Down, down, prices are down. That includes a hefty array of local and international stocks, the US buck and crypto. Most definitely crypto. Any good news? We’ll dig up some.

Actually, you’d think the falling US dollar (-0.28% today) mightn’t be such a bad thing for the historically inversely correlated crypto market. That’s not playing out just at the moment, though.

 

A luxury of crypto payments

Before we look through fingers at the price action below, howz about some crypto-adoption bites?

French luxury brand Balenciaga has announced that, starting next month, it will begin accepting Bitcoin and other cryptos as a form of payment, according to a report by Women’s Wear Daily.

Select US stores and the brand’s website will trial the crypto payments before potentially rolling it out further across other locations.

This actually comes after Gucci (which belongs to the same parent company as Balenciaga, Kering) announced an extremely similar crypto-payments pilot in flagship US stores, as reported by Bitcoin Magazine.

Both companies are apparently looking at this as a long-term play and have metaverse-based plans. Gucci already, for instance, owns digital land within The Sandbox platform.

So, besides overpriced handbags and whatnot, what else is new that you can you spend your flagging Bitcoin on this week? Another luxury item, as it turns out. Swiss watch brand TAG Heuer is now accepting crypto payments in the US via a partnership with payments processor Bitpay.

According to a press release, a dozen different cryptos can be used to buy yourself up to US$10,000 of timepiece-tastic…ness per transaction. Those include Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Dogecoin (DOGE) and various top stablecoins (nope, not TerraUSD).

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at roughly US$1.31 trillion, down 4.1% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Crypto top gun Bitcoin (BTC) dipped as low as US$28.7k an hour or so ago (at the time of writing), although it’s made a pissant V-shaped recovery and is now back trading just above US$29k again.

The move down corresponded with a less-than-inspiring Wall Street open, with the S&P 500 (-1.86%) and Nasdaq (-3.20%) both firmly still in the 24-hour red as this is typed.

As far as Bitcoin is concerned, though, Dutch crypto trader/analyst Michaël van de Poppe has been calling it well today, predicting the lower move.

That said, in the last few minutes, BTC seems to be having another crack at breaching that US$29.4k he’s talking about in the tweet below…

Maybe the next time BTC breaks US$30k it can form slightly stronger support than this…

Maybe.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$11 billion to about US$565 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

• TRON (TRX), (market cap: US$7.7 billion) +7%

• Tezos (XTZ), (mc: US$1.85 billion) +2.5%

• Ethereum Classic (ETC), (mc: US$3.2 billion) 2%

• Radix (XRD), (mc: US$879 million) 1.5%

• Stacks (STX), (mc: US$608 million) 1%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Fantom (FTM), (market cap: US$1 billion) -16%

• Loopring (LRC), (mc: US$682 million) -13%

ApeCoin (APE), (mc: US$2.1 billion) -13%

• Terra (LUNA), (mc: US$1 billion) -13%

• Avalanche (AVAX), (mc: US$7.7 billion) -11%

 

Uppers and downers: lower caps

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

DAILY PUMPERS

• Mirror Protocol (MIR), (market cap: US$55 million) +69%

Beta Finance  (BETA), (mc: US$72m) +47%

• Astar (ASTR), (mc: US$254m) +24%

• XDEFI (XDEFI), (mc: US$17m) +20%

Akropolis (AKRO), (mc: US$12m) +15%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

 Gods Unchained (GODS), (market cap: US$22m) -24%

Augur (REP), (mc: US$72m) -22%

• OpenDAO (SOS), (mc: US$17m) -21%

Rook (ROOK), (mc: US$36m) -17%

API3 (API3), (mc: US$91m) -17%

 

Around the blocks: This and that… and goblintown NFTs

Not too long ago, Stockhead chatted with Kent Byers about the “4X” X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate) Ethereum-based strategy game he and his team at Directive Games are working on. It’s called Civitas, and the news is, whitelist investment spots are being made available for it very soon.

If interested, you can join its Discord group – see below. (Absolutely not financial advice, of course.)

Degenning around in goblintown

To finish… an extremely high-risk degen play for anyone willing to chance their arm at the NFT casino. (Which, again, is 100 per cent no recommendation.)

A new, 10k generative PFP (profile pic) project called goblintown.wtf has sprung up over the past couple of days and it’s created a good amount of Crypto Twitter buzz.

This one was a “stealth release” with a free mint that’s now fully snapped up and selling at the floor price of 0.58 ETH at the time of writing.

Yep, that’s roughly US$1,100 for a pic of a goblin with apparently no utility. And you’d be buying into a project with no roadmap and no Discord group, according to its website. It does have a Twitter page, though.

Here’s an interesting thread about it…

 

Next Bored Ape Yacht Club success story? It’s doubtful anything is the next BAYC at this stage of the bear market. So, is goblintown probably nothing? Yes… probably.