For the Love of the Game (Market Commentary) |
Interest rate cuts may finally be coming as signaled by Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Friday in his
Jackson Hole speech. It was music to traders’ ears who were itching to go full risk on, and for a brief moment, they pushed BTC back on track to nearly $117K. By Friday evening, Bitcoin was back on its downtrend, and on its way to $109K today, a fresh 6-week low. A BTC whale selling $2.7B sure didn’t help either. But it’s Ethereum that has stolen the spotlight, notching its first
all-time high in nearly 4 years twice since Powell’s speech, and giving us a look at what the rest of the year could bring.
In the immediate future, we’ll keep an eye on the US Senate, which goes back to work next week, and is expected to quickly start working on passing the crypto regulation bill, the Clarity Act.
We’ll keep you posted on developments on that front, and on all of the latest happenings
in AI, crypto, and NFTs. Kanye West’s long-awaited token launch has finally arrived, and as many suspected, it was an insider-traded mess. - The YZY token was launched on Solana on Aug 18 but wasn’t announced until
Aug 20.
- YZY soared to a $3B FDV before massive profit taking dumped it down to under $1B. As of today, the token sits at a $573M FDV.
- YZY token is part of the YZY Money ecosystem, which includes the token, YE Pay, and a YZY Card.
- Bubble Maps quickly picked up suspicious trading, including the first buyer being a trader who made
$100M on TRUMP.
- Hayden Davis, the man behind the infamous LIBRA token scandal, appears to be behind the YZY token, too. YZY launched the same day that Davis’ $57.6M was unfrozen by a judge, and an incriminating call was recorded that reveals his early access to the token.
It has been 4 long years in the making, and despite some saying a new ETH all-time high would never come, disbelievers were rekt. - On Friday, Aug 23, ETH hit its highest level in nearly 4 years, climbing to $4,884. On Sunday, Aug 24, it found an even higher high, climbing to over $4,956.
- Open interest on ETH hit an ATH late last week of $34.5B.
- ETH saw $337.7M in ETF inflows on Friday and outpaced BTC by $937.4M on the week (though both were negative on the
week).
- Hope of rate cuts in September, combined with Tom Lee’s massive recent ETH purchases (recently $3B
worth, and owning $7B in total), is fueling this recent ETH move.
Fantasy sports and crypto have always made sense, but regulatory uncertainty has slowed the growth of this sector. A new platform called Football.fun arrives just in time for new regulations and very eager fans. - Football.fun is a Web3 fantasy football platform on the Base blockchain that enables users to trade fractional shares in real soccer players and compete in tournaments based on their real-world performances.
- FDF launched in August 2025 on Base after raising $2M in funding from investors like 6th Man
Ventures and Devmons.
- The platform reached $100M in TVL, $25.7 million in trading volume, and over 11,000 wallet
addresses within two weeks, with $1.7 million in fees generated.
- Some platform users are fudding the platform fees (5%), which are intended to keep extractors out of the ecosystem, and there are concerns about player IP. The founder of Football.fun is confident they are using IP properly after consulting multiple lawyers on top of his previous experience working at Sorare.
The AI market fell -8.28% in the past 7d to a 11.86B market cap. Top token movers include CX + 463.1%, REKT - 19.46%, USDT -16.77%, FET -8.82%, and FARTCOIN - 6.08%. - The top new Virtuals Genesis launches include PokPok ($4.98m), Sage ($4.54M), and Shumi ($1.98M), while Flagship had
their FYI TGE today, hitting a $28M FDV.
- The SWARM announced a partnership with Karum to expand agentic on-chain data beyond Virtuals.
Maicrotrader also announced an integration to bring WalletDNA and smart data to their trading platform.
- Virtuals updated their airdrop selling penalty so now Virgens who sell airdrops can continue to
receive more tokens within just days.
- Vader announced a major change in their project's roadmap. They refunded all users’ staked VADER
tokens and plan to reveal their new direction soon. Many are speculating that they will return to a token launchpad for Virtuals prototype launches.
- Prototype agent launches are becoming the new meta on Virtuals, and a project called AI Rocket is emerging as the top launchpad on Virtuals. Last week, they launched MUTE ($2.3M), and this week are launching AEGON.
- PokPok, the first Genesis 2.0 launch on Virtuals, launched with a major tokenomics issue, as almost no
liquidity was added to the LP, and snipers were able to snatch millions of tokens at a discount. Virtuals corrected the problem by relaunching a new token.
- Symphony revealed a $200K prize pool for their massive trading competition on their
platform.
- The top 35 NFT sales in the past 7d were all CryptoPunks, including CryptoPunk #4619, which sold for 96 ETH ($446K), and a rare Zombie V1 Punk #4513 for 55 ETH ($254K). We also saw XCOPY’s Death Wannabe sell for $475K.
- Crypto Artist m0dest sold out a new 6,969-edition collection called mementos for 254.61 ETH ($1.1M).
The collection will act as a currency in his ecosystem and allows collectors to mint new works, get WL, attend events, grab physical prints, and can also be returned for 75% of the initial mint price.
- Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley teases that interest is growing for their BlueChip NFT Index
Fund.
- Azuki teamed up with Japanese beverage brand Cheerio to release a LE Enter the Garden Lifeguard X energy
drink.
- Collectors of top Ordinals collections like OMB, Taproot Wizards, and others received a surprise collectible called Unity, which equals 10,000 JOY tokens on Spark.
- Monad airdropped 5k Monad Card NFTs to top crypto Twitter influencers, and will expand the collection
to a wider group soon.
- Luca Netz confirmed that PENGU, not Pudgy Penguin NFTs, is the main web3 product of Pudgy Penguins.
He also revealed a greater focus on Asia and says that culture will be shifting to the East.
- NFT sales fell to a 7-week low, coming in at $127.24M.
- Unique sellers and buyers both decreased, while transactions saw a +20.43% increase on the week.
- Traders have now been in profit 4 out of the past 5 weeks as trade profits flip green again with $283K in profits.
ETH NFT Composite - 708.04 (-1.34%)
SOL NFT Composite - 545.16 (-1.01%)
POL NFT Composite - 3.50 (+0.29%)
CAR NFT Composite -
267.11 (+0.33%) Top Gainers 7d CRO - $0.1989 (+39.0%)
OKB - $169.48 (+37.8%)
AAVE - $327.92 (+14.7%)
KHYPE - $46.58 (+9.3%)
ARB - $0.5338 (+9.3%)
Top Losers 7d
MNT - $1.18 (-13.5%)
ADA - $0.8472 (-8.1%)
BONK - $0.00002076
(-7.2%)
UNI - $9.69 (-6.9%)
SKY - $0.06491 (-6.6%) |
In AI culture, “slop” refers to low-effort, low-quality content generated by AI models, often mass-produced with little originality or refinement. It’s used to describe generic images, text, or media that flood timelines and marketplaces,
lacking the creativity, context, or polish that human input usually adds. The term is both a critique of over-reliance on automated outputs and a reminder that not all AI-generated work is meaningful or valuable. Received this from a friend? Sign up for this CryptoSlam VIP newsletter. |
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