Despite the seemingly positive impression that the cryptocurrencies markets give at the moment, the crypto market cap actually dropped by 6.7% to $2.72 trillion over the past week. This happened as Bitcoin’s price fell to $58.425 by 8.3%.
One significant connection between this week’s top performing coins seems to be the metaverse and gaming sector, which has been rallying since Facebook rebranded itself as Meta at the end of October.
Further news that has supported the current metaverse token surge is the November 19 raise of $400 million by Gemini crypto exchange to build a decentralised metaverse.
Top performing and worst performing coins, Source: Nomics
Top performing coins
GALA pumped after it was listed on Coinbase and Huobi on November 16. The token powers a decentralised gaming ecosystem that gives players a voice in the funding and development stages.
CRO also had news to justify the rally. On November 18, the marketing department behind the exchange decided to spend $700 million to purchase the naming rights to the NBA Los Angeles Lakers stadium.
One day later, Elrond (EGLD) also announced its own $1.29 billion incentive program to help attract users and liquidity to its decentralised finance ecosystem. The new project uses sharding technology to achieve up to 15,000 transactions per second.
Decentralised exchange tokens fall
Two of the worst performing coins this week were decentralised exchange utility tokens. The only negative news that backed this trend was a November 9 paper that was published by the US SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw. The study mentioned that the sector lacks market protections and raised concerns about market manipulation.
Quant (QNT) has continued to experience a down trend after a previous 122% 7 day rally on September 3. This was fueled by a protocol upgrade that allowed ERC-20 and ERC-721 token interoperability.
Vechain Thor (VET) has retraced after a 38& 7-day pump on November 2. This was ahead of its proof-of-authority (PoA) mechanism v2.0 test net release in November. The upgrade offers higher security to select the block producers.
The crypto total futures interest was negatively impacted by the market cap drop. However, this was expected since the total market cap retraced and around $2.7 billion worth of liquidations took place this week.
