Period: 29th August 2022 – 5th September 2022

· Despite the satisfying U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls report on Friday, Russia’s gas pipeline closure announcement sent the financial markets to close at a loss

· Clone X snatched 2 out of 5 spots in top trading volume last week, thanks to its fashion apparel minting event

The global financial markets encountered yet another slaughter last week, despite the satisfying U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) report. This set of data is a key economic indicator and represents the total number of paid workers in the U.S. excluding farm workers and workers in a handful of other job classifications. A higher-than-expected reading should be taken as bullish for the USD, while a lower-than-expected reading should be taken as bearish for the USD. Thus the NFP report will consistently cause a large movement in the forex market, follows by the stock and crypto market. Such movement was inevitably repeated again last week.

Both stock (S&P 500) and crypto (BTC) pumped after the release of the NFP report

The report shows that U.S. employers add 315,000 payrolls in August, slightly above expectations of a gain of 300,000 jobs while the unemployment rate rises to 3.7% from 3.5%, disappointing forecasts by a little bit. Overall, the data was rather satisfying in such a bear market, sending the financial markets a rally. However, the celebration was quickly interrupted by the Russian, who announced an indefinite shutdown of the Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany. The bad news resulted in the swift rebound of the U.S. dollar (as measured by the DXY index) and a sharp drop in investment assets. S&P 500 and bitcoin wiped their gains post-NFP report, closing the day at a loss of 1.07% and 0.91% respectively.

U.S. Dollar index (DXY) up, investments assets down

Even though the leader of all cryptos failed to defend its $20K mark, some altcoins managed to escape the punishment. Lido DAO token (LDO) which was featured in the middle of July is once again on the list, continuing to ride on its rally after the announcement of Ethereum’s Merge. On the other hand, Cosmos (ATOM) is your second top gainer last week. The self-proclaimed “internet of blockchains” network has recently attracted a lot of developers to abandon their ship and migrate to this new chain. For instance, dYdX, one of the biggest DEX announced that it will migrate from Ethereum to Cosmos. Other networks like Cronos, ThorChain, and Osmosis have all used Cosmos to scale. ATOM’s recent rally is due to its healthy long-term outlook, by revising rewards for its validators in their Proof-of-Stake (PoS) ecosystem.

You may refer to Interchain Foundation’s (ICF) Twitter account for further details of Cosmos revised delegation strategy

No doubt DigiDaigaku won the top spot in trading volume last week. If you have not checked out our latest in-depth analysis for this hottest free mint project of the year, you may do so later.

Read more of DigiDaigaku here: https://www.coinlive.com/news/detail/?id=11616

A blue-chip NFT project that we rarely see in the top 5 trading volume list, came out of nowhere and snatched two of the top spots. “Clone X - X Takashi Murakami” (or Clone X in short) is an NFT collection collaborated between design studio RTFKT and Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. The Nike-owned studio launched a minting pre-event for all its NFT holders last week. The holders may mint and exchange for physical fashion apparel based on their NFTs’ traits. Bear in mind except for a free T-shirt with the Clone X logo, everything else comes with a price, from socks to pants and hoodies, and even virtual sneakers. If the NFT holders do not wish to redeem their fashion clothes, they may sell them on the secondary market; and those who do not have the Clone X NFT but wish to wear these fancy attire, may purchase them on the secondary market. Through back-and-forth sales, Clone X is rising in trading volume.

Each collection consists of 8 apparel (except human). The rarer the trait, the higher the resale price (yes, the virtual Nike shoes cost a whopping 11 ETH, or $17K in real cash)