The cryptocurrency market surged this week as investors digested the Federal Reserve keeping rates flat at its policy meeting, the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, and earnings season. The Federal Reserve's decision to pause rate hikes was the most impactful, because the bullish sign for the stock market drove the more volatile crypto market to charge higher. It helped that earnings have been strong for the most part, giving investors a reason to buy higher-risk assets like crypto.
Three of the most notable movers were Solana (SOL +0.35%), Decentraland (MANA +0.15%), and Theta Network (THETA 0.12%), which rose as much as 39.8%, 23.6%, and 20.6% respectively over the past week.
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Solana rises again
Solana has been plagued by being associated with Bankman-Fried, who was an early supporter of the blockchain, so his trial and subsequent guilty verdict on Thursday gave the token a big boost. The collapse of FTX led to a sell-off in Solana, but there's an active group of users and developers on the blockchain and that didn't stop when the value of Solana fell. Now, investors looking for upside are seeing that active community as a bullish sign.
If the blockchain ends up getting wider adoption, low-cost, high-throughput blockchains are likely get more use and Solana is a likely winner in that scenario.
CRYPTO: SOL
Key Data Points
Decentraland's comeback
Like Solana, Decentraland would benefit from more activity on the blockchain as one of the leading metaverse tokens. While there's not much specific news about Decentraland this week, investors are speculating that a recovery in crypto would mean good news for big platforms like the Decentraland metaverse, which is still getting users today.
As good as users are to see, the number of people active in Decentraland is still in the hundreds, so this is far from widespread adoption at the moment.
Theta Network continues to develop
The news for Theta this week was the continued adoption of its platform for decentralized products. FedML is using Theta Edge nodes to optimize video recommendations using artificial intelligence (AI) in a decentralized way. This is the kind of activity that's long been controlled by a big tech company and Theta is helping move that activity to the blockchain.
Theta has several video infrastructure projects moving forward with Theta.TV and this could be an interesting use case for crypto and the blockchain. But it'll also take some time to grow adoption and prove out the technology.
Crypto's ups and downs continue
More and more blockchains are building real-world use cases for crypto and the associated tokens had a great week. However, it may take time for developers to build out utility and users to adopt this new technology. But as use cases are built and people start using blockchains like Solana and Theta these tokens could rise. This week was a reminder that there are still investors betting on the future of these tokens, especially in a more risk-tolerant market.
