Morning Coinheads. Thank Fantom it’s Friday, even if some/many/most of us did have a day off in Straya yest. And speaking of Fantom (FTM), it’s up, like Aptos (APT), like several other top altcoins these past few days.

We’ll check in with some of those a bit further down.

As for the crypto pace-setter in chief, though – Bitcoin is still hanging in there, fluctuating around the US$23k level, still giving both bulls and bears a sniff. It’s basically one big gingery tease.

Seems like as good a time as any then to take a quick look at market sentiment. The good ol’ Crypto Fear & Greed Index – a popular tracker based on the following metrics: volatility (25%), market momentum (25%), social media (15%), surveys (15%), coin dominance – mainly Bitcoin (10%) and trends (10%).

Source: alternative.me

“Neutral” might sound a bit meh, a bit confusing. But we’ll definitely take it right now. In fact, Neutral, tipping slightly into green citrus, is practically the crypto market frothing in excitement compared with where we’ve been recently – a sentiment horror show for several months.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.08 trillion, up about 1% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Well look at that – the highly popular layer 2 scaler Polygon (MATIC) has reclaimed it’s rightful (according to it, probably) position in the top 10 – ahead of Solana (SOL) and OKB.

Why is this interesting. It isn’t, massively. But you can’t keep a good Polygon down for too long. This project was a major climber last bull run and has been on a partnership spree for months.

Finding the next Polygon might be something to keep an eye on. Layer 2s, such as Arbitrum, Optimisim and various zk-rollups-related protocols might all be in the running for that title. That said, Polygon itself could still be a solid play. Not financial advi… ah, you know.

Back to BTC for half a sec, we quite like this little hypothesis from US chart obsessor Justin Bennett. A dash more hopium for the crypto crack pipe, anyway.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$9 billion to about US$403 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

• Fantom (FTM), (market cap: US$1.25 billion) +24%

• eCash (XEC), (mc: US$818 million) +23%

• BTSE Token (BTSE), (mc: US$503 million) +6%

• Aave (AAVE), (mc: US$1.26 billion) +5%

• VeChain (VET), (mc: US$1.72 billion) +4%

 

Fantom, eh? What’s the deal there? The mid-tier top 100 layer 1 blockchain is up 65% over the past week. There are several reasons for this, but the biggest overnight news for the project is this – an “interchain” communication announcement that pushes the Fantom cross-blockchain interoperability cause.

And that’s something every layer 1 is trying to meaningly solve, in order to connect blockchain ecosystems and further the true potential of universal, borderless, frictionless cryptocurrencies.

Fantom is collaborating with a firm called Axelar in order to achieve this.

Well, that’s one potential catalyst for the recent surge, anyway. The head of marketing at the Fantom Foundation has a few more…

Meanwhile, it’s not on our daily pumpers list, but it’s worth noting another Ethereum rival’s performance this week – Aptos (APT). It’s up 138% over the past seven days, and 244% over 14.

Why? Partly because it’s one of the buzziest new entries into the increasingly crowded layer 1 smart-contract platform arms race. And partly because it’s developed by former Meta techies.

Also, the Binance exchange has been bigging it up for various reasons, including the announcement of an “Aptos World Tour” – multiple conferences and developer meetups, as well as NFTs becoming more popular on the Aptos chain… and Binance’s two new Aptos liquidity pools.

Plenty happening, then. Also, erm, the Aptos founder, Mohammad Shaikh, looks like this:

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Lido DAO (LDO), (market cap: US$1.91 billion) -7%

• Optimisim (OP), (market cap: US$475 million) -6%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: US$530 million) -4%

• Cosmos Hub (ATOM), (mc: US$3.8 billion) -4%

• Quantum (QNT), (mc: US$2.17 billion) -3%

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

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