BONK boppin'

A delegation of prominent coins, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and XRP, recorded modest gains (1%-3%) heading into the weekend. But leave it to a feisty backbencher, BONK, to take the initiative to go even higher.

The Solana-run memecoin increased 9% in the past 24 hours as of Friday at 7:18 a.m. (EST). Snugly at some fraction of a penny and sitting in the rearmost echelon of the CoinGecko Top 100, BONK shrugged off a difficult past 30 days, getting its bounce on between 2:35 a.m. (EST) and 6:40 a.m. (EST). One possible catalyst could be decidedly jazzed-up vibes starting to surround a Solana community "hack house" event in New York slated for March.

Earlier this week, the Solana Foundation announced a suite of new real world-friendly features for tokens minted on the network (Decrypt).

Meanwhile, SATS, a so-called "BRC-20" token connected with, and seeking to leverage, the Bitcoin network, etched a 20% return on the chart over the past one day. However, SATS remains down 45% in the past month.

SATS' fellow Ordinal inscription token, ORDI, has declined 23% during the same 30 days as demand for unique, satoshi-sized digital artifacts has waned while BTC's spot price tumbled.

ORDI is up 9% since yesterday at this time.

As recently as Sunday, Bitcoin was tap-dancing close to the $42,000 level when the green-tile surface suddenly cracked and lost its sheen. By Tuesday, BTC found itself in a hastily arranged marriage with $38K.

However, in the past couple of days, BTC reclaimed the $40K-$41K range. As of this morning, that nook had not been disturbed.

Expectations for BTC going forward in the near- to mid-term, it must be noted, are diminishing.

Spot BTC ETF asset intake valves are now leaking after a robust fortnight of inflows.

And there is this take, courtesy of Chris Burniske, a crypto venture capitalist: "BTC at least $30K-$36K before a local bottom."

Cointelegraph pointed out Burniske's X post while also noting the ex-Ark investor is hardly alone in spouting glass-half-empty perspective.

Arthur Hayes, formerly the head of BitMEX and now a widely followed crypto blogger, has BTC possibly falling to $30K; and there is Il Capo of Crypto, a trader-pundit who contends there is a blood-soaked scenario still on the table: BTC being as low as $12K.

Okay, here's what we know about the AltLayer airdrop.

For starters, it started – the Ethereum-scaling rollup platform's ALT token is alive and kicking, with a market capitalization already nearing $370 million after one hectic day. That’s large enough for ALT to find a spot in the vicinity of CoinGecko's largest 150 digital assets.

The Block confirmed AltLayer has opened the claims window for certain users who are owed a token reward based on an airdrop snapshot taken last week and that these participants include a large group of AltLayer's NFT holders.

AltLayer’s total airdrop, when all is finally tallied as eligibility stipulations unfurl, will have consisted of 300 million ALT tokens, or 3% of the total supply (of 10B).

So far, 101 million tokens have been claimed by some 29,000 wallets, per The Block.

AltLayer, which has raised about $23 million by way of two prior rounds of private token sales, is said to facilitate the creation of data-scaling "rollups" for scaling Ethereum, solutions that are aggregated from various rollup software stacks offered by the likes of Optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon. One might call AltLayer a player in the "rollup-as-a-service" space. (And, if you must, go ahead and use the abbreviation "RaaS;" while you are at it, feel free to cheerfully pronounce it “rahs.”)

Certainly, a round of “hip-hip hoorays” are right now being aimed at rollups, which are seen as reducing transaction costs and increasing Ethereum’s throughput (by bundling, or rolling up, transactions off-chain).

In a related development, the Celo blockchain is considering strategic partners to help it reboot as a layer-2 network that would run atop Ethereum. Vying for the Celo mandate are teams representing some of the most prominent layer-2 networks, such as the aforementioned trio, and who appear "eager to share technological blueprints with new chain builders in hopes of attracting more critical mass to their mini-ecosystems," CoinDesk said.

And also coming soon, topping off all of this activity atop Ethereum, AltLayer reportedly plans to introduce “restaked rollups,” which are layer-2 projects that leverage EigenLayer, an Ethereum-run protocol for restaking; EigenLayer is a close AltLayer collaborator.

Certain EigenLayer restakers and EigenLayer ecosystem partners are set to receive a decent chunk (17%) of the 300 million airdropped ALT tokens.

AltLayer has also collaborated with Celestia's alternative "data availability" layer for solving verification issues facing rollup operators. An ALT airdrop for Celestia stakers is also said to be in the works.