BTC levels off

Bitcoin reclaimed some lost ground even as most cryptos are sorely reddened. BTC stood at $97.6K as of Tuesday at 8:33 a.m. (EST). It's essentially flat over 24 hours. But BTC's in better shape compared to late Monday afternoon.

A few coins are solidly green today. Among this select cadre is the recently launched DEX, Hyperliquid, fresh off a massive, well-received airdrop. The project has seen its HYPE token rise 10% in the past day to $14. HYPE's record high, reached a few days ago, is about $15. HYPE is up nearly 300% in less than a fortnight. Its market capitalization now exceeds $4.6 billion.

Meanwhile, another come-lately DeFi player, Solana Swap, saw its native SOS shoot up 13% overnight to $3.73. SOS is the 65th-largest token with a market capitalization of $2.4 billion.

But the most noteworthy movement of the past 24 hours has to be the Movement Foundation's launch of the MOVE token connected with Movement, an Ethereum scaling solution rooted in the Move programming language. MOVE already has a market cap of nearly $1.7B, making it the 82nd-largest token.

After thrice bobbing above $100K over the course of a few topsy-turvy days, Bitcoin went right ahead and plunged to below $95K in the late part of yesterday afternoon. Around the same time, Google announced Willow, a quantum computing chip. Quantum computing has long loomed as something of a crypto boogeyman, conceptually representing a processing superpower that could in theory make encryption methods obsolete.

But concerns about Willow are unfounded, experts told CoinDesk. That's because the chip, while impressive, is still not nearly powerful enough to pose a risk. It's more of an experimental opening foray, if anything, the experts said, delving into the complexities of speed relatively.

The total crypto market capitalization has dropped 4% in 24 hours to $3.62 trillion.

“Historically, these dips have been followed by swift recoveries," a CoinSwitch analyst told Decrypt, referring to expectations for fresh capital to seek out oversold tokens.

Among the big altcoins battered and back on their heels are Cardano and XRP, each down 8% since this time yesterday.

A slew of coins that we've covered regularly are slipping further away from CoinGecko's Top 100 but remain in the Top 200. These include Turbo, Notcoin and Ordi. The latter was once heralded as the first-ever "BRC20" token, a novel type of Bitcoin derivative. Ordi (ORDI) has plunged from $95 this past March to now barely $35. It's down 20% in the past day.

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), AI16z is a project that, on the one hand, has been labeled as a memecoin, playing off the name of a famous VC fund, but which, on the other hand, according to Decrypt, has the potential to trifle the status quo in Silicon Valley.

First a word about that famous VC fund. Launched as an early-stage investing firm in 2009 in Menlo Park, Calif., Andreeson Horrowitz (aka "a16z") gained notoriety backing companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Airbnb. In more recent years, the firm has placed its angelic hands into the digital asset realm, taking stakes in OpenSea and Axie Infinity.

"AI16z has nothing to do with Marc Andreeson or the rest of the a16z crew other than the play on the name," Decrypt said. "However, the VC giant is likely aware of, and royally pissed off by, possible confusion created."

Seeking to flip the script on how crypto communities are built and run, two-month-old AI16z is all in on the notion of relying on AI to make purely data-driven financial decisions. An AI agent, "AI Marc," is in charge of investing a fund (which has $6M in assets under management, supposedly), scraping data, workshopping ideas, executing decisions -- and it can invest in its own token, AI16Z, which in just a brief period has amassed a market capitalization of roughly $560M, making it the 184th-largest crypto. It's $0.53 as of this morning following a gain of 55% in the past week.

The project is not just using AI to disrupt VC; it's also having a go at the underpinnings of decentralized autonomy. "Unlike traditional DAOs, where token holders vote on each decision, AI Marc serves as both the brains and the operational engine of the organization," Decrypt explains. "The real Marc Andreeson] probably envies that authority."