Morning Coinheads and welcome to another week in the wacky world of web3 – namely Bitcoin, Ethereum and an ever-increasing array of altcoins of vastly differing quality.

One of the latter you may have heard of is meme coin $PEPE, which has been on something of a tear over the weekend. What the frog? We’ll look at that briefly in a sec, but firstly, something a with a little more… gravitas.

Payments giant Mastercard has announced a new web3 solution that aims to bring more trust to blockchain transactions.

Announced at the big crypto conference Consensus, which has been happening in Austin, Texas over the past few days, the firm has dubbed the program ‘Mastercard Crypto Credential,’ and it will be focused on improving the reliability and security of cross-border, international crypto transactions.

Mastercard’s head of crypto products and blockchain Raj Dhamodharan noted on stage at the conference, as reported by the event’s sponsor CoinDesk, that the firm is creating a “service designed to ensure transactions between users’ wallets are verifiable and compliant”, beginning with transfers of digital assets between countries.

The new service uses tech developed by CipherTrace, a blockchain analytics firm acquired by Mastercard in 2021.

Here, check out the professional-looking, banky-corporate promo for Crypto Credential, in which the firm outlines it’s “building a way for web3 and blockchain service providers to help secure transactions between users, verified according to standards set by Mastercard.”

For its new web3 initiative, Mastercard is collaborating with prominent blockchain entities including Ethereum scaler Polygon Labs; Aptos Labs; Ava Labs (Avalanche); and The Solana Foundation.

Moving on to some daily and weekly price action…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.26 trillion, up about 0.2% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

 

Binance’s exchange token has grabbed the ball over the past 24 hours, for some reason – some increased trading activity on the world’s biggest crypto exchange by trading volume, I guess. 

That said, it’s still largely about the number-one crypto, Bitcoin (BTC) at the moment, which has seen a small rise in the Bitcoin Dominance chart over the past week, which now places the asset at 45.3%. It’s a percentage value that’s based on Bitcoin’s current market capitalisation divided by the total crypto market cap.

Long story short: when BTC’s dominance stat trends higher, it tends to mean money is flowing away from the altcoins and into the relative safety of the bull goose crypto. 

Perhaps that’s to be expected at the moment, ahead of a potentially volatile event this week, in which the US Federal Reserve is set to announce its next rate-hiking decision. A 25bps hike seems to be “priced in” if you believe the consensus we’re seeing on Crypto Twitter and in various media. But it’s the tone from Jerome Powell – dovish or hawkish – that will likely matter most with regards to market reaction.

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)

• Casper Network (CSPR), (market cap: US$689 million) +6%

• BitTorrent (BTT), (market cap: US$624 million) +4%

• Trust Wallet (TWT), (market cap: US$493 million) +2%

• Render (RNDR), (market cap: US$869 million) +1%

 

PUMPERS (lower caps)

• Pepe (PEPE), (market cap: US$321 million) +69%

• IDEX (IDEX), (market cap: US$69 million) +23%

• AIOZ Network (AIOZ), (market cap: US$25 million) +12%

 

Right then, the meme coin PEPE, based on (but not necessarily officially connected to) a frog character created by cartoonist/animator Matt Furie, is surging again. Big time.

So that’s at least one frothy coin that’s doing its level best to keep the recent mini altcoin season running.

“The most memeable memecoin in existence” is currently up about 69% (an appropriately memey amount) over the past 24 hours and more than 135% over the past seven days.

The hype and FOMO is real, with tweets out there like this citing “generational wealth” based on not much more than a pic of a cartoon frog and hopium it could be the next Dogecoin or Shiba Inu…

The power of the meme can be a significant thing for those taking a chance at the riskier end of the crypto casino, of course, especially when someone with the influence of Elon Musk grabs hold of it.

Best to remember, though, it’s very, very easy to rug yourself chasing the hype on every latest shiny coin, particularly the meme-tastic ones.

 

SLUMPERS

• ApeCoin (APE), (market cap: US$1.43 billion) -4%

• Frax Share (FXS), (mc: US$550 million) -4%

• Radix (XRD), (mc: US$1.03 billion) -4%

• Aptos (APT), (mc: US$1.96 billion) -4%

• Cronos (CRO), (mc: US$1.84 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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