This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Slumps, TON Surges as Gaming Tokens Burn

A flurry of excitement this week around interest rates, crypto leverage, and ETF flows still proved net negative for the price of Bitcoin this week.

The leading cryptocurrency plunged as low as $65,018 on Friday, according to CoinGecko, edging near a 30-day low, before rolling into the weekend at $66,088. That's down 4.7% for the week—even as AllianceBernstein predicted yesterday that BTC could hit $200,000 next year.

Ethereum (ETH) fell 4% over the same period to $3,538, despite SEC chairman Gary Gensler confirming that Ethereum ETFs will be here soon. 

Amid such dim performances, it was Toncoin (TON) that stole the show this week, rising to a new all-time high of $8.25 apiece late Friday. The Telegram-linked coin is now up 8% over the past week (and 17% over 30 days) and crosses into the weekend as the ninth largest crypto by market cap at $19.4 billion. 

The rally is warranted: Toncoin is the native currency of The Open Network, which flipped Ethereum in May for its number of daily active addresses—of which it had 547,000 on Thursday compared to Ethereum’s 407,000. 

Many TON ecosystem coins have rallied amid the hype. Telegram-based clicker game Notcoin (NOT) rose 20% on Friday, carrying its momentum after reaching 35 million users in March. Hamster Kombat—another TON-based clicker game—hit 100 million players last week and is planning its own token launch for next month. 

Telegram’s next victim in the market cap rankings is Dogecoin (DOGE), which already fell 7.5% this week to a $19.7 billion market cap.

Most alts and other meme coins fell drastically alongside the large-cap coins, including NEAR (down 18%) PEPE (down 8%), and Dogwifhat (down 14%). Bitcoin layer-2 platform Stack (STX) tanked by 11% on Friday—down 19% for the week—after the network failed to produce a block for nine hours straight.

And despite Roaring Kitty doubling his stake in GameStop on Friday, the meme stock and its associated Solana-based meme coin, GME, are on the decline. 

Some of the worst hit tokens this week were gaming tokens: Ethereum L2-based RPG Guild of Guardians (GOG) is down 46% on the week to less than $0.10, while Parallel’s PRIME token is down 37% to almost $10.

As is typical, massive Bitcoin whale MicroStrategy (MSTR) stock fell 6% alongside Bitcoin this week. However, members of the upcoming wave of ‘mini MicroStrategys’—other companies adopting Bitcoin as their main treasury reserve asset—have surged, with MetaPlanet up 9.76% and Semler Scientific (SMLR) up 17%. 

Of that group, the biggest gainer by far was Canadian-based crypto fund provider DeFi Technologies (DEFI). Since announcing its Bitcoin Treasury Strategy on Monday, the company’s stock has mooned 50%.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.