Period: 11^th July 2022 – 18^th July 2022

· According to US Commerce Department, US retail sales rose 1% month-on-month in June, beating forecasts of a 0.8% gain as consumers sentiment restored even as they paid more for petrol. Given this great news, the US stock market jumped, followed by the crypto market.

· Blue-chip NFTs are still leading the NFT market. Meanwhile, we witnessed 2 of the biggest purchases in 2022 happen in the same week!

There were both good and bad news happened over the week. For the bad news, the annual inflation rate in June hiked to 9.1%, the highest since November of 1981, which was mainly contributed by the insanely high energy prices in the States. The good news is, the purchase sentiment of retailers was slightly recovered. The S&P 500 ended its week with a strong rally, closing high of 1.92% on Friday. Thanks to this, the global crypto market cap regained its $1 billion mark (for a short period though) during the weekend.

Aside from the good retail statistics, there was good news in the crypto space too. Lido DAO token (LDO) gained a whopping 158.7% increase right after the announcement of Ethereum’s Merge, aka ‘the Merge’. Tim Beiko, one of the core developers from Ethereum Foundation, proposed the 19^th of September as the tentative target date for the Merge. LDO being the native utility token of Lido Finance, a platform that offers liquid staking for a few cryptocurrencies (mainly ETH), is one of the beneficiaries of the Merge, and thus became the top gainer last week.

On the other hand, Disney selected Polygon as the only blockchain provider to participate in its accelerator program, together with 5 other non-blockchain companies. The price of MATIC, Polygon’s native coin, rallied nearly 20% in a single day after the press release. As of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) managed to hold its ground above the $20K mark, and was up 3.5% while the price of Ethereum (ETH) hit $1,400, gaining a significant increase of 21.7% for the past week.

The Cryptopunks are always the top leader in terms of highest trading volume in the NFT market. Well, last week was something special. Two Ape punks were sold for 2,500 and 2,691 ETH respectively, the biggest NFT sales in the second half of 2022 coincidently took place in the same week.

Cryptopunk that sold for millions of dollars isn’t any fresh news yet the case for CryptoPunk #4156 is different here. When NFT started to bloom in 2021, this Ape punk wearing a blue bandana on its head was sold for 650 ETH (approx. USD$1.25M during then) in February 2021. It later changed hands for 2,500 ETH in December of the same year. As when ETH was almost at its peak at that time, this punk was worth ridiculously ten million US dollars! However, the price of ETH and almost all cryptos fell from heaven to hell as a result of inflation and the US Fed’s quantitative tightening policy.

As you can see from the picture above, this Ape punk was resold for a higher unit of ETH but the value gap in between was tremendous, the seller suffered a nearly $7 million loss in exchange for just additional 191 ETH.

Many Twitter users are saying that it was a brilliant move for ‘tax loss harvesting’, whereby investors can reduce their capital gains liability by selling some of their assets at a loss. Whether or not this is the true intention of the seller, we do not know, we can only wish him or her the best after taking such a huge loss.

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