Meme cryptos surprise and delight

All investments and trading are risky and may result in the loss of capital. Cryptoassets are largely unregulated and are therefore not subject to protection.

As of early Wednesday, the two biggest mover-gainers on the crypto ledger were Shiba Inu (SHIB) and ApeCoin (APE).

SHIB, on the back of its new Robinhood listing, at one point in the wee hours before dawn had shot up about 20% over 24 hours. As of 8:15 a.m. (EST), SHIB was +7%. Much of the rest of the crypto market was flat to sluggish.

APE gained 4%. It may or may not tie in but there is this: Bored & Hungry, a Bored Ape Yacht Club-themed burger restaurant, just debuted in California, and it takes APE (Decrypt).

As it lost its grip on $40K on Tuesday, Bitcoin also saw volatility waning as well. Altcoin activity, on the other hand, is a curious jostle-up of mildly jarring motions.

Several well-known alts are in the 24-hour green place as of Wednesday at 7:15 a.m. (EST). Sixth-largest digital ducat XRP gained 0.5% to $0.71. No. 20, MATIC, native asset of smart contract platform Polygon, rose 1%. Litecoin (LTC) rose almost 2%.

And we’ll give some space to Filecoin (FIL), a decentralized storage network and CoinGecko's 39th-largest asset, and which had socked away a +0.4% return as of late Tuesday afternoon, playing the role of green shoot in spring and at least momentarily defying the somber vibe that had descended on markets.

A check of FIL as of 7:30 a.m. (EST) had it dead flat at about $19. FIL has declined roughly 28% in the past fortnight and is down 89% from this time last year.

Meanwhile, Ethereum has a soft green glow over 24 hours, rising 0.5%, but not so its main rivals.

Solana (-1.9%), Cardano (-1.4%) and Avalanche (-1.3%) are all in the red relative to this time yesterday and all down double-digits percentagewise over the past week.

Last week, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson met with Snoop Dogg to hype their collaboration with Clay Nation on the launch of some non-fungible token (NFTs), thus formally ushering in the era of clay animation on Cardano.

Yesterday, during a YouTube video address to the ADA community, Hoskinson had something else to tout up, what he referred to as a "major, major, major hard fork combinator event."

It's set for June, and it is called the Vasil hard fork. What has Hoskinson so excited is the expected performance enhancement said to be coming with the introduction of "pipelining."

In plumbing or surfing, the gist of the term pops to mind. In blockchain, though, it's a bit of a mind bender. Pipelining – or more precisely, diffusion pipelining – is an improvement to the consensus layer that facilitates faster block propagation, Hoskinson said.

Ah, okay, so it enables gains in headroom. We get that concept, having learned it the hard way, driving a camper van out of an underground parking lot. In blockchain, blocks, lots of them, navigate across the chain in sequenced steps that diffusion pipelining reconfigures, overlaying some of the steps so they happen concurrently, saving time, allowing for more large camper vans stuffed with transaction data to more speedily wind their way out of the garage and on to the open road.

But why is it called the Vasil hard fork? It's named in honor of Bulgarian blockchain guru Vasil Dabov who recently passed away (CryptoGlobe).

This past September, Virgil Griffith, a former Ethereum developer, pleaded guilty to his role in a conspiracy to help North Korea use crypto to evade international sanctions. Sentenced yesterday, Griffith will serve 63 months in prison and pay a $100,000 fine. He was arrested in November 2019 after giving a talk at a conference in Pyongyang that prior April.

The judge in the case read a series of text messages and emails from Griffith in which he admitted to sharing information with the repressive regime with the express purpose of helping it evade sanctions, according to CoinDesk.

Top NFT marketplace OpenSea takes a 2.5% cut of each transaction. Its rival LooksRare charges 2%.

Apple's App Store hits developers with a 30% charge.

Meta's total fee for sales made through the Meta Quest Store? A whopping 47.5% all in, after including hardware platform fees and partner Horizon Worlds' sizable taste.

Some in the NFT community are outraged (CNBC). “If Meta wants 47.5% of NFT sales they gotta talk to the IRS," one creator griped. "Because I don’t even have that after taxes.”

One Twitter user chimed in, “I hate you Facebook.”