A sudden outburst

Autumn's chill has charmed the valley. Leaves are shading russet hues. In crypto, memecoins have turned glow-in-the dark green. 

The category's fluorescence was noticeable in the pitch-black night with Neiro (NEIRO), 123rd-largest coin, hitting an all-time high of $0.001494 just before sunrise.

Neiro is a community united around a shiba inu dog owned by Atsuko Sato, famous for also owning Kabosu, also a shiba inu, and, sadly, now deceased. While alive, Kabosu's claim to fame was inspiring the adorable but grammatically challenged canine meme that ultimately spawned Dogecoin and countless imitators/communities. Neiro's native NEIRO is at the moment as robust as any of them, soaring nearly 50% last night.

Another dog-themed coin, Dogwifhat (WIF), spiked 15% in the past 24 hours. WIF is the 40th-largest coin. Among the other memecoins rising 10% or more since yesterday are Pepe (PEPE), Popcat (POPCAT), Bonk (BONK), Mog Coin (MOG) and Turbo (TURBO).

Memecoins remain one of the hottest crypto sectors in 2024, buoyed by "vibrant social communities," CoinDesk said.

So it seems Bitcoin displayed some momentary pep during Asian hours and apparently that stirred some animal spirits. "Cat-themed memecoins continue to lead over their dog-themed counterparts and remain the preferred choice for riskier memecoin bets," CoinDesk added.

Bitcoin got near $64K late Sunday night. All of crypto seemed startled by it and not just memes but also some AI-related projects.

Monday morning thus far has been a tale of BTC endeavoring to stay above $63K and possibly going green over a trailing seven-day stretch.

Bears aren't ready to hibernate. One of the few digital investment products to experience an inflow last week, per CoinShares data, were short BTC funds. They allow investors to bet against the largest crypto. Short BTC products saw an inflow of $2.8 million (CoinTurk).

A new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) seeks to increase baseline, layer-1 efficiency, shifting at least some of developers' focus away from layer-2 networks billed as "scaling solutions."

Aside from increasing mainnet throughput, the proposal also aims to distribute bandwidth usage over time. A big part of the proposed change would be to boost the capacity of "blobs," a term for smaller, temporary containers for data within the sharding structure. Blobs have been hailed as a way to reduce fees on Ethereum tributaries.

A pseudonymous developer, Cygaar, said the new EIP would be the “huge first step improving Ethereum layer-1's performance."

Over the past year, as Cointelegraph points out, the lion's share of developers' focus has been pushed toward nurturing Ethereum layer-2s, offshoots where speed and scalability come easier.

Arbitrum, among the most prominent of these networks, is in the midst of herding the developer community in Asia ahead of a major conference in Bangkok in November.

According to Decrypt, a pair of ArbiLink events in Vietnam and Indonesia will seek to hotwire two of the fastest-growing local developer communities while the “Step Into Arbitrum” campaign invites participants to familiarize themselves with Arbitrum SDK, a set of modules for simplifying the process of utilizing Arbitrum for cross-chain bridging. A follow-up bounty campaign invites developers to put their Arbitrum SDK knowledge to use by programming some new decentralized application (dApp).

The Arbitrum Foundation said Arbitrum’s decision to “go big” in Asia owes to the region’s rapid growth in the blockchain space.