The CoinDesk Market Index of 183 assets has seen a 60.1% growth year-to-date, but the last week saw a 1.4% dip. To get a better understanding of the market, let’s take a look at the top-10 and bottom-10 assets based on their performance month-on-month.
Culture and entertainment assets and currencies dominated the leaders. Small gaming and metaverse protocols such as Yield Guild Games (YGG), HighStreet (HIGH), and LivePeer (LPT) made a huge impression in the top-10 leaderboard. However, the culture and entertainment sector, which is market-cap weighted, was pretty flat month-on-month (down 0.4%).
Yield Guild Games saw a 600% increase in its token value over four days, but then began to plummet as rumors circulated that the guild’s initial backers were taking their money out. “It appears to be a pump and dump,” said CoinDesk Indices Data Analyst Reilly Decker.
Stellar (XLM), XRP (XRP), and Shiba Inu (SHIB) were the biggest currency leaders over the last week. Stellar is building on a research report it released in July that supports the narrative that XLM is one of the most well-connected and integrated USDC cash off-ramps. XRP is still benefiting from a U.S. judge’s ruling last month that the sale of XRP tokens on exchanges do not constitute investment contracts (and therefore are not covered by securities laws). Shiba Inu (SHIB) announced it would tie digital identity services across all of its platforms, another sign of its effort to distance itself from its meme coin origins and become a serious DeFi protocol.
On the other hand, Augur (REP) and Pepe (PEPE) were the two biggest laggards month-on-month. Curve Finance (CRV) also suffered a $70 million hack in July, at one point raising doubts as to its viability as a going concern.
“In crypto, there are always winners and losers, often massively so,” said Decker.