Sonic boom

Sonic (S), the token previously known as Fantom, is out of the shadows and scarily surging. 

An EVM-compatible, layer-1 chain positioned as a player in the burgeoning DeFi infrastructure space, Sonic boasts $400M in total value locked (TVL), up from less than $40M at the start of the year,  according to DeFi Llama. One of the dApps in the Sonic ecosystem is Silo Finance, a lending protocol, which saw assets rise 20% to $134M over the past week. Stoking interest in the network perhaps is the 6% yield that stakers of S can get, said Crypto News, pointing out, by way of comparison, the 2%-3% yields available on Ethereum and Sui. Sonic apparently also hopes to eventually become a player on the memecoin scene.

S has a total market capitalization of $1.8B, making it the 64th-largest token, according to CoinGecko. As of Monday, S had risen 10% in 24 hours to $0.57. On a weekly basis, S is up 40%.

Among Top 100 coins, two other top weekly performers, Mantra (OM) and Kaspa (KAS), stand out. They each gained about 20% since last Monday. 

Cardano (ADA) is up 14.5% over the past week, reaching $0.80, largely on the back of Grayscale ETF hype. Some analysts insist ADA needs to show it can stay above the $1 mark which was last hit in mid-January. ADA hit $1.23 on Dec. 6. 2024, about one month after the U.S. elected a crypto-friendly president. ADA's chart pattern cries out for a higher high, or at the very least an $0.83 handle, said one trader, Sssebi, posting on X. “Otherwise, we could be forming a head and shoulders,” he warned.

Traditional securities markets in the U.S. are closed in observance of President's Day.

After promoting a Solana-bred token, Libra (LIBRA), Argentina's crypto-friendly President Javier Milei finds himself confronting a backlash, including calls from the opposition for his impeachment. On-chain analysts are calling the episode a "massive insider scam," Cointelegraph said.

LIBRA spiked massively and collapsed catastrophically just between Friday and Saturday, prompting Milei to issue a statement on X that said in part: "I was not aware of the details of the project."

According to a later statement issued yesterday by Argentina’s Oficina del Presidente, Milei has requested the Anti-Corruption Office to investigate all government members, including himself, for potential misconduct. Back in October, per that statement, Milei did take a meeting with KIP Protocol representatives who at that time informed him about the Libra blockchain project and its aims to finance private ventures in Argentina.

Argentine lawyers have filed fraud complaints against President Milei, one of the lawyers told The Associated Press.

Bitcoin has been hugging $96K-$97K for going on two weeks now. It's been a fortnight of fret over uncertainty connected with the macro environment, specifically the risk of inflation.

And while the U.S. crypto task force's ongoing effort to explore the possible creation of a national BTC stockpile may or may not prove to be a meaningful catalyst, such a move could spur similar efforts worldwide, Wall Street researchers said.

In a research report released today, a team of Berntsein analysts said that "creation of a U.S. BTC reserve could lead to a global race amongst sovereigns to buy BTC as one of the reserve assets."

As far as how the U.S. reserves specifically might come about, the analysts spelled out one plausible scenario in which the Federal Reserve, pending necessary legislative approval, issues debt and/or sells some gold (CoinDesk).