This Week in Coins: Chainlink Moons 44%, Leads Marketwide ETF Speculation Rally

The last seven days were an exhilarating ride for holders of many leading cryptocurrencies, with multiple coins posting double-digit percentage gains by the start of the weekend.

The marketwide rally began last week, when rumors and speculation that a Bitcoin spot ETF was about to be approved in the United States drove Bitcoin (BTC) to reclaim $30k, a level not previously seen since summer. 

The market leader enjoyed a wilder rally this week, rising 14.6% to trade at $33,621 by Friday, according to CoinGecko. However, Bitcoin actually set a 16-month high on Wednesday, briefly inching past $35,000. 

Closest contender Ethereum (ETH) also managed a wilder rally than last week’s, blowing up 10.5% over the seven days to hit $1,769 on Friday. 

Solana (SOL), which posted a 25% increase last week, continued ballooning this week. SOL is up 18.8% and currently trades for $31.75.

Other notable rallies among the top thirty cryptocurrencies by market capitalization include: Cardano (ADA), which rose 15.2% to $0.288154, Dogecoin (DOGE) added 17.2% to $0.070223, Polygon (MATIC) rallied 15.4% to $0.619624, Polkadot (DOT} climbed 10.6% to $4.13, Shiba Inu (SHIB) grew 12.7% to $0.00000782, and Cosmos Hub (ATOM) added 10.7% to trade at $6.99 as of this writing. 

The biggest mover this week was Chainlink (LINK), which mooned an eye-watering 44.6% and currently changes hands at $11.08. The project’s token began rallying on Monday, buoyed in part by the growing popularity of Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), a recently launched tech-stack upgrade aimed at simplifying cross-chain transactions.

There were no significant price drops among the leading cryptocurrencies this week. 

The ETF saga

Last week’s Bitcoin rally began after a fake news tweet by Cointelegraph successfully annoyed the SEC and hoodwinked a lot of people into thinking that a U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF launch was  imminent. 

This week another blunder reignited a blaze of speculation. This time, a ticker for BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, IBTC, was listed by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a huge clearing and settlement company that clears NASDAQ trades.

The following day, the ticker was removed from DTCC’s ETF list after people called attention to it, causing Bitcoin’s price to wobble and ostensibly confirming that ETF hype is driving it. It has since been put back. 

The week kicked off with another sign for ETF watchers: on Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals issued its highly anticipated order for the Securities and Exchange (SEC) to take another look at Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin ETF application after it was previously determined that the SEC’s earlier rejection of it was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Finally, in other regulatory news, British lawmakers green-lit the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill today, a new bit of legislation that strengthens law enforcement’s powers to seize crypto. It’s aimed at tackling various criminal activities, including drug trafficking, cybercrime, and terrorism.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.