Mooners and Shakers: Surge sees crypto smash back through $900B market cap in a matter of minutes

Good morning coinheads, and welcome to the second-last working day of the week… a day that more than a few of us spend with one eye on our workload, and the other on the calendar as we will ourselves forward – step by weary step – towards Friday and the alluring prospect of a weekend on the couch.

Overall, the crypto trading hasn’t exactly been fast and furious – but a sudden surge this morning has seen the overall market cap driven 2.7% higher, blasting through the psychologically important $900 billion market cap milestone.

And by “sudden surge”, I mean sudden… This entire intro had to be completely re-written this morning, because in the time it took to pull today’s Mooners column together (about 90 minutes), the 24-hour total market cap gain moved from +0.7% to +2.7%, with about $40 billion in value added to the market in that short span of time.

Broadly speaking, the major market players have their needles in the green this morning; BTC is up 2.9%, ETH is pushing hard against a resistant market, climbing 4.0% and XRP is pushing even harder still, adding 6.5% over the past 24 hours.

Flare has clawed back some of the ground it lost over the previous 24 hours, climbing 13.3% but still well below its original value when it was airdropped to XRP holders, who promptly dumped them and sank the token more than 70%.

And Bitcoin SV is that fastest faller this morning – for reasons that we’ll get to in a moment.

Robinhood gearing up to bounce Bitcoin SV

Totally, 100% legit stock trading app Robinhood has announced that its customers have until 25 January to offload or remove any Bitcoin SV (BSV) they’re holding on the platform, as Robinhood is planning to delist it.

Why? Honestly, with Robinhood, who really knows? … aside from the people at Robinhood, who have offered a typically opaque statement on the matter.

“We have a rigorous framework in place to help us regularly review the crypto we offer on Robinhood,” the company said. “While we do not discuss the process for assets on an individual basis, based on our latest review, we’ve decided to end support for Bitcoin SV.”

BSV is currently experiencing some value woes – probs because everyone’s flogging it off before the Robinhood deadline, falling sharply overnight by around 8.5%, earning it the morning’s Most Rapid Loser award, leaving it about $69 lower since this time last year.

Gala off the boil after Hollywood superstar projects revealed

There have been a number of eyebrows raised quizzically overnight, after newcomer Gala Games’ token appeared to surge on news that the company was working on several projects that include Mark “I used to be much funkier” Wahlberg and The “Dwayne Johnson” Rock.

In a now-deleted tweet, Gala Games was spotted bigging up the news that it had a couple of films on the way that are reported to have Wahlberg and Johnson attached – with that tweet arriving at roughly the same time as the company’s Gala token was enjoying a rapid rise in value.

But – and we’re not 100% sure what caused which bit to happen – but the best estimate at this point is that it looks like the general public saw Johnson and Wahlberg’s names attached to the projects, and that might have sparked a bit of a buy-in mini-frenzy.

Then, the tweet disappeared, replaced in short order by other tweets from Gala Games that were a bit more forthcoming in the details department, revealing that the two projects are feature-length documentaries (yuck), neither of which are about or star either Mr Funky Bunch or The Incredible Bulk.

And – quelle surprise – Gala suddenly came off the boil, leaving more than a few people making that terrible face The Rock makes when he does that thing with his eyebrow that he learnt during his Wrasslin’ Years.

You know… this one:

crypto Gala The Rock — Legends say that eyebrow will one day end its migration and become a proper mohawk. Pic vai Getty Images.

By way of kind-of an explanation, one of the Gala team wrote on Discord: “Out of respect to our partners at Seven Bucks (Dwayne Johnson) and Unrealistic Ideas (Mark Wahlberg), we removed a tweet that was a bit overzealous.”

At one point during the confusion, Gala was down nearly 14% and it’s currently trading 7.6% lower over the past 24 hours, but the probably-tweet-related surge still managed to spike Gala high enough that even with the recent drop, it’s still around +114% for the week.

Wallet company Ledger gets into the Web3 gaming space

Hardware wallet company Ledger has announced that it’s getting into gaming, adding blockchain game Cometh Battle to its Ledger Live app.

Ledger’s addition of the game to its app, which to date has simply been a way for users to manage their crypto assets and glance discreetly at how much monetary value they’ve got squirreled away whenever they’re feeling otherwise glum, is the next step for the company to help drive user engagement.

Those of you old enough to remember when Nokia made bullet proof cellphones and everyone went mad playing that horrendous Snake game will have seen this sort of move before – but, obviously, there’s a lot more to it than just “stick a game on it, and see what happens”.

As Decrypt describes it: “Cometh Battle is a free-to-play sci-fi digital card game that released its open beta version on Ethereum scaling network Polygon back in May 2022. Its in-game assets are NFTs that can be bought, sold, or rented.

“It’s also PVP, meaning each player is pitted against another in online person-versus-person matches, à la Activision Blizzard’s popular Hearthstone.”

So if trading card battle games are your jam, then you’re in luck – because the opportunity to sink many, many hours of your life (and possibly more than just a couple of dollars) building up your fighting deck and taking on other players is now at your fingertips… for about the billionth time.

You can check out the game itself right here – and while it may look like “just another PVP trading card game”, the tech behind it is pretty nifty.

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$918 Billion, up 2.7% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.