For the Love of the Game (Market Commentary) |
There are just 11 days to go in the month, and it’s time to ask again - Sell in May and walk away, or
hold through June and to the moon? Over the past week, we’ve seen some strong evidence that the market is still primed to rip this summer.
Let’s start with one of the most significant, but least talked about developments of this cycle. I’m talking about Bitcoin seeing its highest weekly close in history, closing at $106,475 on Sunday evening. That happened even with Moody’s issuing its first ever credit downgrade to the
US. You would think that would be a serious gut punch to the crypto markets, but as we’ve seen this year, Bitcoin is on its path to becoming digital gold, and reached as high as $107,000 after close. While the 30-year Treasury yield hit an 18 month high at 5.02%, it’s
good news from across crypto that has traders continuing to see Bitcoin’s potential in the short term.
Bo Hines, Executive Director of Digital Assets for the White House, said that digital asset tech is the next generation of finance, and the US is ready to lead it, and JPMorgan continues to forecast a red-hot 2nd half of the year fueled by corporate and US state adoption. Regulations are coming, with the White House signaling optimism that bills like FIT21 and the GENIUS Act will be passed by August. We have a $5B FTX stimmy coming for creditors at the end of May, which just might give the market a little more juice for the short term. Crypto is winning, and the moment we see that reflected in the charts is coming soon. Everyone’s talking about the Virtuals AI launchpad, and the few who aren’t will be soon. This week Virtuals announced some major changes to how their community of “Virgens” will earn Diamond Hand points for token presales going forward. - Virtuals Diamond Hand bonus points, which were earned for holding Agent tokens, will now only be distributed to traders who are staking their Agent tokens.
- Beginning on Thursday, May 22, no Diamond Hand points will be given for just holding agent tokens.
- Staked agent tokens will face a 14-day cool-down period where no points are accrued and tokens are not tradable.
- Vader Research is retiring its Legacy VaderAI Holder Score, which applied to The SwarmAI, Billy
Bets, and Wakehacker.
- Virtuals is also dropping a new 69-day experimental launch style where projects can “rage quit” their token, and the LP and fees will be distributed to their token holders.
- Rumors suggest that Solana agent launches, points, and staking are coming to Virtuals in the next
few weeks.
Stablecoin Regulation’s Big Win Following the Senate’s failure to pass stablecoin legislation just 2 weeks ago, the GENIUS Act was back up for a cloture vote in the US Senate last night. It passed with 66 votes in favor of moving forward with the historic bill. It’s safe to say this is one of the biggest wins in crypto legislation history to date. - Senator Bill Hagerty says the Senate is set to make history by passing a landmark stablecoin
legislation.
- Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, calls on the US Senate to vote YES on the GENIUS
Act.
- 1.1% of the USD supply is tokenized as stablecoins.
- Circle, creators of USDC, is in talks to sell itself to Coinbase or
Ripple.
The crypto AI market saw an -8.15% pullback this week to $10.48B, but with the Virtuals ecosystem continuing to draw in new users, the market is expected to soar over the summer. It’s easy to see that coming with Agentic AI and AI Agents hitting a new all-time high on Google Trends. - $VIRTUAL is firmly in the $1B club, now with staking rewards and a big Genesis launch airdrops rewarding holders.
- The Swarm Report hosted Bizzy Agent during their Virtuals Genesis launch this morning, and will
be hosting BAibysitter on Wednesday.
- The Axelrod agent from AIXVC launched last week and at the time set records in all categories - market cap ($22M), participants (7k), and oversubscription, and saw traders realize over 100x on their presale buy-in.
- Arbus was the newest record-breaking launch on Virtuals, hitting 100% committed in under 1 hour, while seeing
7,482 participants. The token reached a $16M market cap, which is an 80x from the pre-sale price.
- An experimental AI/NFT collection called DX Terminal from OG crypto artist Gremplin launched on Base
last week. It saw 36k NFTs minted, each with a corresponding AI agent that is actively trading in a simulated crypto trading game.
- Coinbase Ventures posted a graphic showing off the scope of AI that is being built out on the Base
blockchain.
- Refik Anadol’s Biome Lumina AI art collection minted out 1800 editions at $5k each, bringing in
nearly $5M.
- Aicellerate gave an update for Alphapulse AI, revealing their updated UI/UX, MCP integration,
and new GPT o3 & Gemini pro 2.5 support.
- Major NFT sales this week include CryptoPunk #3609, which sold for 440 ETH ($1.08M), CryptoPunk #3281 for 148 ETH ($384K), and Boogle #70 for 1,300 SOL ($220K).
- Pudgy Penguins officially debuted the first episode of their new Lil Pudgys animation on YouTube,
while revealing plans to grow the Lil Pudgys brand. They also announced a new partnership with Random House Kids, the world’s largest children’s book publisher, to release a book called The Worst Birthday Present
Ever.
- Good Vibes Club is seeing more NFT sales above the floor price than any other collection, with 33% of
their sales coming in over the floor price.
- Hester Pierce made public comments saying that many NFTs are not securities, including NFTs
designed to compensate their creators over time.
- NFT artist DrifterShoots was arrested at his solo show in Chelsea, NY, last Thursday, for trespassing
when he climbed the Empire State Building to take one of his iconic photos.
- Red Bull Stadium in New York, home of the New York Red Bulls MLS team, will now be powered by
AVAX and will sell 100% of its tickets as NFTs.
- Rekt Drinks announced the acquisition of the rekt.com domain and is teasing a new blue label drink, possibly with OpenSea
as a partner.
- The NFT market is seeing signs of life, with sales hitting a 13-week high of $116.65M last week.
- Trade profits also came in at a 17-week high, though still negative at -$5.09M.
- Average sale price was up +7.30%, hitting a 13-week high of $103.39
- Unique buyers were up +55.91% to 264,901, a 23-week high.
ETH NFT Composite - 601.15 (+0.30%)
SOL NFT Composite - 514.29 (+0.39%)
POL NFT Composite - 3.76 (-1.05%)
CAR NFT Composite -
406.87 (-0.91%) Top Gainers 7d BGB - $5.19 (+9.1%)
AAVE - $240.69 (+8.8%)
HYPE - $26.40 (+7.5%)
TKX - $35.55 (+3.4%)
KCS - $11.72 (+3.1%)
Top Losers 7d
PI - $0.7322 (-36.7%)
TIA - $2.63 (-16.6%)
S - $0.4984
(-14.8%)
INJ - $11.77 (-14.4%)
OP - $0.7085 (-14.2%) |
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI technique that pairs a large-language model with an external knowledge retriever: before the model drafts its answer, it pulls in the most relevant documents (on-chain data, news articles,
research PDFs, etc.) and “augments” its prompt with those snippets, giving you responses that are both up-to-date and grounded in verifiable sources—hugely valuable for crypto analytics, where facts change fast and hallucinations are costly. Received this from a friend? Sign up for this CryptoSlam VIP newsletter. |
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