Bitcoin and the crypto market’s little pump yesterday is still intact but not everyone’s convinced it has the oomph to push much higher, especially if the corresponding stocks surge taps out first.

While the S&P 500 (-0.56%) and tech-heavy Nasdaq (-0.46%) continue to be the leading indicators for the entire crypto market, it makes sense to check in on them fairly frequently, along with the US dollar Index (+0.14%).

So far today, we’re not seeing a continuation of Friday’s positive market action on stonks. That may or may not keep crypto in its place. With that in mind, Bitcoin is holding the mid US$31.5k level pretty well since it jumped above it about 20 hours ago. In fact, in the space between these sentences, it just made another break for it…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at roughly US$1.38 trillion, up 3.9% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Before we get back onto crypto-market barometer Bitcoin, we’d best talk about Cardano. The smart-contract platform is the clear daily and weekly winner in the majors right now.

Its native token ADA is now the sixth-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of US$21 billion, overtaking Ripple’s XRP.

Is it simply recovering stronger because it’s been a particularly “oversold” asset, down around 80% from its September peak of US$3.09? Possibly, but there’s been a spike in DeFi activity on the Cardano network over the past day, so there’s that.

DeFi Llama, one of the leading sites that tracks decentralised finance activity, shows that Cardano’s TVL (total value locked) increased by more than 30 per cent over the past 24 hours.

Perhaps the increased activity has something to do with the Cardano-hosted protocol iagon launching a cross-chain bridge to enable token transfers between Ethereum and Cardano. The bridge supports USDC for now, but will apparently soon open up to all Ethereum-based tokens.

As for the big dogs Bitcoin and the Merge-tastic Ethereum… are they leading the relief rally various crypto commentators are pointing to?

It seems to be happening. But relief rallies can merely be a short-ish term respite, obvs. M_Ernest is one of several wary analysts we’re noticing on Crypto Twitter…

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$11.4 billion to about US$563 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

• Waves (WAVES), (mc: US$874.6 million) +40%

• Axie Infinity (AXS), (market cap: US$1.95 billion) +20%

• Kava (KAVA), (mc: US$592 million) 17%

• Near Protocol (NEAR), (mc: US$4.2 billion) 9%

• Curve DAO (CRV), (mc: US$562.8 million) 8%

GameFi OG Axie Infinity’s surge today seems to be related to the project revealing the first 12 projects accepted into its Builders Program for user-generated Axie content…

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Terra Luna Classic (LUNC), (mc: US$856 million) -17%

• Everdome (DOME), (mc: US$572 million) -6%

• Evmos (EVMOS), (market cap: US$624 million) -3%

• Tezos (XTZ), (market cap: US$1.87 billion) -2.5%

• Monero (XMR), (market cap: US$3.5 billion) -2%

 

Around the blocks

Meanwhile, goblintown.wtf, a free-to-mint 10K generative profile-pic NFT collection created by a sweary, incoherent, so-far anonymous team, has today hit a floor price of 4 ETH. No utility, no roadmap – wtf indeed. Apparently Val Kilmer’s got one, though…

Back on blockchain-gaming projects again for a sec – recently we dug into the developing 4X city builder game Civitas with its project lead Kent Byers. Today, it launched its the first of its whitelisting opportunities for interested participants…

 

Read MoreBitcoinCryptocurrencyEthereum

You might be interested in