News
Here’s what drove Q2’s top performers BRETT, TON, KAS; and what’s next for Bitcoin and crypto investors
The second quarter saw three tokens – brett (BRETT), Ton Network’s TON and Kaspa’s KAS – emerge as shining stars as the cryptocurrency market bellwether, bitcoin (BTC), wilted, dragging most major digital assets, including ether (ETH), lower.
BRETT, a Base Chain-native memecoin inspired by the character Brett from the Boys’ Club comic book series, has more than doubled to 15 cents, becoming the best-performing digital asset among the top 100 coins by market cap, according to data tracked by TradingView and CoinMarketCap.
Ton Coin (TONNE)The native cryptocurrency of The Open Network (TON), a decentralized layer-1 network popularly known as the TON blockchain, surged 42% to $7.65 and the Kaspa blockchain’s KAS surged over 35%. Meanwhile, the total cryptocurrency market cap fell 13.8% to $2.2 trillion.
Here’s what may have helped these coins stand out from the general market malaise.
The rise in BRETT was not an isolated event, but part of a broader bullish trend in meme coins. Dune-based analytics platform DYOR relative strength of the crypto narrative tracker shows that the meme coin subsector is up more than 45% in three months, while others have seen losses.
Cultural coin mog (MOG) has emerged as another high-performing asset driven by positive sentiment and a cult following on social platforms like X. MOG’s market cap has skyrocketed from $220 million in early April to over $700 million, briefly placing it among the top 100 tokens by that metric.
The performance is typical of a bull cycle in which investors rotate profits from larger coins like bitcoin into smaller tokens like meme coins, fueling a price surge and retail investor FOMO (fear of missing out). In other words, the fate of meme coins is tied to investor risk appetite and credit availability.
BRETT began its meteoric rise in May after Bitcoin began consolidating at all-time highs near $70,000 and at one point saw its market cap approach the $2 billion mark.
“The $2.0 billion mark is the liquidity barrier that many of the established meme coins hit before profit-taking and sideways volatility set in. Of course, for every $1 billion more from there, it will take a lot of momentum and risk-taking from retail investors (aka Apes) to push these meme coins to the levels of DOGE and SHIB. Let’s see what the Degens can do later in this bull market cycle,” Kenny Hearn, chief investment officer at SwissOne Capital, told CoinDesk in an interview.
Hearn added that SwissOne’s Top 50 Smart Passive Index Fund holds six of the largest meme coins in its portfolio after this quarter’s rebalancing.
TON’s growth stemmed from its involvement in the cloud-based mobile and desktop messaging app Telegram, which has 1.56 billion users worldwide and 800 million active users.
“A toncoin (TON)-based economy is starting to take root on the Telegram messaging app,” said TON’s chief investment officer. Justin Hyun told CoinDesk in April.
Several catalysts have boosted TON adoption, including Telegram’s decision to switch to TON payments for ads and the Open League rewards program. TON’s network activity has also received a boost with the integration of tether (USDT)the world’s largest dollar-pegged stablecoin and the debut of the Telegram-based Notcoin gaming digital token.
TON’s daily active addresses surged to nearly 600,000 in June, surpassing Ethereum, the world’s largest smart contract blockchain that is home to major DeFi projects worth several billion dollars.
“During Q2, daily active users (DAUs) for TON experienced a significant increase, even surpassing Ethereum. This growth was attributed to the introduction of mini apps, which are decentralized apps embedded within the Telegram messaging app. Notcoin, one such app, gained notable traction as users could ‘mine’ Notcoin by simply pressing a button within Telegram,” Katie Talati, head of research at Arca, said in an email to CoinDesk.
“Other significant catalysts include the launch of USDT on TON, with approximately $550 million in USDT currently on the network, positioning it for payments, a core feature of WeChat,” Talati added, highlighting Pantera’s recent “largest investment ever” in TON.
According to Hearns, KAS’s parent proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, Kaspa’s attempts to solve the blockchain trilemma have helped the token gain investor attention.
The blockchain trilemma refers to the tradeoff between three key aspects of blockchain technology: scalability, decentralization, and security.
Kaspa’s GHOSDAG allows transactions to be processed more asynchronously and in parallel, unlike traditional blockchains that rely on sequential processing. This helps improve performance and security while maintaining the security of the PoW consensus mechanism.
“It seems this team is on a mission to solve the trilemma (scale, speed, security) through their DAG vs blockchain structure (supporting speed and scalability) while using the security benefits of POW (supporting security). What appears to be a strong “hodler” base, meaning little free float, seems like the market is very supportive of this cutting-edge technology. Again, support on fundamentals,” Hearn explained.
The third quarter historically was the weakestwith bitcoin recording an average gain of just 5% over the past 13 years, compared to 60% in the second and fourth quarters.
There is a risk that current US President Joe Biden’s recent poor performance in the presidential debate could prompt Democrats to replace him with a strong candidate against crypto-friendly rival Donald Trump.
This could keep animal spirits in check until the November 4 elections. In addition, the Fed and other central banks could meet BIS Council to avoid premature easing of monetary policy.
Still, cryptocurrency subsectors with solid fundamentals may continue to excel.
“The long-term play is key for many projects that are built quietly in the background and delivered on real use cases,” Hearn added. “We see ONDO, JASMY, and ENS all fall into that category of strong fundamentals, user growth.”
Arca’s Talati said stocks in bitcoin mining, artificial intelligence, gaming and DeFi sectors could see growth.