Algorand and XRP are the crypto assets making the biggest moves over the past week. The former related to its FIFA NFT partnership, the latter still riding on court-case positivity. Meanwhile the Optus data hacker digs Monero.

More on those things further below.

The week is well and truly underway here in Australia, but at the time of writing Bitcoin, and the rest of the crypto market, is only just “closing” out its week elsewhere. Some folks seem a little nervous about it.

What is this crypto market “close”? Isn’t crypto the financial market that never sleeps? Yep, that’s right, but for the sake of charting and technical analysis (also known as mumbo jumbo to the vast uninitiated), it’s generally accepted that the daily and weekly close occurs at midnight UTC. And it’s imminent.

Bitcoin is back under US$19k and, according to Cointelegraph as well as other analytical minds, BTC’s latest weekly close looks set to be the lowest since 2020 if it remains around its present level.

Trading account Crypto Yoddha expressed the week ahead’s importance for shaping the crypto market’s direction…

While economist Alex Krüger seems to think things could get a little worse in the short term before a pretty nice, potential bounce. If that’s an accurate assessment, then, well – enjoy the ride.

Dutch trader Michaël van de Poppe, meanwhile, is looking at the continued macro/soaring inflation effects that have really found an extra gear in the past week or so.

Onto some daily price action and other happenings.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$963 billion and down about 1% since yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

A Bitcoin weekly close below US$18,800, then and so far a slowish bleed into the week for the crypto majors… except for XRP.

The crypto industry’s most prominent currency-rail project continues to grab the headlines, the analysis and speculation, and the gains at the moment. And, judging by this tweet from an XRP community member, it continues to grab the attention of whale investors, too.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100 – Algorand and FIFA NFTs

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$7.46 billion to about US$386 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

• Tokenize Xchange (TKX), (market cap: US$599 million) +8%

• Maker DAO (MKR), (mc: US$638 million) +5%

• ApeCoin (APE), (mc: US$1.8 billion) +5%

• Algorand (ALGO), (mc: US$2.7 billion) +3%

• Cosmos Hub (ATOM), (mc: US$4.1 billion) +3%

• Chainlink (LINK), (mc: US$3.87 billion) +3%

 

Algorand is a proof of Stake layer 1 blockchain and competitor to the likes of Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, Avalanche and more. It may not be leading the daily price action in this category, but it’s been doing extremely well over the past week.

In fact, it’s up more than 32% over seven days, at the time of writing.

Why? The fact that it has an official partnership with FIFA to launch World Cup NFTs might have something to do with it!

The International Federation of Association Football has now launched its NFT marketplace FIFA+ Collect. And it’s built on the Algorand blockchain – a massive coup for the layer 1 project.

Last week, FIFA introduced its “Genesis Drop” NFTs containing notable football highlights (in the form of art/imagery) from FIFA history. The drop was launched with 532,980 editions, with each containing three such moments.

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Terra Luna Classic (LUNC), (market cap: US$1.4 billion) -13%

• Celsius Network (CEL), (mc: US$612 million) -8%

• Ravencoin (RVN), (mc: US$446 million) -6%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: US$1 billion) -5%

• Arweave (AR), (mc: US$470 million) -5%

 

Around the blocks: Optus hacker wants Monero payment

A selection of randomness and pertinence that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse…

As reported by Alex Turner-Cohen for news.com.au, a person “claiming to be the evil genius responsible for the Optus data breach” has demanded more than AUD $1.5 million in ransom money from the telco – to be paid in the crypto “privacy coin” Monero (XMR).

The hacker claims to have gleaned important data about roughly 11.2 million Optus customers, including names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and even some ID document numbers.“Optus if you are reading! price for us to not sale data is 1.000.000$US We give you 1 week to decide,” part of their message reads on the forum.

According to the report, the ransom demand appeared on a forum early on Saturday morning and experts so far seem to think it’s legitimate.

Why Monero? The XMR token is widely considered the leading privacy coin in crypto. These are highly decentralised and controversial assets as they use privacy-enhancing technology to obfuscate transactions and transaction history, thus achieving a level of anonymity that makes its users very difficult to trace.

Needless to say, privacy coins are generally not popular with governments.

 

Speaking of governments and things that are hugely controversial, though, it’s interesting to watch Russia’s evolving stance on cryptocurrency.

Moscow Exchange (MOEX), the largest exchange organisation in the country, is reportedly looking to enable trading in digital financial assets (DFAs) and securities trading based on a set of bills currently being put together.

The Bank of Russia has also reportedly been considering the possibility of legalising crypto for the purpose of international/cross-border payments in the near future.

Meanwhile, Washington is still figuring out its stance but is “increasingly changing its perspective on crypto”, according to the Coinbase exchange’s chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad.

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