This week, the markets seemed to be grateful for the lack of news. After last Thursday’s flash crash that made most leading cryptocurrencies decline by double digits, most of them recovered their losses over the week. Bitcoin (BTC) is now at $26,015, about 0.4% lower than it was a week ago. Ethereum (ETH) similarly followed suit, trading at $1,647, 1.6% lower than the previous week. Most other top thirty cryptocurrencies retained their value, with the only notable depreciation seen in Uniswap (UNI) and Avalanche (AVAX). UNI and AVAX fell 7.9% and 7.2% respectively.
Meme coin PEPE, however, is still in freefall. This week, it suffered a loss of over 20%, sliding from 71st to 98th place and currently trading at $0.000000865154. Adding to its generally poor performance, the PepeCoin team’s multi-sig Ethereum address transferred 16.045 trillion PEPE—worth $16.85 million at the time—to four exchanges (Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and Bybit) on Thursday, which sparked some panic selling and lack of communication from the team.
In terms of news, the Kenyan government established a committee to inquire into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s crypto project Worldcoin. The U.S. Department of Justice also arrested Tornado Cash founder Roman Storm and charged him with crimes related to money laundering. Earlier this week, the legislative body of the Central African Republic (CAR) granted approval for the tokenization of land and natural resources to help the government position the country as an up-and-coming business destination in Africa.
