Bitcoin has been holding strong above US$42k for several hours, at the time of writing, after a choppy opening to the week for the stock markets. Nevertheless, there is a Fed-related reason to remain cautious in the very short term.

The US Federal Reserve is holding its “emergency meeting” today to discuss its approach to the highest level of US inflation in 40 years.

And that meeting will likely already have occurred by the time you read this, which may or may not put the market updates in this article in extreme danger of being extremely out of date, extremely quickly.

No matter what happens, though – accelerated rate hikes or not, short-term price dump or not – the prevailing “stack sats” (buy BTC) mentality is as strong as ever in the crypto community right now…

And pushing aside fundamental factors, there seem to be quite a few full-time traders and analysts spotting bullish signs on the charts today. For instance, TechDev…

… and “BTCfuel” (although with a handle like that, it’s probably to be expected)…

That’s all well and good, but as “Bitcoin Charts by Mick” points out, the US$40k-42k remains a critical “pivot point”. The bulls vs bears arm wrestle is still very much in the balance for now.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap up about 0.7% over the past 24 hours, here’s the state of play in the top 10 by market cap right now – according to CoinGecko data.

Source: CoinGecko.com

Winners and losers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$20 billion to about US$990 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time.

DAILY PUMPERS

• Mina Protocol (MINA), (market cap: US$985.8 million) +8.5%

• Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), (mc: US$4.3b) +5%

• NEM (XEM), (mc: US$1b) +4.7%

• Nexo (NEXO), (mc: US$1.18b) +4%

• Gala Games (GALA), (mc: US$2.24b) +3.8%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Radix (XRD), (market cap: US$1.6b) -7%

• Crypto.com (CRO), (mc: US$12.2b) -6%

• Elrond (EGLD), (mc: US$4.2b) -4.5%

• Dogecoin (DOGE), (mc: US$19.5b) -4%

• Humans.ai (HEART), (mc: US$1.34b) -3.5%

 

Lower-cap winners and losers

Moving below the crypto unicorns (in some cases well below), here’s just a selection catching our eye…

DAILY PUMPERS

Ellipsis (EPS), (market cap: US$148m) +27%

FEG Token (FEG), (mc: US$297m) +26%

SelfKey (KEY), (mc: US$25m) +21%

• Neos Credits (NCR), (mc: US$62m) +21%

• Beta Finance (BETA), (mc: US$170m) +18%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

Smart Valor (VALOR), (market cap: US$18.4 million) -19%

• API3 (API3), (mc: US$210m) -13%

• Vader Protocol (VADER), (mc: US$145m) -12%

• LooksRare (LOOKS), (mc: US$524m) -12%

• Klima DAO (KLIMA), (mc: US$65m) -10.5%

 

Final words

Oh, and let’s finish on something you can sink your teeth into if you haven’t already…

If you’re interested in the “play and earn” side of crypto, our recent GameFi explainer article will give you a pretty broad overview, while we also cover off 10 top play/earn games set to drop in 2022 here.

Sascha Zehe, the CEO and co-founder of GameFi platform and gaming guild Polemos made a salient comment today about the sector…

From what we’re seeing, there are plenty of quality-looking blockchain games being built right now that very much have a focus on the “fun games first, earning second” ethos.