, interrupted by a retrace of at least 45%. The echo is the highest point reached within 18 months after the peak, following a first retrace of more than 50%, expressed as a percentage of the peak. Market caps are those published by CoinGecko on the day of the peak, when they exist. CoinGecko only tracks a coin from its first listing on a referenced exchange, so incubator debuts often escape measurement: that is why Neurai shows x22 rather than about x200.

• Daily prices and market caps: CoinGecko, complete histories of 60 PoW coins, collected 13 Oct 2026.
• Aggregated all-time highs: CoinPaprika, collected 13 Oct 2026.
• Monthly charts BTC/USDT, BTC.D, ETH/BTC, OTHERS.D, TOTAL3: TradingView, 13 Oct 2026.
• Bitcoin peak at $126,210 on 6 Oct 2025: KuCoin News.
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, Article 79: EUR-Lex.
• Crypto Lowcap archives: annual presentations 2019-2024, workbooks 2023-2024, collective sheet of 12 Sep 2024, the 2021 pump history, the August 2026 backtest, the asymmetric-potential scoring files, the Price Entry Framework, Project Watch and the published articles.