FIL is freakin' flying

On a Friday morning that saw Bitcoin hunched over – after banging its head on $25K, an archway apparently made out of granite – the doors to a cozy hideaway flung open for decentralized storage network Filecoin.

As of 7:40 a.m. (EST), FIL was +23% in the past day and +42% over the past week. It was only two weeks ago that the project's creator, Protocol Labs, revealed a rash of staff cuts owing to crypto winter. Perhaps Protocol was prepping its community for still-to-come positive news, stowed away for a rainy day; indeed, developers just now announced the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) is set to launch on March 1. The FVM, CoinGape said, will "bring smart contracts and user programmability to the Filecoin blockchain, making it a fully-fledged L1."

FIL was $5 and change at this time on Thursday. It was closing in on $6.80 when last we checked. Twenty-two months ago, FIL reached its all-time high of $236.84, per CoinGecko.

The stock market is under the thumb of a centralized money steering committee and this same dynamic seems to have bled into the decentralized money sector, which is also facing a separate headwind in the form of stepped-up regulatory scrutiny.

Yesterday, on the macro front, an inflation metric that tracks wholesale prices rose 0.7% in January, more than economists expected, resulting in fresh speculation about a double-cheese rate hike looming in March.

The S&P 500 index declined more than 1% as of the close on Thursday afternoon. As of Friday morning, at 8:05 a.m. (EST), BTC had shed 3% and was sitting at about $23,900. Most of the largest coins are in the red but there are a few exceptions. Polygon's MATIC stayed green and has now gained 20% on the week. The OKEx platform's native asset OKB – climbing into CoinGecko's Top Ten – is +30% on the week.

The worst performance came from Aptos' APT. The No. 30 coin fell 10% to $14.52.

Most of the major coins that are crimson toned, as in the bulk of the Top 30, have suffered only slightly. Ethereum, XRP and Cardano each lost 1.5%-2.5%.

What does the Federal Reserve have to do with a multi-chain smart contract network teaming up with a multi-media powerhouse to spearhead non-fungible token and decentralized autonomous organization projects? Nothing, and perhaps everything, as speculators' juices flow and the winter warm-up tries to linger on.

Growing fears of collateral damage from the Fed's possibly-about-to-escalate anti-inflation fight could not dampen the spirits of Astar as it surged in value on a new infusion of mojo courtesy of The Sony Group which tapped Astar to launch a Web3 incubation program focused on NFTs and DAOs.

ASTR is CoinGecko's 112th-largest coin. ASTR gained 14% overnight. Its +40% gain over the past seven days puts it next to FIL as one of the best-performing digital assets of the week. Magic is another project that gained 40% this past week, as is Mina. The single biggest gainer on the week is FLOKI, a meme coin that rocketed 130% in the aftermath of an Elon Musk tweet.

AI-related tokens pulled back in the past few days, at least somewhat, although AGIX and OCEAN remain huge gainers on a monthly basis with the former up 110% in that period and the latter +60%.

"It would appear, for now, traders are yet to concede on the bullish momentum driving associated AI tokens and projects higher," Blockworks said.

Steady drips of news detailing widening crypto dragnets continue to pool in the nooks and crannies of a digital ecosystem still repairing damage from the flood of negativity connected with the FTX debacle.

Today it came out that the SEC has moved on Terra's creator Do Kwon; meanwhile, Binance is reportedly wrangling with the agency over what charges it'll neither admit, nor deny, and how large of a financial penalty it must pay.

In themselves, harsher crypto regulations are not an existential threat to the industry, a research team at Bernstein said on Thursday.

The Fed would seem to hold the heaviest sway over whether the '23 digital derby has legs. The current rally owes to a Fed policy pertaining not to the size of rate hikes but to the contents of the central bank's treasury general account (TGA).

Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes put his own technical-jargon-laced stamp on the old saying, "don't fight the Fed," tweeting out a view regarding the "TGA as expected continues to decline which is $liq +ve," or positive for liquidity, meaning the risk rally likely has room to run.