A flurry of excitement this week around interest rates, cryptocurrency leverage and ETF flows has still proven to be a net negative for the price of Bitcoin this week.
The main cryptocurrency absorbed on Friday, according to CoinGecko, starting at $65,018, nearing a 30-day low, before finishing over the weekend at $66,088. This is a decline of 4.7% for the week, just as AllianceBernstein predicted yesterday BTC could reach $200,000 next year.
Over the same period, Ethereum (ETH) fell 4% to $3,538, despite SEC Chairman Gary Gensler confirming that Ethereum ETFs will be available soon.
Amid such weak performances, it was Toncoin (TON) that stole the show this week, reaching a new all-time high of $8.25 apiece last Friday. The Telegram-linked coin is now up 8% over the past week (and 17% in 30 days) and as of the weekend stands as the ninth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at $19.4 billion.
The rally is justified: Toncoin is the native currency of The Open Network, which upended Ethereum in May by its number of daily active addresses, of which it had 547,000 on Thursday compared to Ethereum’s 407,000.
Many coins in the TON ecosystem have rallied amid the hype. Telegram Notcoin (NOT) based clicker game it rose 20% on Friday., continuing its momentum after reaching 35 million users in March. Hamster Kombat, another clicker game based on TON, was successful 100 million players last week and is planning his own token launch for next month.
Telegram’s next victim in the market capitalization ranking is Dogecoin (DOGE), which has already fallen 7.5% this week to a market capitalization of $19.7 billion.
Most alt coins and other meme coins fell sharply along with large-cap coins, including NEAR (down 18%) PEPE (down 8%) and Dogwifhat (down 14%). The Bitcoin layer-2 Stack (STX) platform fell 11% on Friday, down 19% on the week, after the network failed to produce a block for nine hours straight.
And despite Roaring Kitty doubling his bet on GameStop on Friday, meme stocks and the related Solana-based meme coin, GME, are in decline.
Some of the hardest hit tokens this week were gaming tokens: Ethereum L2-based RPG Guild of Guardians (GOG) fell 46% on the week to under $0.10, while Parallel’s PRIME token fell 37% to nearly $10.
As is typical, huge Bitcoin whale stock MicroStrategy (MSTR) is down 6% along with Bitcoin this week. However, members of the coming wave of “mini MicroStrategys” – other companies adopting Bitcoin as their primary treasury reserve asset – have surged, with MetaPlanet up by 9.76% e Semler Scientific (SMLR) up by 17%.
These publicly traded companies have announced a bitcoin buy, or full-fledged Bitcoin strategy in 2024:
— Luke Mikic⚡️🇸🇻🇦🇺 9-5 Escape Artist (@LukeMikic21) June 10, 2024
Of that group, the biggest gainer by far was the Canadian-based cryptocurrency fund provider DeFi Technologies (DEFI). Since announcing its Bitcoin Treasury strategy on Monday, the company’s shares have risen 50%.
