Morning, Coinheads. Rain to start the week here in Sydney, while in Melbourne Novak Djokovic extended his own reign and cruised (sorta) to his 10th Aussie Open win. All a bit predictable. One thing that’s perhaps less so is Bitcoin and crypto’s continued surge.

Some have been calling it, of course.

As for altcoins, there’s plenty of  “M”-related action going on, and we’ll get into some of that in a bit more detail in a minute or two.

Meanwhile, it’s a big week for macro-related financial happenings, as our own non-fungible Eddy Sunarto highlights in his Trader’s Diary outlook for the week.

For global markets (including crypto) there are a few things to remain aware of, he notes:

“It’s going to be a huge weekly calendar for worldwide markets, with the Fed interest rates decision due on Wednesday (US time) followed by the ECB rates decision on Thursday (EU time).

Equally as important is the US jobless rate on Friday, and the EU’s jobless rate on Wednesday.”

Can we expect another hawkish stance for the foreseeable from US Fed boss Jerome Powell? It’s widely thought that he’ll keep hiking rates until it’s clear that unemployment in the US is significantly rising. They’re possibly not there with that yet, although there have been some pretty hefty tech-sector layoffs lately.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.12 trillion, up about 3.4% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have been showing the market the way over the past 24 hours, with 3.4% and 4.9% gainage respectively.

Want some positive tweets regarding both? A delve into the Crypto Twitter hive mind brings us to young analyst Will Clemente, who’s spotted the fact BTC holders, aggregated, are “no longer underwater”. And that’s corresponded with a pretty positive place for the market in the past.

Meanwhile Lark “Just a Dude on the Internet” Davis has a quick reminder for us about a few of Ethereum’s positive traits…

Polygon‘s MATIC token is also maintaining its position in the top 10 major coins, on the back of an 18%+ run of positivity over the past seven days.

There’s a particular narrative that might be helping to push it higher, and that’s ZK (zero knowledge) technology scaling. The Polygon network has been surging ahead of a major protocol upgrade to include zkEVM – an Ethereum-compatible “rollups” scaling solution.

A couple of weeks ago, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal hinted that the official date for the highly anticipated upgrade will be arriving “SOOON”.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$9.8 billion to about US$443 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

Mina Protocol (MINA), (market cap: US$622 million) +19%

• Decentraland (MANA), (mc: US$1.44 billion) +15%

• Dash (DASH), (mc: US$639 million) +14%

• GMX (GMX), (mc: US$527 million) +12%

• Fantom (FTM), (mc: US$1.25 billion) +11%

 

Mina Protocol (MINA), is known as “the world’s lightest blockchain” with a developer-friendly and nimble size of no more than 22kB.

As for its pump (it’s up more than 33% over the past week), that’s harder to discern than, say, MATIC’s. That said, there appears to be expectation among the Mina-investing community that the protocol’s bridging capability with Ethereum is progressing well and that a launch fairly soon this year may be on the cards.

As for Decentraland (MANA), one of crypto’s top metaverse-related tokens by market cap (and user count), perhaps its strong association with the Australian Open has brought it some added attention recently.

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.