Top Crypto Stories This Week: From Solana Goats to Bitcoin Rumours
If crypto is the alternate reality to TradFi, then Web3 is the alternate reality to life. Never entirely sure what to believe, the Web3 world is expected to embrace oddities as norms and fiction as facts.
This week saw the spawning of a goat-themed memecoin, which is making Solana fanboys very, very rich. And how? It's all down to the dystopian power of artificial intelligence (AI).
The self-proclaimed "chaotic" AI called?Truth Terminal began as an AI chatroom experiment within the "Infinite Backrooms" project by performance artist?Andy Ayrey.
It then evolved into a self-governing AI blending humor, irreverence, and unpredictability.?a16z co-founder and general partner Marc Andreesen was so impressed by the bot that he sent it $50,000 in Bitcoin in July.
Eventually, for reasons that only make sense in AI and crypto, it established a new persona known as Goatseus. Launching into rants about “Goatseus Maximus,” a new memecoin under the ticker $GOAT was soon born.
The AI agent quickly caught wind of it and long story short, it hit a market cap of about $700 million within days of its existence.
Essentially, a robot spewed goat-related nonsense, inspired a memecoin, and degens got rich. That's crypto for you.
But over in the physical world, things are equally as abstract. The question of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamori's true identity has recently resurfaced thanks to an HBO documentary, which pointed fingers at Canadian developer Pete Todd.
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Rumour at best, supported with little evidence, the HBO claim nonetheless has caused poor Todd to retreat into hiding as Bitcoin maxis and crypto fanboys are apparently threatening his life.
In a world as bizarre and fleeting as crypto, rumours often serve as pillars of truth. Last week, Elon Musk inadvertently stirred the rumour mill after Tesla moved almost all of its Bitcoin, causing the market to brace for the worst. Again, with very little to go on, Bitcoin holders jumped to their own conclusions.
Although not enough to move the market, rumours of Musk turning his back on Bitcoin flooded Crypto Twitter (or is that Crypto X because of Musk?). However, this week, Tesla's Q3 2024 earnings proved that the EV giant had sold none of its BTC holdings. All that FUD for nothing but alas, such is the cycle of crypto.
Despite the rumour mill being hard at work this week and AI powerfully thrusting digital goats at Solana enthusiasts, Bitcoin and Ethereum have had a rather lacklustre week, down 0.81% and 4.91% respectively, while SOL enjoys returns of around 12% over the same period.
Risk appetites have slipped slightly from last week's 73, "Greed" to 72, also "Greed." The Fear & Greed Index uses 5-6 measurements to assess the current sentiment of the market and then rates that level of emotion on a scale of 1-100 – 1 is extreme fear and 100 is extreme greed.
As always, BRN is here to calm your fears. "The absence of significant selling pressure indicates market confidence, reinforcing our recommendation to remain heavily invested, with a bias for Bitcoin over Ethereum to maximize potential returns," BRN analyst Valentin Fournier tells subscribers today in his daily update.