Mooners and Shakers: FIFA NFT Partner Algorand and XRP Lead Biggest Crypto Gains; Optus hacker wants Monero

by · September 25, 2022

Algorand and XRP are cryptoassets that have made the biggest moves in the past week. The former was related to the FIFA NFT partnership, the latter is still proceeding with positivity in litigation. Meanwhile, the Optus data hacker is mining Monero.

More on these things further down.

The week is well and truly underway here in Australia, but at the time of writing, Bitcoin, and the rest of the crypto market, is just “closing” its week elsewhere. Some people seem a little nervous about it.

What is this crypto market “near”? Isn’t crypto the financial market that never sleeps? Yep, that’s right, but for the sake of charting and technical analysis (aka mumbo jumbo to the vast uninitiated), it’s generally accepted that the daily and weekly close happens at midnight UTC. And it is imminent.

Bitcoin is back below US$19k and according to Cointelegraph as well as other analytical minds, BTC’s latest weekly close looks set to be the lowest since 2020 if it stays around its current level.

Trading account Crypto Yoddha expressed the importance of the week in shaping the direction of the crypto market…

While economist Alex Krüger seems to think things could get a little worse in the short term before a pretty nice potential bounce. If that’s an accurate assessment, then fine – enjoy your ride.

Dutch trader Michaël van de Poppe, meanwhile, looks at the continued macro/floating inflation effects which have really kicked into gear in the last week or so.

On some daily price actions and other events.

Top 10 overview

With the total crypto market capitalization at USD 963 billion and down around 1% since yesterday, here is the current status of the top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

A Bitcoin weekly closes below USD 18,800, then and so far a slow bleed into the week for the crypto majors … except for XRP.

The crypto industry’s most prominent currency rail project continues to grab the headlines, the analysis and speculation, and the gains of the moment. And judging by this tweet from an XRP community member, it continues to catch the attention of whale investors as well.

Overs and Downers: 11-100 – Algorand and FIFA NFTs

With a market cap of about $7.46 billion to about $386 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour winners and losers at press time. (Statistics accurate at time of publication, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPS

• Tokenize Xchange (TKX), (market cap: USD 599 million) +8%

• Maker DAO (MKR), (mc: USD 638 million) +5%

• ApeCoin (APE), (mc: USD 1.8 billion) +5%

• Algorand (ALGO), (mc: USD 2.7 billion) +3%

• Cosmos Hub (ATOM), (mc: USD 4.1 billion) +3%

• Chain link (LINK), (mc: USD 3.87 billion) +3%

Algorand is a Proof of Stake layer 1 blockchain and competitor to the likes of Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, Avalanche and more. It cannot be conductive daily price action in this category, but it has done extremely well in the past week.

In fact, it’s up more than 32% over seven days, at the time of writing.

Why? The fact that it has an official partnership with FIFA to launch World Cup NFTs may have something to do with it!

The Federation of Association of FIFA has now launched its NFT marketplace FIFA+ Collect. And it’s built on the Algorand blockchain – a massive coup for the Layer 1 project.

Last week, FIFA introduced its “Genesis Drop” NFTs featuring notable football highlights (in the form of art/images) from FIFA’s history. The drop launched with 532,980 copies, each containing three such moments.

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Terra Luna Classic (LUNC), (market cap: USD 1.4 billion) -13%

• Celsius network (CEL), (mc: USD 612 million) -8%

• Ravencoin (RVN), (mc: USD 446 million) -6%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: USD 1 billion) -5%

• Arweave (AR), (mc: USD 470 million) -5%

Around the blocks: Optus hacker wants Monero payment

An assortment of coincidences and relevance that stuck with us on our morning through the Crypto Twitterverse…

As reported by Alex Turner-Cohen for news.com.au, a person who “claims to be the evil genius responsible for the Optus data breach” has demanded more than AUD$1.5 million in ransom from the telco – to be paid in crypto. “privacy coin” Monero (XMR).

The hacker claims to have collected vital data on approximately 11.2 million Optus customers, including names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses and even some ID document numbers. “Vote if you read! price for us to not sell data is 1,000,000$US We give you 1 week to decide,” reads part of their message on the forum.

According to the report, the ransom demand appeared on a forum early Saturday morning, and experts so far seem to think it is legitimate.

Why Monero? The XMR token is considered the leading privacy coin in crypto. These are highly decentralized and controversial assets as they use privacy-enhancing technology to hide transactions and transaction history, thereby achieving a level of anonymity that makes users very difficult to trace.

Needless to say, privacy coins are generally not popular with governments.

Speaking of governments and things that are hugely controversial, however, it’s interesting to see Russia’s evolving stance on cryptocurrency.

The Moscow Exchange (MOEX), the largest exchange organization in the country, is reportedly looking to enable digital financial asset (DFA) trading and securities trading based on a set of exchanges currently being put together.

The Bank of Russia has also reportedly considered the possibility of legalizing crypto for international/cross-border payments in the near future.

Meanwhile, Washington is still figuring out its stance, but is “increasingly changing its perspective on crypto,” according to Coinbase head of policy Faryar Shirzad.

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