Summer flings
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 16th August 2024.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
Don’t invest in crypto unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.
What’s up
Pair Of Altcoins Get Lift From Grayscale Treatment
Newly launched single-asset funds tied to Sui (SUI) and Bittensor (TAO) have helped give these coins a spot price jolt.
Both the Grayscale Sui Trust and the Grayscale Bittensor Trust launched on Aug. 7. In the one-week period following the introduction of these over-the-counter (OTC) products (aimed at high-net-worth investors), the spot price of TAO, 44th-largest coin, gained 10% while No. 38 SUI's price surged 47%.
"Bittensor is at the center of the growth of decentralized AI, while Sui is redefining the smart contract blockchain," said Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Grayscale’s head of research, vowing that the firm would continue to provide investors with products that enable access to cutting edge tokens.
SUI's percentage gains were recorded as exceeding triple digits as of the earlier part of this week. But it pulled back some by Wednesday morning.
Both trust vehicles have pricey management fees of 2.5%. The TAO fund, as of earlier this week, had garnered more than $1 million while the SUI fund claimed assets of $650K.
What's down
RUNE Weathers Hard Month With Help From Its Friends
A popular DeFi platform for cross-chain token swaps, THORChain (RUNE) enjoyed a mid-August pop owing to the spirit of collaboration. Among THORChain's recently announced partnerships is one with fellow DeFi liquidity provider Kujira, as well as arrangements with SwapKit and Noble to integrate stablecoins into the mix, also a move aimed at enhancing liquidity while at the same time making THORChain's AppLayer more user friendly (The Coin Republic).
And while RUNE has had a nice run of late – it's now CoinGecko's 61st-largest token, with a market cap of $1.3 billion – the past month has been something of a slog.
RUNE has shed 8% over roughly the past month.
What's next
AI Coins Await Potential ‘Mic Drop Moment’
Artificial Intelligence juggernaut Nvidia is set to report earnings later this month. Although NVDA shares have shed $900M worth of combined value since their June peak, there is a highly enthusiastic analyst, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, predicting a tantalizing scenario surrounding the reveal of future prospects.
Because when Nvidia announces earnings on August 28th, "you will be able to hear a pin drop on Wall Street," Ives wrote on X.
Ives painted a picture of traders listening with rapt attention to the utterances of Nvidia's CEO Jensen "Godfather of AI" Huang.
Huang, Ives said, will give insights on the demand trajectory for AI chips into 2025 – and it will be massive.
"We believe it will be another drop the mic moment for tech,” Ives added.
A cadre of AI-related cryptos could use some fresh positivity.
Looking at the past one month, there's been some serious bruising of the largest coins connected with the fast-dawning age of computer programs that can think like humans.
For example, Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET) has lost one-third of its value since mid-July. The biggest AI-related coin is Near (NEAR) which lost about 25% over the past month. The Near blockchain project, per the Near Foundation, seeks to scale up user-owned AI, globally. To that end, Near's team, per The Defiant, launched an initiative to incubate a native AI infrastructure.
The protocol's co-founder, Illia Polosukhin in a blog declared: "We do not want to live in a world where a few mega-corporations control the most powerful human resource.”
