Welcome to another week in Bitcoin and altcoin speculation, quite possibly with a side of meme coin-fuelled market hopium.

Speaking of the latter, though, the meme coin insanity has cooled off a good deal since late last week, which isn’t particularly unexpected. It’s a volatile game, betting on/trading crap coins.

That’s not to say the froth’s totally gone or that it won’t bubble up again.

Part of the reason “frog coin” PEPE pumped late last week and into the first half of the weekend, was the fact the crypto exchange Binance listed it for trading in its “innovation zone”, along with another meme coin, FLOKI.

Dumpage has been known to shortly follow exchange-listing pumpage.

But traders who focus specifically on this unique brand of non-utility, memey tokens will still be finding ways to make money from them in the lulls. Traders such as POE.eth, who featured in an enthusiastic chat with the widely followed crypto influencer and hype merchant Ran Neuner the other day.

POE spends most of his day, every day, trading (not investing, let’s make that clear) in meme coins. Some of his recent successes include $PEPE, $BOB, $LAMBO and others he was able to find using @DEXToolsApp, among other places.

That’s not a hint, of course, to go out and ape into any of those, or any crypto for that matter. The boat on those may, or may not have been missed – although it’s eternally difficult to gauge.

As another popular Crypto Twitterer, Miles Deutscher points out, “You can think of meme coins like the games at a casino, and the L1s like Ethereum + exchanges as the house.”

And the house always wins in the end. Meaning, in this instance, that meme coin profits tend to flow back to the likes of the bigger cryptos – largely Ethereum.

Deutscher’s thread (above) is well worth a read if you do intend to dabble in the crypto meme coin casino end of what’s already a risk-on market as a whole. He details how to:

• monitor which coins are performing

• verify a token’s culture

• research fundamental reasons for buying

• strategise into niches

• follow the smart money (whales, in this instance)

 

Bitcoin meme coins?

Meanwhile, we’re noticing hunters of meme coin sugar-rush hits heading a slightly different direction and away from Ethereum and over to Bitcoin just at the moment. Yep, Bitcoin.

The OG crypto network now has a new token standard similar to ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, called BRC-20, which allows fungible tokens to be deployed on the Bitcoin blockchain via Ordinals inscriptions, which you can read more about here.

The upshot is, it’s caused a network-congestion frenzy on the Bitcoin blockchain, sending transaction fees to the highest point they’ve reached in two years.

Part of the reason for that is because meme-coin hype appears to have shifted its way to the Bitcoin network.

This thread from Alex Wacy covers the basics on how to begin exploring BRC-20s, although we’ll also dig into it with Apollo Crypto in an upcoming Apollo’s Alpha column.

Incidentally, if you’ve been trading in and out of Bitcoin on Binance lately, you may have noticed that the global exchange temporarily paused its withdrawals of the No 1 crypto. And this was due, apparently, to the unusually large Bitcoin network congestion.

As CoinDesk reports, on-chain data showed there were nearly 400,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions at one stage – higher than anything seen during the bull runs of 2018 and 2021. It’s being put down to the adoption of BRC-20 tokens driving up transaction levels and, consequently, transaction fees.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.23 trillion, down about 0.5% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

 

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)

• Stacks (STX), (market cap: US$1.02 billion) +5%

• Pepe (PEPE), (market cap: US$1.14 billion) +5%

• Render (RNDR), (market cap: US$783 million) +4%

• Radix (XRD), (market cap: US$887 million) +4%

 

PUMPERS (lower, lower caps)

• Forta (FORT), (market cap: US$63 million) +59%

• DinoLFG (DINO), (market cap: US$46 million) +39%

• Dejitaru Tsuka (TSUKA), (market cap: US$45 million) +39%

 

SLUMPERS

• Sui (SUI), (market cap: US$653 million) -7%

• Kaspa (KAS), (mc: US$453 million) -5%

• Curve DAO (CRV), (mc: US$716 million) -3%

• Toncoin (TON), (mc: US$3 billion) -2%

• Near Protocol (NEAR), (mc: US$1.56 billion) -2%

 

SLUMPERS (lower, lower caps)

• Ribbit Meme (RIBBIT), (market cap: US$20 million) -32%

• ArbDogeAI (AIDOGE), (market cap: US$89 million) -12%

 

Around the blocks

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

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