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This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Price Cools, Solana ETFs Soar, BODEN Sinks Amid Debate
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
The June crypto market crash began to show signs of recovery this week as upbeat news revived investor interest in a variety of altcoins.
The main of these currencies is Solana (SOL) – one of the biggest cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).
The latest assets fell another 5% and 3% respectively last week as another old-school Bitcoin whale decides make profits while the market is rising. In contrast, SOL jumped an impressive 6% this week to over $142 thanks to VanEck launching the first application to a US-based Solana ETF.
VanEck’s logic was simple: If regulators consider Ethereum a commodity worthy of an ETF, then surely Solana ticks all the right boxes as well. It’s a prevalent bullish thesis for altcoin investors eager for a taste of the Wall Street inflows that Bitcoin ETFs enjoyed earlier this year. And 21Shares followed suit. your own Solana ETF registry on Friday, continuing the buzz.
Capitalizing on the same excitement, alternative smart contract platforms including Cardano (ADA), Avalanche (AVAX) and Polka dot (DOT) also rose approximately 5.5%, 11% and 7%, respectively.
Meanwhile, the Telegram-linked Ton currency (TON) has given back some of its gains from earlier this month after a sharp correction last week, rising more than 5% in the last seven days. Now successfully eclipsed Dogecoin as the 9th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Another coin that saw market-defying gains this week was Kaspa (KAS) — a top-25 cryptocurrency by market cap that exploded 23% this week after Marathon Digital announced it was mining the cryptocurrency. The miner has now produced $15 million worth of KAS since September 2023, with its dedicated ASICs generating 95% gross profit on their efforts in some cases.
Blast (BLAST) was a key focus for traders this week as the Ethereum layer 2 network-linked token finally launched alongside a sizable airdrop that put 354 million dollars in their wallets of users – although there was some initial disappointment among Crypto Twitter chatter amid expectations of larger purses for early supporters.
Still, airdrop has indeed made many users rich, and BLAST began to recover after significant sales. It is currently 29% below this week’s peak, in a price of almost US$0.021which gives it a market capitalization of around US$360 million.
Perhaps most volatile this week, however, were political meme coins. After what was widely seen as a disappointing debate performance by President Joe Biden, the Solana-based party “Jeo Boden” Token (BODEN) plummeted 52% in a single day – alongside Biden’s reelection oddsat least for crypto bettors.
Donald Trump, who many cryptocurrency advocates saw as the debate winner despite his persistent lies, also saw his “Doland Tremp” (TREMP) token plummet from Thursday night to Friday, although it was still up 13% in the week.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
The opinions and views expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment or other advice.