Like an old Billy Ray Cyrus video you’ve probably forgotten about, Bitcoin bootscooted along sideways in boring, tepid, repetitive fashion over the weekend. At least it hasn’t done a Joe Biden and fallen off the podium. (At this stage.)

Meanwhile, some altcoins have been seeing a bit more interesting action – some green shoots perhaps that revolve around a particular re-emerging narrative. And that’d be the metaverse.

What, you thought it was dead? Nah, although, before we start being too deterministic about it one way or another, it’ll be interesting to see how the impending release of Apple’s “mixed reality” headset goes.

Because that seems to be the buy-the-rumour catalyst for this web3 sub-sector’s spurts of price action just recently.

And it’s not just Apple who’s in the hunt in this field. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have poured a LOT of investment into this area over the past year or so, and are not giving up. In fact, Zuck got ahead of the big fruit and unveiled his company’s latest VR reality headset late last week – the Meta Quest 3, promising higher resolution and quality.

But it’s Apple’s ‘Reality Pro AR’ headset that appears to be creating the most buzz among the web3/crypto community and general tech fiends. And that can be put down to the reputation of Apple as a tech-sector definer, as well as its past history of huge success with hardware releases.

Apple’s reveal is reportedly taking place on at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC23) at Apple Park in California, which runs all this week, from June 5-9.

Pseudonymous Crypto Twitter account, EvanLuthra.eth, certainly thinks metaverse tokens could be due a run on the back of a surging Apple tech narrative. Although take what he, or anyone says on this matter, with a massive grain of salt, of course. It’s all highly, highly speculative territory.

For the TLDR record, though, the seven metaverse tokens he’s calling out are: The Sandbox (SAND), Axie Infinity (AXS), Decentraland (MANA), Wilder World (WILD), VulcanForged (PYR), Render (RNDR), and HighStreet World (HIGH).

A few of those, you can see (further below), have made some half-decent gainage over the past 24 hours or so, without absolutely mooning at this point. Most are still well, well down from all-time highs, as are most cryptos.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.12 trillion, down about 1% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Pretty flat in the crypto majors, although XRP is still ahead of the pack regarding recent gains. Any fresh news there? No, it’s still trading and trending slightly higher on the Ripple-vs-SEC lawsuit potential resolution ANY WEEK NOW (honest).

As for Bitcoin, one of the most famously bullish analysts of the coin, PlanB, says BTC is still in its “early bull market stage”.

 

Uppers and downers

Some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

PUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)

• ApeCoin (APE), (market cap: US$1.24 billion) +7%

• Decentraland (MANA), (market cap: US$938 million) +5%

• The Sandbox (SAND), (market cap: US$1.1 billion) +5%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (market cap: US$826 million) +4%

• Render (RNDR), (market cap: US$985 million) +3%

 

SLUMPERS

• Filecoin (FIL), (market cap: US$1.99 billion) -4%

• Gate (GT), (mc: US$591 million) -3%

• Pepe (PEPE), (mc: US$528 billion) -3%

• IOTA (MIOTA), (mc: US$572 million) -1%

• The Graph (GRT), (mc: US$1.15 billion) -1%

 

Around the blocks

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

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