The crypto market experienced a volatile week with memecoins like Pudgy Penguins and SEI leading gains, while tokens like Kaia, GateToken, and CRV declined. Bitcoin's rebound fueled speculative trading, but overall sentiment remained cautious amid sharp swings and mixed technical signals.
The launch of new blockchains, including layer-2 networks built on Ethereum, is on the rise, with the recent launches of the Sei network and the Shibarium blockchain. Sei, a layer-1 blockchain built using Cosmos technology, gained over $1 billion in trading volume after its launch and aims to provide faster performance for decentralized trading applications. However, the launch was marred by questions and complaints from early adopters regarding the timing of the airdrop of rewards tokens. Shibarium, built on Ethereum, aims to reduce transaction fees and boost the price of the SHIB token but experienced technical difficulties on its first day. In other news, Binance shut down its Binance Connect service, former U.S. President Donald Trump holds $2.8 million in a cryptocurrency wallet, and Hedera Hashgraph's HBAR token surged after being added to the U.S. Federal Reserve's instant payments platform.