BTC naps; altcoin sector romps
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. 1st March 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
Wild 29-Day Month Concludes With Bitcoin Taking A Breather; AI Coin Segment Flying
March is here, and so February's Bitcoin "leap week" has concluded. It did so in lamb-like fashion. But the past five roaring days won't soon be forgotten.
As of Friday, March 1, at 7:33 a.m. (EST), BTC's spot price had shed 0.9% in 24 hours. The largest crypto has found a comfy nook around $62,000 after a seven-day stretch in which it soared 21%, briefly hitting $64,000 early Wednesday. BTC gained 44% in February to notch its best-performing single month since December 2020.
CoinGecko at midnight (EST) recorded BTC sitting at about $61,500, which reflected king crypto's highest month-end price ever, surpassing the previous mark set in October 2021.
Even as all-time records come closer into view, this current bull market isn't close to peaking, analysts told CoinDesk.
Of course, "AI coins" are the beneficiaries of the moment, a zeitgeist inside a fever dream, one where Elon Musk sues OpenAI for putting profits ahead of humanity.
Fetch.ai (FET) increased nearly 20% since yesterday, hitting an all-time high of $1.65 only hours ago. SingularityNET (AGIX) gained 22% to $0.88, not too far from its ATH of $0.95.
Meanwhile, memecoins refuse to be laughed off. PEPE is now 75th-largest digital asset with a market cap of $1.3 billion after rocketing 149% in the past week. BONK, No. 67, soared 95% in that same span. Dogwifhat (WIF) cracked one dollar and is only a few slots shy of joining CoinGecko's Top 100 following its 30% rise in the past 24 hours after being listed on Robinhood Europe.
What's down
AXL Rose
A much-loved interoperability enabler, Axelar (AXL), hit an ATH of $2.64 early Friday. The run (+30% in 24 hours) owes to a listing on Binance, and also to a recently announced partnership with XRP Ledger. But oh, how momentum can dissipate.
As of 8:21 a.m. (EST), AXL, 82nd-largest coin, was $2.18, or about 18% off its peak reached only a few hours ago.
What's next
Trendy Projects Leap, Launch, And Shower Their Users With Rewards
Cross-chain gaming platform Portal snagged itself some Leap Day hype, minting a token on Ethereum and launching it via an airdrop portending a push toward an array of incentive schemes down the line.
Meanwhile, Blast, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network from the team behind NFT marketplace Blur, launched its mainnet Thursday afternoon.
Traders and developers had widely criticized Blast’s approach of launching an early supporter bridge several months removed from users being able to claim rewards while hitching the future to a model based on incentives to be named later, as Decrypt pointed out. Roughly $1.9 billion remains staked to Blast now that it’s live and rewards points (tied to future airdrops and projects) have been booked.
Yesterday's Portal debut ran as hot as it did because of a similar incentives program. PORTAL soared above $3 within hours. At the moment, it's $2.25. CoinGecko pegs PORTAL's market cap at $375 million, putting it in the vicinity of the Top 200 biggest coins.
Demand for this new coin was enormous. As of last week, Binance users had staked $8 billion worth of crypto in rewards pools set up as a pipeline for PORTAL allocations.
Portal has touted up token staking benefits coming soon. The concept is to allow user to lock up their tokens within the platform to gain perks, such as “VIP access” to NFT sales, per Decrypt. Portal also plans to introduce more seasons of its rewards-driven “Crystal Dash” airdrop campaign.
