Weekend rally fizzles

A handful of coins not named Bitcoin caught some momentum over the weekend and continued to spiral upward even as BTC buckled. 

Sui (SUI) and Fantom (FTM) each gained 7%-8%. Celestia (TIA) was up 5%. That was over a 24-hour period as of Sunday night. BTC by then was in decline after previously going above $60K, but still having notched (as of last night) a +9.6% return over the prior week. This rally "helped buyers turn around September’s returns to positive," Cointelegraph said.

SUI, 32nd-largest digital asset, remains +19% since last week. As of Monday morning, SUI was $1.10, flat over 24 hours. No. 56 FTM is up 4% in that one-day timeframe and has recorded a weekly return of 15%.

Meanwhile, a trio of memecoins secured listings on Binance, the exchange announced earlier this morning. The coins are: Turbo, Baby Doge Coin and Neiro. The latter has rocketed 660%, per CoinGecko. NEIRO now has a total market capitalization of $140 million, making it CoinGecko's 320th-largest coin.

Neiro is a project inspired by a Japanese shiba inu dog of that same name, and who is said to be related to Kabosu, the dog that inspired Dogecoin.

After sinking to as low as $54,400 last weekend, Bitcoin begins the back half of September in better shape but still in a defensive crouch, below $59,000.

The largest crypto surged to $60,600 on a spatter-free "Friday the 13th" although BTC's subsequent performance Sept. 14-15 did somewhat resemble a scene from the slasher franchise. BTC was approaching $59,500 as of Sunday afternoon. As of today at 7:35 a.m. (EST), BTC was $58,600.

Traders are taking profits ahead of key rate decisions by the Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan, Cointelegraph said.

As traditional lending becomes less centralized and more automated, there's been steady growth in digital credit transfers between businesses and individuals. Cross-border transfers of collateral-backed digital credits is an area that Velo Labs' Velo Protocol has staked out as a proving ground for its layer-1 chain. Growth has been observed -- and loudly trumpeted -- during the past couple of weeks.

The protocol's native VELO token, which is the 363rd-largest digital asset, limped out of August at barely one cent. But it began to challenge the two-cent mark as of last Tuesday. As of this past weekend, VELO was hovering at $0.015, down 9% over seven days.

Velo's total value locked (TVL) has seen a decent summer spurt, going from $15M in July to $25M as of early September.

"The higher the TVL, the higher the trust in the project," said ChartNerd on X.

Last week, VELO token holders were treated to some bullish news as it was revealed that Velo was incorporating the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), a tokenized short-term treasury fund, into a USDV, a Velo stablecoin, resulting in extra yield for about one million users across Southeast Asia. That region is home to a huge and fragmented remittance industry.

For several years now, the Southeast Asian remittance market, reportedly as big as $800B, has been marked for disruption.

Velo said it is partnering with Securitize, a blockchain firm which is collaborating with BlackRock on its tokenization efforts.

"With USDV now backed by BlackRock's institutional-grade BUIDL fund, users can enjoy bank-free transactions," Velo said, underscoring the absence of a fee-charging middleman.

Velo, according to a YouTube analyst, Boxmining, is applying all of its infrastructure pieces (stablecoins, DEXs, dApps, wallets), and tapping key partners like Securitize and BlackRock, with a goal of facilitating faster, far less expensive remittances for millions of migrants who work in, say, for example, the Philippines, and who send money home to perhaps Thailand.

"Velo has done the hard work but it hasn't been super noticed in the crypto community," Boxmining said. "But BlackRock noticed."