Mooners and Shakers: Fantom Rises as Crypto Opera Plays On; Bitcoin strikes a steady tone

Morning Coinheads. Thank Fantom it’s Friday, although some/many/most of us in Straya did have a day off. Speaking of Fantom (FTM), it has surged along with Aptos (APT) like several other top altcoins over the past few days.

We’ll check in some of them a little further down.

However, as for the crypto pacemaker, Bitcoin is still hanging there, teetering around the $23,000 level and still giving both bulls and bears a sniff. It’s basically a big redhead tease.

It seems like a good time to take a quick look at market sentiment. Good old Crypto Fear & Greed Index – a popular tracker based on the following metrics: volatility (25%), market dynamics (25%), social media (15%), polls (15%), coin dominance – mainly Bitcoin (10%) and trends (10%).

Source: alternative.me

“Neutral” might sound a little meh, a little confusing. But we’ll definitely take it now. Indeed, slightly fading into green citrus, neutral is practically the crypto market frothing with excitement compared to where we’ve been recently – a mood horror show for several months.

Top 10 overview

With the crypto market cap totaling $1.08 trillion, up about 1% since this time yesterday, here is the current state of the top 10 tokens, according to CoinGecko.

Well, look at this – the very popular Layer 2 scaler Polygon (MATIC) has reclaimed its rightful (probably according to him) position in the top 10 – ahead of Solana (SOL) and OKB.

Why is this interesting. It’s not massive. But you can’t keep a good polygon down for too long. This project was a big climber in the last bull run and has been on a partnership tour for months.

Finding the closest polygon might be something to keep an eye on. Layer 2s like Arbitrum, Optimisim and various zk-rollups related protocols could all be in contention for this title. That said, Polygon itself could still be a solid game. No financial advice… ah, you know.

Back to BTC for half a second, we like this little hypothesis from US chart obsessor Justin Bennett. A shot more hopium for the crypto crack pipe anyway.

If #Bitcoin follows gold as before, we could go quite a bit higher.

Gold rallied ahead of $BTC during the last bull market and even retreated before Bitcoin peaked in April 2021.

We saw the same dynamic ahead of the July-October 2021 BTC rally.

🍿 pic.twitter.com/xmHOMZx0XE

— Justin Bennett (@JustinBennettFX) January 26, 2023

Overweight and Underweight: 11-100

Let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers, ranging in market cap from about $9 billion to about $403 million in the rest of the top 100 at press time. (Stats correct at time of publication, based on data from CoinGecko.com.)

DAILY PUMPER

• phantom (FTM), (Market Cap: $1.25 billion) +24%

• eCash (XEC), (mc: $818 million) +23%

• BTSE token (BTSE), (mc: $503 million) +6%

• Spirit (AAVE), (mc: $1.26 billion) +5%

• VeChain (VET), (mc: $1.72 billion) +4%

Fantom, isn’t it? What’s going on there? The mid-tier top 100 layer 1 blockchain is up 65% over the past week. There are several reasons for this, but the biggest news for the project overnight is this — an “interchain” communications announcement that will drive Fantom cross-blockchain interoperability.

And that’s something each Layer 1 is trying to meaningfully solve in order to connect blockchain ecosystems and foster the true potential of universal, borderless, frictionless cryptocurrencies.

To achieve this, Fantom works with a company called Axelar.

Axelar provides interchain communication for #Fantom and its broader Web3 ecosystem! ⛓️

With @Axelarcore, Fantom users and creators benefit from secure, decentralized interoperability across 30+ chains

See how they will bring cross-chain swaps to @SpookySwap👇https://t.co/DWchpthfk6 pic.twitter.com/SSeAoVhDX8

— Fantom Foundation (@FantomFDN) January 24, 2023

Well, that’s a potential catalyst for the recent surge anyway. The Fantom Foundation’s head of marketing has a few more…

So what’s the deal with #Fantom?

Here are a few facts you might not know…

🧵Revealing what’s in store for the future

— Juan Angel (@juanaxyz00) January 21, 2023

Meanwhile, it’s not on our daily pumper list, but it’s worth noting the performance of another Ethereum rival this week – Aptos (APT). It’s up 138% in the last seven days and 244% in the last 14 days.

Why? In part because it’s one of the liveliest additions to the increasingly crowded Tier 1 smart contract platform arms race. And partly because it was developed by former meta-engineers.

The Binance exchange has also grown for a variety of reasons, including the announcement of an “Aptos World Tour” – multiple conferences and developer meetings, as well as NFTs growing in popularity on the Aptos chain… and Binance’s two new Aptos liquidity pools.

2/
First, on January 9th, #Aptos held its first #AptosMoveMonday of 2023, roughly coinciding with the upward move in APT price. Co-founders @moshaikhs and @AveryChing actively answered a number of questions and discussed many upcoming developments during the session.

— Binance Research (@BinanceResearch) January 25, 2023

5/
Additionally, on Jan. 20, #Binance announced the opening of two new liquidity pools for Aptos, $APT/#BTC and $APT/$USDT. Data from @CoinMarketCap shows that this has helped (at least in part!) boost the price (up ~56%) and trading volume (up 147% on 5-day moving average) for $APT.

— Binance Research (@BinanceResearch) January 25, 2023

So a lot is happening. Also, the founder of Aptos, Mohammad Shaikh, looks like this:

Because… pic.twitter.com/FkTxmXeARK

— Lazy Lads — Aptos (@Lazy_LadsNFT) January 26, 2023

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Lido DAO (LDO), (Market Cap: $1.91 billion) -7%

• optimism (OP), (Market Cap: $475 million) -6%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: $530 million) -4%

• cosmos hub (ATOM), (mc: $3.8 billion) -4%

• quantum (QNT), (mc: $2.17 billion) -3%

around the blocks

Some appropriateness and randomness that have accompanied us in our morning sweeps through the crypto Twitterverse.

The future is multi-chain 🤝 pic.twitter.com/1RHkEuAtNT

— Alan Carroll (@alancarroII) January 25, 2023

If you’re getting into bitcoin this early, you’re not a normal person.

Point.

😂😂😂

— Joe Burnett (🔑)³ (@IIICapital) January 26, 2023

The US government yesterday filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google.

A month ago, Nancy Pelosi sold $3 million in $GOOGL stock. pic.twitter.com/QZg3wUf23M

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) January 25, 2023

Source of article and source of salehttps://t.co/zvweRQyLo0 pic.twitter.com/Vx4KYKERMu

— Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker ♟ (@PelosiTracker_) January 25, 2023

I’m not convinced kangaroos are real. They always look like CGI to me. pic.twitter.com/DRn7IVokCy

— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) January 26, 2023

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