Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
The crypto market’s bearish decline in June began to show signs of recovery this week as positive news revived investor interest in a variety of altcoins.
The most important of these coins is Solana (SOL) – one of the largest cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).
The latter assets lost another 5% and 3%, respectively, over the past week as another old-school Bitcoin whale decided to take profits while the market was on the upswing. In contrast, SOL rose an impressive 6% this week to over $142 as VanEck filed the first-ever application for a US-based Solana ETF.
VanEck’s logic was simple: If regulators consider Ethereum an ETF-worthy asset, then surely Solana also meets all the necessary criteria. This is a widely held bullish thesis for altcoin investors yearning for the Wall Street inflows that Bitcoin ETFs enjoyed earlier this year. And 21Shares followed up on Friday with its own Solana ETF announcement, continuing the excitement.
The same enthusiasm was also sparked by alternative runners-up among smart contract platforms, including Cardano (ADA), Avalanche (AVAX), and Polkadot (DOT), which also rose by about 5.5%, 11%, and 7%, respectively.
Meanwhile, Telegram-linked Toncoin (TON) has recovered some of its gains from earlier in the month after a sharp correction last week, rising over 5% in the past seven days and has now successfully overtaken Dogecoin as the ninth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Another coin that posted market-defying gains this week was Kaspa (KAS) – one of the top 25 cryptocurrencies by market cap, which exploded 23% this week after Marathon Digital announced it was mining the cryptocurrency. The miner has produced $15 million worth of KAS since September 2023, with its dedicated ASICs generating gross profits of 95% in some cases.
Blast (BLAST) has been in the spotlight of traders this week as the token pegged to Ethereum’s Layer 2 network finally launched alongside a sizable airdrop that infused $354 million into users. However, there was some disappointment in the crypto Twitter chat as larger amounts were expected for early backers.
Nevertheless, the airdrop did indeed enrich many users and BLAST started to recover after significant sell-offs. It is currently 29% below this week’s high and is priced at nearly $0.021, giving it a market cap of around $360 million.
However, political meme coins were probably the most volatile this week. Following President Joe Biden’s widely perceived disappointing debate performance, the Solana-based token Jeo Boden (BODEN) plunged 52% in a single day – along with Biden’s chances of re-election, at least according to crypto bettors.
Donald Trump, who many crypto advocates considered the winner of the debate despite his persistent untruths, also saw a price collapse of his token “Doland Tremp” (TREMP) late Thursday night and Friday, but it is still up 13% week-on-week.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for information purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment or other advice.
