Bitcoin is still warming the bench, hoping for some impactful time in the game, hoping it doesn’t get cut from the team. Meanwhile, the Render token has been surging again.

More on that in a sec, but first a news item for those interested in the crypto hardware wallet drama that ruffled industry and market feathers just recently.

Ledger, the company that makes the cold-storage, self-custody-enabling hardware crypto wallets Ledger Nano S Plus, Ledger Nano X and Ledger Stax, has announced it is pausing the rollout of its controversial service Ledger Recover.

This is after Charles Guillemet, Ledger’s CTO, hosted a Twitter Spaces forum and “town hall” meeting on the subject, noting feedback and criticisms from members of the cryptoverse at large.

Last week, Ledger caused a stir when it announced the new optional feature Recover – a private-key recovery service that would enable Ledger users to backup their private seed phrase, linked to their personal ID via three different custodians.

For most hardware wallet users, this feature flies in the face of the very idea for purchasing a Ledger wallet in the first place – private, self-custody of assets, inaccessible from third parties. The backlash was strong.

Ledger has now announced a pause on the feature, and has published an “open source roadmap”, in which the firm aims to take a more verifiable approach to its products and upgrades.

Meanwhile, another CTO – David Schwartz over at Ripple – has some suggestions for Ledger, that centre around the very fair-enough idea of creating “two firmware streams, one with Recovery and one without. Ship the firmware without Recovery.”

The rest of his suggestions are pretty good, too.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.17 trillion, up about 0.5% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

About this time yesterday, Bitcoin (BTC) was struggling a bit, below US$27k. At least, for the moment then, it’s retained a previously quite strong support level at about US$27.2k.

The popular Crypto Twittering analyst Rekt Capital still believes $27.6k is the “key resistance” to crack, but is seeing potential for some “exaggerated Bullish Divergence” on the daily Relative Strength Index (RSI) momentum indicator. And that’d be a good thing.

Another full-time crypto chartist, Michaël van de Poppe, meanwhile thinks Bitcoin might just be more correlated to the price movements of the “safe-haven” asset gold than anything else amid macroeconomic uncertainties right now.

 

Uppers and downers: Render up again

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)

Render (RNDR), (market cap: US$993 million) +13%

Kava (KAVA), (market cap: US$630 million) +10%

• Toncoin (TON), (market cap: US$2.98 billion) +10%

Huobi (HT), (market cap: US$511 million) +8%

ImmutableX (IMX), (market cap: US$767 million) +5%

Pepe (PEPE), (market cap: US$674 million) +4%

 

Render (RNDR), the utility token for Render Network, is on a bit of a run lately, up 13% over the past 24 hours, +41% over the past week and +60% across the past month.

As a provider of decentralised, GPU-based rendering solutions, the project plays into the metaverse narrative that quite a lot of non-crypto people we speak with tend to think is dead.

The Ethereum-based RNDR token facilitates payments for animation, motion graphics, and VFX rendering within its network.

The project might be pumping, in part, due to a new release that it claims will improve its rendering workflow process, creating a more efficient user experience.

There’s something else, though, that may well a rise once more in metaverse projects given the right bull-market conditions, if you’re inclined to hefty speculation.

And that’s the rumour that Apple will be launching, potentially within the next couple of months, a “mixed reality” headset to the market.

The Twitter account @FomoCatchers certainly seems to think this supposed event/release could trigger a surge in the crypto market, specifically around the metaverse and web3 gaming sectors…

It’s a food-for-thought, deeply speculative thread…

 

PUMPERS (lower, lower caps)

Ben (BEN), (market cap: US$57 million) +52%

SelfKey (KEY), (market cap: US$49 million) +33%

• Evmos (EVMOS), (market cap: US$88 million) +25%

• Waves (WAVES), (market cap: US$193 million) +20%

• Conic (CNC), (market cap: US$27 million) +18%

 

SLUMPERS

GMX (GMX), (market cap: US$506 million) -3%

Conflux (CFX), (mc: US$663 million) -2%

Bitcoin SV (BSV), (mc: US$660 million) -2%

Sui (SUI), (mc: US$556 million) -1%

 

SLUMPERS (lower, lower caps)

Ovr (OVR), (market cap: US$29 million) -17%

Turbo (TURBO), (market cap: US$28 million) -17%

Energy Web (EWT), (market cap: US$113 million) -7%

 

Around the blocks

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