Altcoins shimmering

Bitcoin is flat, Ethereum's up modestly, Solana's sort of rallying but the most noteworthy gains can be found among an elite coterie of DeFi darlings.

Exhibit A is Chainlink, a data-disseminating oracle protocol integral to smart contract execution. The project’s native LINK spiked by 20% in 24 hours following an announcement regarding Chainlink's involvement in an institutional dry-run aimed at spurring more traditional financial players to lean into real world asset (RWA) tokenization. Wall Street's very own securities settlement consortium, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), said on Thursday it experimented with "a standardized process to bring and disseminate the net asset value data of mutual funds across blockchains" and did so using Chainlink's CCIP, an interoperability protocol. The project was deftly dubbed "Smart NAV." Participating behemoths include JPMorgan and BNY Mellon.

As of 7:47 a.m. (EST), LINK was $16.44. LINK last tasted $20 back in March. It got to $21 actually.

Note: LINK was not quite $7 last year at this time.

Meanwhile, Lido DAO (LDO), 65th-largest digital asset, has gained 12.6% in 24 hours to reach $1.78, per CoinGecko. Earlier this week, CoinDesk reported on Lido's co-founders, Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov, secretly investing in a restaking startup, Symbiotic, angling to compete with EigenLayer, a protocol often singled out as the linchpin for the fast-growing market for liquid restaking, a way for users to leverage their staked assets, such as Lido’s staked ether (stETH).

Not to be confused with Lido is Ondo (ONDO), the governance token of the Ondo platform for tokenizing U.S. Treasuries. ONDO gained 10% overnight. It's the No. 73 token.

Speaking of treasuries, if the 10-year treasury (scant movement) is any guide, it would seem as if investors are uncertain about the state of the U.S. economy. All macro-environmental ambiguity aside, equities are boiling over; the Dow yesterday touched 40,000 – for the first time ever – before pulling back to end the Thursday session down 0.1%. Dow futures were green this morning at 8:22 a.m. (EST), suggesting perhaps that nice, round milestone is due back in play.

Notcoin (NOT), a token connected with a play-to-earn game on the Telegram app, made a howling debut on The Open Network (TON) on Thursday, although momentum for the new crypto proved short-lived.

Some 80 billion tokens were airdropped to roughly 35 million players. At the peak of trading, NOT's volume exceeded $1 billion; and it would appear NOT's market capitalization briefly crossed $2 billion, according to Decrypt.

Yesterday morning, NOT quickly reached a per-token price said to be in the vicinity (on some trading venue, somewhere in the world) of $0.02. Even if that was the case – two-thirds of NOT’s value had vanished by the latter part of the afternoon.

Earlier this morning we saw that NOT’s debut-day high was pegged by exchange-data-aggregator CoinGecko at $0.007486. That was some 13 hours ago. NOT has shed 9% since then. No, really, it has.

Near Protocol (NEAR) crossed the $8 mark and looked to be bound for $10, breaking out even as experts were predicting a rotation from altcoins back to Bitcoin poised to challenge new highs.

BTC, by the way, was $66,300 when we last checked it at 9:25 a.m. (EST).

But back to NEAR. Among CoinGecko's Top 20 coins, only Chainlink (LINK) had enjoyed a better seven-day stretch as of Friday morning. LINK gained 16% in the past week while NEAR was up 7% in that same span (versus +4.8% for BTC).

The other day, The Daily Hodl flagged a forecast from an analyst, Credible, drawing parallels between Near and Pepe (PEPE) which hit a record high on Wednesday. As far as we can tell, Near and Pepe have nothing in common; Near emphasizes a form of database maintenance known as sharding such that dApp developers can scale up their offerings while Pepe is a coin built around a community enlivened by a wry-smiling cartoon frog.

Ah, we see; Credible was drawing a parallel between the weeks-long, technically charted market structures of NEAR and PEPE, as these coins, each of which is not called Bitcoin, dipped, rallied, rinsed and repeated, in their own ways, almost identically.

Last weekend, Real Vision analyst Jamie Coutts pointed to pattern formations indicating NEAR was on the verge of a rally. Per The Daily Hodl, Coutts predicted NEAR could go as high $10.50.