Bitcoin continues to float about in uncertain, shark-infested territory. It can see the US dollar off in the distance, happily board riding 20-year high waves…. and all the while – out at sea – IoT crypto Helium (HNT) is deflating badly in a rubbery ducky all its own making.

But Crypto isn’t without its major positive narratives, although Ethereum’s Merge will want to be, at the very least, a technical success when it finally begins merging this month, lest it contribute to further plummeting sentiment.

But right now, for the short-term-price concerned, any little pumps seems to be held well at bay by a surging US Dollar Index, which has breached some resistance at its 109 mark and looks in the mood to storm another gate.

Here’s crypto analyst Justin Bennett’s take…

And then there’s this, too, of course…

One thing, though, the S&P 500 and Dow Jones did both manage to close in the green on the first day of September. Maybe the insomniac crypto market can also follow suit heading into the weekend…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.03 trillion and up about 0.5% since yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8.2 billion to about US$423 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

• Celsius Network (CEL), (market cap: US$589 million) +25%

• EOS (EOS), (mc: US$1.52 billion) +10%

• Evmos (EVMOS), (mc: US$727 million) +7%

• Litecoin (LTC), (mc: US$4.1 billion) +6%

• Cosmus Hub (ATOM), (mc: US$3.7 billion) +6%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS: Helium out of gas

• Helium (HNT), (market cap: US$609 million) -10%

• LEO Token (LEO), (mc: US$5.17 billion) -5%

• Chiliz (CHZ), (mc: US$1.14 billion) -3%

• Synthetix Network (SNX), (mc: US$690 million) -3%

• NEXO (NEXO), (mc: US$589 million) -3%

 

So why has Helium (HNT) been deflating over the past few days?

Firstly, what the helium is it? Well, Stockhead took a look at it last year and you can read about that here – I think you’ll find it’s incredibly well-written and not uninformative.

But if you want the quick, squeaky, high-pitched voice version… it’s a blockchain network in the IoT (Internet of Things) sector of crypto, and it uses nodes as hotspots to connect wireless devices to its network.

It’s trending downwards at the moment because of a rather significant announcement its developers made on Tuesday. Essentially they’ve put forward a proposal (HIP-70) that would scrap its own blockchain network and port the project over to major Ethereum layer 1 competitor Solana (SOL) instead.

This has clearly caught HNT investors by surprise. And token prices don’t always dig surprises. HNT is now down about 28% on the week as a result.

Still, the devs reckon it will ultimately be a net positive for the ambitious project’s overall speed, security and scalability, with potentially more HNT reward tokens distributed to the pool of node operators.

Solana’s SOL token could kind of care less about this news at the moment, by the way. Over the past 24 hours, it appears to be going for its 0% planking personal best.

 

Around the blocks

A selection of randomness and pertinence that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse…

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