Mooners and Shakers: Avalanche slides on whistleblower drama; Bitcoin and Ethereum rebound (a bit)

August 30, 2022 Editor Ethereum 0

ethereum pumps

Jerome Powell’s latest speech is a few days old and the crypto caravan moves on. Bitcoin has bounced above US$20k and Ethereum’s finding some resilience, but Avalanche has a few issues…

There’s been some controversy circulating about the Avalanche layer 1 protocol, which sent the AVAX token crashing yesterday…

Things have picked up a bit since then, but the token is still down close to 15% on the week.

So what happened? In some sort of nutshell, this…

• Self-described crypto “whistleblower” website Crypto Leaks published a report this week alleging Ava Labs had paid law firm Roche Freedman to sue Avalanche’s competitors.

• Crypto Leaks also posted a series of unattributed, covertly recorded videos, showing lawyer Kyle Roche apparently detailing his relationship with Ava Labs executives.

• The report insinuates the law firm was paid by the Avalanche creators to hurt competitors, including major rival Solana, and help distract regulatory scrutiny away from Avalanche.

• Lawyer Kyle Roche has since said that the statements he made related to Ava Labs were “obtained through deceptive means” by an employee of Avalanche rival Dfinity’s founder Dominic Williams.

• The same Crypto Leaks report also implicated Ripple Labs’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse with similar Roche Freedman-associated, competitor-targeting plans. Garlinghouse has strongly denied any such actions, or even meeting Roche.

A quick scan of Avalanche tokens on CoinGecko, and it’s clear the ecosystem has been taking a bit of a hit on the news. DeFi protocols Trader Joe (JOE), Pangolin (PNG) and Avalaunch (XAVA), for instance, are all down around 15%-20% on the weekly timeframe.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.02 trillion and up about 3.4% since yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

After plummeting below the trillion dollar mark yesterday, the crypto market cap has reclaimed the magic number on its daily spin of the chocolate wheel.

Ethereum (ETH) was leading the descent yesterday, and now it’s holding the flag for the daily pump, up close to 8% over the past 24 hours at the time of writing.

With so much conflicting analysis, plus a strong school of thought emerging that the protocol’s mythologised upcoming upgrade (that’d be The Merge) will be a sell-the-news dumpster fire, ETH’s short-term future seems difficult to call right now.

That said, European trader/analysts Rekt Capital and Michaël van de Poppe are having a crack…

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8  billion to about US$412 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

• Synthetix (SNX), (market cap: US$803 million) +16%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: US$1.07 billion) +15%

• Cosmos Hub (ATOM), (mc: US$3.4 billion) +13%

• Flow (FLOW), (mc: US$1.98 billion) +12%

• Kusama (KSM), (mc: US$445 million) +9%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Chain (XCN), (market cap: US$1.8 billion) -4%

• Tenset (10SET), (mc: US$459 million) -1%

Around the blocks

A selection of randomness and pertinence that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse…

Snoop Dogg and Eminem have now delivered their hyped Bored Ape-themed MTV/VMA performance…

Turns out it’s not exactly been getting five-star reviews across Crypto Twitter and Reddit, though…

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