Period: 18^th July 2022 – 25^th July 2022

· It’s earnings reports season, which is the time for the U.S. listed companies to announce their financial results. As cryptocurrency market is strongly tied to the performance of stock market nowadays, these company earnings will affect the sentiment of both market investors.

· Free-mint NFT did it again & again! A free-to-mint NFT project by one of the Web 2.0 giants made it to the top of the list, surpassing all the blue-chip projects.

Last week is considered quite a week for global investors, the S&P 500 is up 2% and Bitcoin regained its $24K mark after a month and a half from its biggest single-day drop of 16% this year. Unfortunately, the good sentiment didn’t last long. Snap Inc (SNAP.US), a social-media company that provides digital advertising, released an awful financial result, driving its share price into a downward spiral and also dragging its peers down. The 3 U.S. main indexes all plummeted on Friday, with NASDAQ being the technology index dropping the most at 1.87%. There were actually signals before the U.S. earnings reports season begin, big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Tesla, and even the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the States, Coinbase, had announced hiring slowdowns and layoffs. These financial reports are basically just confirmations of the economic downturn.

For the crypto market, Bitcoin had one of its biggest daily gains this year, hitting an increase of 7.85% on the 18^th of July. On the other hand, Ethereum continued its upward momentum after the announcement of ‘The Merge’, recording the highest YTD single-day gain of 18.17%. As of writing, Bitcoin is retracing below $22K while Ethereum is standing strong above its $1,500 mark. Despite the bad news from the stock market, some coins managed to stand out against the bearish sentiment.

Fantom Token (FTM) had a decent gain of 29.16% over the week, riding the wave of The Merge. What has anything to do with Fantom and the Ethereum 2.0 Merge? Fantom is known as the competitor of Ethereum blockchain, it’s a smart contract-supporting Layer 1 blockchain that aims to provide faster speed and cheaper cost. Although there isn’t any major announcement or update by the Fantom team, liquidity tends to flow to Layer 1 networks when the price of Ethereum surges. Other than Fantom, another Layer 1 blockchain called NEAR Protocol (NEAR), is also one of the top ten gainers with a 13.71% gain.

The price movement of ETH, FTM & NEAR over the week. Source: TradingView

Another crypto that has a notable performance last week is ApeCoin (APE), a rather new utility token that has just launched a few months ago in March 2022. Unlike most of the tokens out there, ApeCoin doesn’t need to go through the process of Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The token is airdropped to all the holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) & Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT collections. Of course, in order to get these free tokens, you got to pay for the expensive entry ticket first, say a MAYC that cost 18 ETH (approx. $45,000 at that time) before the airdrop will get you 2,042 tokens, which is worth around $12,500 now.

The claimable amount of ApeCoin for each holder of BAYC related NFT series

ApeCoin serves as the native token of BAYC’s metaverse ecosystem, anyone who owns the token is eligible to become a member of ApeCoin DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation). Token holders can vote on governance proposals on the DAO and access exclusive features of the ApeCoin ecosystem. For those who cannot afford or are not willing to purchase the BAYC NFT collections, but wanted to take part in some way, ApeCoin is the way to go. The successful first launch of Otherside (BAYC’s metaverse project) last week sent ApeCoin’s price all the way up.

In-game screenshot of the Otherside Metaverse. Source: @OthersideMeta

The weekly total sales of NFT were back to its $200 million mark after four weeks, thanks to the highly anticipated free-mint NFT project – ‘The Potatoz’. This free-mint NFT project is launched by one of the Web 2.0 giants called 9GAG, a social media website that is known for collections of Internet memes. Although the website is founded by Hong Kongers, the majority of its users come from the west. The top 3 countries that send the most traffic to 9GAG are Germany, the U.S. and Netherlands, with over 23% of global users. As such a high influence on the young internet users in the west, there is no miracle that 9GAG had a successful run when launching its NFT project. The first NFT collection by 9GAG is called ‘Memeland’, it is still in the process of development. While the team is working on its main project, they dropped an NFT collection called 'YOU THE REAL MVP’ that required 5.3 ETH (approx. $6,500 at the time) to mint and only with a total supply of 420 (the weed code). This NFT collection is now sitting at a floor price of 19 ETH (approx. $29,000), that’s quite a tremendous gain if you ask me.

To all of you who are reading this piece, YOU THE REAL MVP

With such a high paywall, 9GAG fans and all the NFT enthusiasts out there are looking forward to its free-mint side project instead, The Potatoz. These potatoes make for a great sidekick for Memeland’s captain and they also served as an entry ticket into the great Memeland ecosystem. The whole collection of 9,999 NFTs was sold out in 24 hours before getting into the public sale phase, which means you can’t mint without a whitelist. Getting a whitelist is extremely hard (I tried), thus the secondary sale started with a high price of 0.6 ETH. The floor price slumped after the first reveal but was immediately pumped thereafter. What we can see currently is just a variation of leaves, while the potatoes are hiding in the poop I believe. If you love 9GAG then probably this is the NFT collection you shouldn’t miss out on.

Don’t ask me how can a poop grow a bag of potato chips

Disclaimer: This article is an update on the top-performing crypto & NFT for the past week. Any views, opinions, research, analyses, or other information contained in this piece is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. Every investment involves risk, please conduct your own research when making a decision.

Written by: [Coinlive] Nell