Crypto finds way through peril

Late Thursday night and into Friday morning, Bitcoin spiked past $35,000 in the wake of remarks by El Salvador’s president cementing the largest crypto as legal tender. Over 24 hours, as of 7 a.m. (EST), BTC was looking at a modest but welcome 1.5% gain as it dipped below $34,000. But by 9 a.m., the largest crypto was sliding toward $33,000.

Altcoins, meanwhile, proved a mix of joy/pain. Dogecoin (DOGE) continues to rally with a 7% gain to $0.25. And Nano (NANO) also enjoyed some impressive gains yesterday, as did Solana (SOL).

Fourteenth-largest crypto, native token of the Solana blockchain, SOL at $30 has solidly rebounded since Tuesday when it crashed to $20.

One key driver: yesterday's launch, by Digital Asset AG, of tokenized stocks on the Solana blockchain (Decrypt).

Tuesday's crypto market tumult might one day be forgotten but for now it remains seared into memory – we are tallying lots of double-digit losses over this past week.

Some are of a "oh, that's not too bad" varietal, such as the 12.5% decline turned in by TRON (TRX) over seven days as of Friday. A bunch of coins are down 20%-30% (including SOL, MATIC, LINK, UNI and XRP) in that time period, and then there is Polkadot (DOT) which has fallen 32%.

But the single-most wretched weekly stretch belongs to Kusama (KSM). An experimental blockchain that bills itself as “Polkadot’s wild cousin," KSM touched $630 in mid-May. It's now roughly $188. KSM, over the last seven days, has declined by 46%.

Since early June, Ethereum has been in lockstep with Bitcoin.

BTC volatility has of course stolen the show, but ETH was right there too, doing the same "I'm too old for this $h!+!" shtick, like the sidekick in a buddy-cop movie, with "higher highs, lower lows, price spikes, and crashes,” AMBCrypto said.

ETH lost 5% over 24 hours as of Friday morning about 9 a.m. (EST), sitting right at $1,900.

As far as what ETH might do next, analyst Michael van de Poppe has asserted that if the second-largest crypto can, over the next few trading sessions, stick within the $1,700-$1,900 levels, then a near-term move to $2,600 awaits.

John McAfee's wild personality, in all of its multi-faceted eccentric brilliance, mirrors the volatile history of crypto, says CoinDesk podcast host Nathaniel Whittemore, marking the passing of an icon – and an era.

The larger-than-life anti-virus software pioneer – who in more recent years became a vociferous, at times bawdy crypto promoter – died on Wednesday by suicide in a Spanish prison, his lawyer told Reuters.

McAfee worked for NASA, Xerox and Lockheed Martin before launching, in 1987, the world's first commercial anti-virus program, that carries his name and still counts 500 million users.

If crypto's “Wild West” period is not fully a bygone era, then at a minimum “its march away from the beginning is inevitable,” Whittemore said, tying the waning chapter to news of McAfee’s demise, which is being deemed by many in the crypto community as Jeffrey-Epstein-suspicious.

"However it happened, it happened,” Whittemore said. “And with it, something larger passed too."

When Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson declared eight years ago that the company would accept Bitcoin, the move was a bold fusion of kindred endeavors, both forward-thinking but still a long way off.

Early this morning, Virgin Galactic announced the Federal Aviation Administration granted it a license to fly passengers.

The space tourism race is on. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is planning to launch its first crewed flight on July 20. SpaceX will launch billionaire Jared Isaacman, along with sweepstakes winners, possibly as early as September.

While the FAA previously gave Virgin Galactic a launch license to conduct spaceflights, this new license expansion allows the company to fly “spaceflight participants.”

Virgin Galactic chief astronaut trainer Beth Moses, who prior to joining the company had worked as a NASA engineer, is the only non-pilot to ever fly on one of the company’s flights.