The past seven days in the cryptocurrency space have been a week of massive declines as the market capitalization fell below its $2 trillion mark to currently stand at $1.7 trillion as of the time of this writing. Flagship cryptocurrency, Bitcoin posted a weekly decline of 8.40% losing a little over $4,000, from $46,453 at the start of the week, to currently trade at $42,550 as of the time of this writing.
The declines seen in the market during the week were as a result of a stronger dollar, which is trading at 99.79 basis points, a level not traded since March 2017. The strength in the dollar was as a result of the prospect of more aggressive Federal Reserve tightening. The release of minutes from the Fed’s March meeting showed a majority of its officials were prepared to raise rates in 50-basis-point increments in coming months.
As you would expect, with Bitcoin posting steep declines, so has the altcoin market, with majority of the top 50 cryptocurrencies losing 15% and more. The biggest decline of the top 50 comes from WAVES, the native token of the Waves platform, a multi-purpose blockchain platform that supports various use cases including decentralized applications (DApps) and smart contracts. As previously reported by Nairametrics, the decline was due to Neutrino Dollar (USDN), a stablecoin issued through Waves-backed Neutrino protocol, losing its U.S. dollar-peg on the 4th of April, amid speculations that it could become insolvent in the future.
Although we saw declines for the week, these coins DOGE, NEAR and XMR defied the natural trend as they posted gains for the week. Here’s why:
Dogecoin DOGE (6.51%)
Dogecoin, known to be Elon Musk’s, the world’s richest man, favourite coin, posted gains this week as a result of Tesla’s boss’ suggestion of using the token as a means of payment on Twitter. During the week, Musk became the majority shareholder of Twitter after buying 9.2% stake in the company worth approximately $3 billion. A day after the disclosure, Musk was named as a new member of the board of directors of the organization. This was disclosed by the current CEO, Parag Agrawal, on his Twitter account.
On Saturday, Musk offered some advice on how Twitter Blue, which is Twitter’s first-ever subscription offering, could be improved. Twitter Blue is a paid monthly subscription service that was announced on the 3rd of June 2021. Twitter’s blog post mentioned that the new feature offers premium features like bookmark folders, tweet undo and reader mode.
Elon Tweeted, “Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (ie pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark. Blue already has a modifiable 20 second time to edit tweet feature.” He further stated, “And no ads. The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive.”
Musk believes that the subscription fee should be reduced to $2 per month (“paid 12 months up front”), that there should be no ads and that Twitter should consider allowing the subscription fee to be paid in Dogecoin ($DOGE). He stated, “Yes, should be proportionate to affordability & in local currency. Maybe even an option to pay in Doge?”
Near Protocol NEAR (1%)
NEAR is the native token of the Near Protocol, a layer-one blockchain that was designed as a community-run cloud computing platform. The reason for the rally can be traced to platform announcing that it had raised $350 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global, a New York-based hedge fund.
This is the second fundraiser the platform has done in 2022 as it previously raised $150 million in a round led by Three Arrows Capital, Alameda, and Jump in January 2022. The platform, in its announcement, stated that it expects several more fundraising to be announced in the coming weeks, particularly in NEAR- and Aurora-based DeFi projects and applications.
The NEAR network also touts to have processed more than 110 million transactions and has over 5 million accounts. As of the time of this writing, more than 450 apps are running or building on NEAR, which has the sixth-largest developer community in the blockchain ecosystem with more than 200,000 community members worldwide.
Monero XMR (7.65%)
Monero is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that allows transactions to take place privately and with anonymity, as it is designed to obscure senders and recipients alike through the use of advanced cryptography.
The reason for the rally can be traced to speculations about entities in Russia using the platform to bypass sanctions. The American research group Brookings warned last month that Monero, the first in the line of privacy coins, could be “used as part of a sanctions-evasion scheme.”
Brookings explained, “As a result of the difficulties in tracking and tracing the individuals involved in privacy coin transactions, the IRS has offered payments of $625,000 to those that can crack the privacy protections of Monero, Zcash, and other such cryptocurrencies.”