This Week in Coins: Dogecoin Surpasses Bitcoin and Ethereum Amid Musk’s Twitter Takeover

The crypto markets continued to see green too second week in a row.

In a typical week, market leaders Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) set the pace for everyone else, but this week they took a backseat to other impressive rallies.

Bitcoin gained 3% over the past seven days and is currently trading at $21,314. Ethereum gained nearly 2% during that time and is trading at $1,640. Both could have made more progress, but the US Federal Reserve’s announcement on Wednesday for now further 0.75% interest rate increase– the fourth this year – quickly spun their course.

Interest rate hikes are usually (but not always) met with bearish sentiment among investors who go for riskier assets like crypto or stocks. The reason is that higher prices make it more difficult for people to borrow money, so in general they hold on to their wealth and forego their chances.

On Friday, the two market leaders recovered slightly after the release of a The Ministry of Labour’s report shows that job growth in the US was up.

Several of the top thirty currencies flourished positively this week. Binance Coin (BNB) rose 18.6%, Litecoin (LTC) rose 25%, Chainlink rose 20%, and Algorand (ALGO) rose 24%.

Uniswap (UNI) and Cosmos (ATOM) both added about 10% to the price.

Top meme coin Dogecoin (DOGE) mooned 22% over seven days and topped 12 cents (yes, yes, far from its high of 73 cents in May 2021). Like last weekeveryone’s favorite memecoin continues to respond positively to the news of Twitter’s new CEO

And the most impressive rally among the top 30 coins was Polygon (MATIC), which surged 28% for the week following the Reddit’s booming Polygon NFTs and an announcement on Wednesday by Meta that Instagram would integrate Polygon for its upcoming NFT embossing function.

Twitter Goes Crypto?

It’s been a week Elon Musk took over Twitter and the news since has given strong hints that the world’s largest microblogging platform may swing towards Web3 and crypto sooner than we think.

For a start, on Monday, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao appeared on CNBC and said his exchange had invested half a billion dollars in Musk’s takeover to give crypto a “seat at the table when it comes to free speech.”

CZ also elaborated on potential crypto use cases on Twitter, saying that Musk’s tentative plans to charge subscription fees for verified accounts could “be done very easily, globally, using cryptocurrencies as a means of payment”.

Binance announced last week create an internal blockchain team to help the Tesla CEO in his crackdown on bot accounts.

The day before, Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) shared a photo to his followers from Twitter’s San Francisco office, tweeting that he is “helps Elon Musk with Twitter temporarily with some other great people.”

Krishnan added, “I (and a16z) believe this is a hugely important company and can have a big impact on the world, and Elon is the person to make it happen.”

Adoption!

The steady mainstream adoption of crypto continued this week as the industry on Monday cheered two key announcements.

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission says it is now ready to conduct one public consultation on how to give retail investors access to crypto. Although crypto exchanges are allowed to operate in the special administrative region, onboarding is limited to investors with at least HK$8 million ($1 million) in their portfolios.

The regulator said it is open to considering property rights for tokenized assets and the legality of smart contracts at some point, and it is exploring a number of pilot projects to test the potential benefits of using crypto.

Potential projects include issuing a NFT for Hong Kong Fintech Week 2022 and possibly even a pilot of Hong Kong’s own central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Private equity giant Apollo Global – which manages half a trillion dollars in assets – announced on Monday that it will keep crypto for institutional clients through a new partnership with Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States.

Anchorage will retain a “significant portion” of Apollo’s portfolio. COO Adam Eling said in a statement: “We were attracted to work with Anchorage because of their commitment to operating under strict regulatory oversight, their strong emphasis on security and segregation of client assets, and their ease of use for asset managers to hold digital tokens.”

On Wednesday, the decentralized finance pilot program of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) carried out “the first real-world use case for institutional-grade DeFi protocols,” according to Aave founder Stani Kulechov who spoke to Decrypt.

JP Morgan, DBS Bank and SBI Digital Asset Holdings used the Aave protocol on Polygon to complete currency and government bond transactions on Ethereum. Banks swapped tokenized versions of Singapore government bonds for Japanese government bonds, and Japanese yen for Singapore dollars as a test.