[Review] Last Week's Top 5 Performing Crypto & NFT to Watch

Period: 31^th October 2022 – 8^th November 2022

· After two consecutive weeks of strong rebound, the stock market lost momentum last week due to the Fed’s interest rate hikes and the Chair’s hawkish speech. While the Fed decision only made a minimum impact on the crypto market, bloodshed in the blockchain world is about to happen.

· The highly-anticipated Art Gobblers NFT collections achieved multiple records within a week of its debut. Not only it achieved one of the craziest single-day gain records, but also, it achieved one of the most epic dumps at the same time. Dirty laundry and rumours were exposed; let’s check them out in today’s review.

After two weeks of solid rebound for the US stock market, S&P 500 and Nasdaq are starting to tumble during the Fed’s meeting week. S&P 500 had wiped out half of its gain last week, while Nasdaq had wiped out all the profits. The Dow, on the other hand, is less impacted and still on track for its biggest monthly gain since 1987, according to Fortune magazine. As the Dow consisted of what the investors called “fundamental stock” and only 30 listed companies, it was less affected this time round. S&P 500 and Nasdaq are the victims who suffered from the Fed’s interest rate hikes of 75 basis points and Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s speech. While the Fed decision only made a minimum impact on the crypto market, a storm is brewing in the crypto space.

Before talking about the bad stuff, last week started with plenty of good news. One is the announcement of Meta’s latest Instagram feature – the NFT tool. Arweave (AR) and Polygon (MATIC) are the blockchain solutions for the social media platform’s latest Web3 integration. In this collaboration, Polygon will act as the Layer 1 network for the NFT transactions - minting and selling NFTs - while Arweave will be the blockchain storage solution. MATIC and AR were up 34% and 31% in a week. Initially, the price increase of both tokens was way higher than 30%, but the upward momentum was destroyed due to a war between the two largest crypto exchanges in the world, FTX and Binance. According to a report by a reputable crypto news site CoinDesk, it revealed that the balance sheet of Alameda Research, the SBF-founded quantitative crypto trading firm, heavily relied on holdings of the FTX Token (FTT). Before SBF had enough time to explain, Binance announced their decision to sell FTT, which triggered the sell-off of FTT, and the damage split over to the crypto market. As of the time of writing, FTT was down 16% to $22.05.

Created by the co-creator of Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland, and backed by famous crypto VC firm, Paradigm, Art Gobblers quickly catches the attention of the NFT community. The very first sale of Art Gobblers was sold at 5ETH. However, within two minutes, the price doubled to 10 ETH and later traded between 10-14 ETH. With just one day of listing, Art Gobblers gained a whooping 13,160 ETH of trading volume, beating all its peers. On the art reveal day, the sale was even crazier; Art Gobblers floor price was pumped a whooping 10 ETH (~$15,500), from 12 to 22 ETH within hours. When the market was in high spirits, dirty laundry and rumours started spreading in the streets. Starting with NFT influencers and whitelisting issues, Art Gobblers was accused of insider trading and market manipulation. Besides, there is also the controversy of using an underage child as a marketing gimmick. All of these spurred the FUD emotion of holders, resulting in one of the most remarkable dumps ever in NFT history. The floor price is around 3.5 ETH as of the time of writing.

The price movement of Art Gobblers. Source: NFTGo.