Market slides, snoozes

Majors and memes alike got slapped around on Friday after unexpectedly robust employment numbers came out, reviving talk of the Fed not cutting rates later this year. Some $400 million worth of leveraged Bitcoin and Ethereum futures positions were liquidated that day. The rest of the weekend, from the standpoint of watching the movement of the biggest assets, proved a long summer's nap.

As of Monday, at 7:36 a.m. (EST), BTC was $69,300, motionless and uncaring whatsoever about the $70K mark. And if ETH had its eye on $4K, well, that kind of level jump would seem to be very much on hold for the moment.

A couple of coins, Kaspa (KAS) and Pepe (PEPE) among them, have registered slight (2%-3%) gains in the past 24 hours. Pepe is coming off a tough week.

The biggest gainer we can see is Mantra (OM) which is a project billing itself as a beehive of tokenization-infrastructure activity for the Cosmos ecosystem. OM, 105th-largest digital asset, spiked 10% to above $1. It happened after some reports of an agreement to collaborate with a bank in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) seeking to create a framework for bringing real world assets (RWAs) to the blockchain under the supervision of Dubai's regulatory regime, or something to that effect, anyway.

And check out Pepe's cousin, Brett (BRETT). It hit an ATH yesterday. BRETT has gained 130% in the past two weeks. However, it's down 11% in the past 24 hours. With a market capitalization of nearly $1.7 billion, BRETT sits within the ranks of the Top 75 coins and has emerged as the blue darling of CoinBase's Base Chain.

Whether because of meme connotations or just its role as a plus-sized crypto, Dogecoin has taken some extra lumps of late.

The ninth-largest digital asset was firmly 16 cents last week at this time. Today, DOGE is 14 cents and sliding.

Crypto at large sold off on Friday in the wake of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealing that 272,000 jobs were added in May, which was more than most economists forecast.

The mother of all meme stocks, meanwhile, is all over the map. GameStop (GME) plunged by as much as 40% on Friday even as Keith "the kitten that roared" Gill took his touting to a new level via his first YouTube livestream in three years. GME was actually rallying in pre-market trading on Monday as of 8:45 a.m. (EST).

And while DOGE is slightly down over the past 24 hours, another memecoin of size, Shiba Inu (SHIB), is flat. Checking the frogcoin, Pepe (PEPE), we find the No. 26 crypto likewise is trading sideways. This comes after a brutal week (down 17% in seven days).

PEPE has lost 27.7% since hitting its all-time high of $0.00001717 roughly a fortnight ago. Staying with the larger memecoins, there's Floki (FLOKI), which hit its ATH five days ago but has since shed 23%.

If Ethereum is a congested highway, as it is often described, then layer-2 chains can be thought of as a series of side streets, tunnels and skywalks.

As crypto spring rolls onward – led by a convoy of publicly traded ETF vehicles but also a freewheeling meme scene – traffic certainly is rerouting to Base, Coinbase's "L2," recently establishing itself as more than a mere cog on the rim.

According to BeInCrypto, Base's total value locked (TVL) has surpassed $8 billion. The $1B mark was reached this past February. Base, launched in August of 2023, trails only Arbitrum in terms of layer-2 TVL. Arbitrum One has TVL of $18B.

In addition to meme mascot Brett, Base boasts a $40M-in-market-cap memecoin, Normie (NORMIE), which has wildly fluctuated in recent weeks in the wake of an exploit incident owing to a compromised smart contract.

Regarding such vulnerabilities, Ryan Lee, chief analyst at Bitget, told BeInCrypto that as more complex smart contracts are developed to meet the increasing number of user requests, the “vulnerability risk associated with highly complex code is also gradually increasing."

Scammers and regulators will find blockchain back roads irresistible; still, experts are mapping out an extensive journey for Ethereum layer-2 scaling networks, including Arbitrum, Base and Optimism. This whole sector, per VanEck analysts, is expected to reach a combined $1 trillion market cap by the end of the decade.