New crypto star on rise

Record-breaking heatwaves, much of the planet consumed by flames – no time like the present for Worldcoin to debut its WLD token.

The project, co-founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman, launched on a slew of big exchanges and promptly sapped all available oxygen out of the digital markets. CoinGecko earlier this morning had WLD encroaching on $2.80 after it spiked 60%.

Altman's Worldcoin Foundation began rolling out (outside the U.S.) WLD, which is billed as a blockchain-run crypto underpinned by a wallet featuring eye-scanning technology.

Worldcoin, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Reid Hoffman, among other venture capitalist firms, wants to put a WLD-bearing wallet on everybody's phone, as TechCrunch explained. But to pull it off securely, they're also seeking to build a way to determine whether each user is indeed a unique human.

"While Worldcoin’s rollout comes as AI takes major strides forward – such as OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT last year – it also coincides with an unprecedented period of tumult for digital tokens and the broader crypto sector," the FT said.

“Worldcoin is perhaps one of the most audacious efforts to bribe the world to embrace their currency,” TechCrunch added.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter spawned a snap-launch memecoin that pumped and dumped after meme investors turned their attention to something else.

Over the weekend, Twitter's bird logo was nixed; also, the platform is no longer called Twitter.

Strangely enough, Bitcoin sat comfortably above $30,000 as recently as yesterday afternoon. For at least a few hours, BTC became the giant boulder from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," reclaiming its key level. And then it caved.

As of Monday morning at 8:26 a.m. (EST), the largest crypto was changing hands in spot markets for about $29,200, hardly a doom spiral (-2.4% in 24 hours), but an unsteady gait, to be sure. Key support currently sits at $29.5K, said Tom Wan, analyst, 21Shares, per Forkast.

The total crypto market fell 1.7% in the past day. All of the Big Ten coins are down, save for Dogecoin. No subset has been spared. Memes, DeFi, metaverse, all of them are red hued. We spied XRP dipping below $0.80 at 7:29 a.m. (EST). It has declined by 6% since Sunday morning.

Earlier this month, after Ripple declared victory in a legal case brought by regulators, XRP seized the spotlight.

But it's not quite a summer blockbuster.

And now regulators seem to be signaling they have only begun to fight.

A judge gave Ripple a split-decision, ruling that the company did not violate U.S. securities laws in offering its native token XRP to retail investors. As far as a separate offering to institutional investors, the judge ruled it was another story altogether – that Ripple did run afoul of laws in that instance, as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had claimed in its complaint.

According to new documents filed in the Terraform Labs case, the SEC is hinting that an appeal to the Ripple ruling is impending (Decrypt).

XRP remains up 47% in the past two weeks. Large holders are viewed as either buying or sitting tight, Lookonchain said.

"XRP is now probably one of the strongest coins in the market in terms of fundamentals," CryptoNews said. "But it may actually take some time to see significant price appreciation, especially when its initial post-SEC rally appears to be over."