This Week in Coins: Bitcoin and Ethereum Flat Again, Axie Infinity Sees Rare Bounce

This week’s crypto market was another mixed bag as the industry continues to navigate the continued contagion from the FTX collapse.

Bitcoin and Ethereum ended the week basically flat again, which can be considered a victory considering the losses experienced by some of the other top coins. As of Saturday morning, Bitcoin (BTC) was up less than 1% over the past seven days, and Ethereum (ETH) was down 1.5%. Most of the top 50 coins by market capitalization were in the red this past week, or, if they were in the green, up less than 2%.

BTC fluctuated between about $17,300 and as low as $16,700, while Ethereum jumped between $1,300 and $1,225 as bears and bulls battled for control.

But a rare winner over the past seven days was Axie Infinity’s native AXS token. The token is up a whopping 21% since last weekend and is now trading at roughly $8.50, per CoinGecko.

The AXS token is used in the popular play-to-earn crypto game, where users battle Pokémon-like creatures.

AXS is the project’s governance token, which allows holders to vote on things like how the project’s treasury should be distributed, or proposed new features in the game. The game uses another token called Smooth Love Potion (SLP), which is used as a reward for users for winning duels.

This week’s top follows launch of the project’s Axie Contributors initiative. About 700 “engaged” community members will be given formal roles within the game’s governance model as part of Axie’s push for more informed discussions about how the game should work.

Following AXS, the native token that powers the self-custodial crypto wallet Trust Wallet is also on a rally. TWT has risen about 6% in the past seven days, almost reaching $3 per CoinGecko. Like Axie Infinity’s token, Trust Wallet is a governance token used to vote on new developments for Binance owned wallet.

Tokens for the decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch (1INCH), Chainlink (LINK) and Flow (FLOW), all round out this week’s biggest losers.

FTX infection continues

The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire last month is causing continued damage to the industry, with several firms announcing more layoffs this week in the wake of FTX’s bankruptcy.

Bybit, Swytfxand Koinly all announced a cut in the workforce, citing both contagion from the collapse of FTX and the ongoing bear market.

In addition to layoffs, Maple Finance, a platform that allows companies to spin up a lending facility using smart contracts, was also hit with fallout. The platform announced this week that it would cut all ties with Orthogonal Trading after the latter “misrepresented” its exposure to FTX, causing it to default on its loans.

M11 Credit, the firm that set up the lending facility on Maple from which Orthogonal borrowed, said: “we believe that Orthogonal Trading previously purposefully mismanaged their exposure and therefore committed a serious breach of the Master Loan Agreement (MLA).”

It wasn’t just M11 and Maple that were burned. Crypto insurance protocol Nexus Mutual, another borrower from the same M11 pool, as well revealed loss of around $3 million in Ethereum due to Orthogonal’s default.

As for SBF, it looks like he is finally on the way back to Washington DC to testify before the House Financial Services Committee.

After a public back-and-forth on Twitter with committee chair Maxine Waters, the former FTX CEO said he would be “willing to testify” despite “a limit” to what he can say due to not having ” access to a lot of [his] data – professional or personal.”

The meeting is scheduled for December 13 and will try to unpack how the stock market collapsed last month.