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Railgun Among Crypto Market Top Gainers: Why Is RAIL 53% Up?

Recently, the crypto market fluctuations have seen most cryptocurrencies exhibit red numbers. While many remain unfazed by the market dynamics, some sectors of the crypto community have turned more pessimistic, and their bags are seemingly going down instead of up.

Despite this, some projects have shown a remarkable performance this week. Among the top gainers today, privacy protocol Railgun has skyrocketed 53% in the last 24 hours after a week of support from crucial figures in the crypto industry.

Vitalik Buterin Shows Support To Privacy Tools

On Monday, news broke that Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin had transferred 100 ETH, worth around $325,000, to Railgun. The project is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) privacy protocol that allows DeFi private transactions.

Although the move raised criticism, most replies supported his use of privacy tools. Some users pointed out that Buterin’s every on-chain move is watched and speculated on.

Ethereum’s founder later addressed the news, expressing support for the project’s use of the Privacy Pools protocol, which “makes it much harder for bad actors to join the pool without compromising users’ privacy.”

Buterin also stated in his post that “privacy is normal,” an idea he has expressed several times before. He has researched the use of Privacy Pools to achieve an equilibrium between blockchain privacy and regulatory compliance.

After the post, Railgun (RAIL) skyrocketed 257%. The token went from trading at $0.56 to changing hands for $1.97 in a few hours. Moreover, the rest of the privacy tokens market saw a pump, with tokens like Monero (XRM) and Oasis Network (ROSE) rising 7% and 12.3%, respectively. As of this writing, privacy tokens are 4.7% up, per CoinGecko data.

Railgun Defends From Crypto Laundering Allegations

On Tuesday, the crypto news platform Wu Blockchain highlighted the alleged links between the privacy protocol and the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group. The post affirmed that Lazarus Group “is also a user of the coin mixer Railgun.”

Moreover, the news platform pointed out that, in January 2023, the US FBI claimed over $60 million worth of stolen ETH was laundered through Railgun. Additionally, the post stated that the privacy protocol became the “main alternative” after the Tornado Cash sanctions.

Railgun shut down Wu Blockchain’s claims, deeming them “not true and false reporting.” The post stated the news was “a mistaken, false allegation in the first place.”

However, they clarified that the Lazarus Group is blocked from using the protocol’s system due to the “Private Proofs of Innocence” (Private POI).

The Private POI tool was implemented a year ago and gives “cryptographic assurance that funds entering the RAILGUN smart contract are not from a known list of transactions or actors considered undesirable by respective wallet providers.”

Despite the controversy, the price of RAIL remained above the $1 support level, hovering between $1.00 and $1.30 in the following days. RAIL continued an upward trajectory after its listing on the crypto exchange Poloniex.

At writing time, RAIL is trading at $1.85, an 18.2% surge in the last hour. According to an X user, a whale recently bought 152,034 RAIL tokens, which could have fueled the price jump.

Moreover, following its remarkable week, RAIL has increased 156% in the last seven days, with its daily trading volume rising a stellar 376% from yesterday.

crypto, Railgun, RAIL, RAILUSDT

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Dogwifhat (WIF) Flips PEPE As The 3rd Largest Memecoin After Hitting $4

Memecoins are again in the spotlight as some of the most popular dog-themed tokens performed remarkably during this bull cycle. Dogwifhat (WIF), Floki Inu (FLOKI), and Dogecoin (DOGE) have done impressive numbers this month.

WIF’s market capitalization skyrocketed to almost $4 billion, surpassing PEPE and taking third place as the largest memecoin in the market by this metric.

Hats On, Is WIF Going To The Moon?

Yesterday, WIF’s price increased 32% in half a day, setting a new all-time high (ATH) of $4. Simultaneously, its market capitalization jumped from $3.04 billion to $3.98 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data, which represents a 30% increase in the same timeframe.

This remarkable performance saw dogwifhat flipping PEPE as the third largest memecoin by market cap, now ranking just below Dogecoin and Shiba Inu (SHIB) in this category.

WIf, crypto

As reported by EmberCN, this performance gave wifto100billy.sol, the largest WIF holder, $134 million in unrealized profits. This whale bought 37 million WIF for approximately $9.33 million at an average of $0,248. When it reached its ATH price of $4, the wallet saw a 1440% gain on the inversion.

Since then, WIF’s market cap has decreased to $3.65 billion, which still represents a 15.25% increase from 24 hours ago and remains above PEPE’s $3.82 market cap.

Similarly, WIF saw an 8.5% correction from its ATH price. At the time of writing, the token changes hands at $3.66, a 20% increase in 24 hours. Moreover, WIF’s market activity skyrocketed by 70%, with its daily trading volume reaching $808.4 million.

Dogwifhat Shows “Organic” Growth, But What’s Going On With Memecoins

Dogwifhat is one of the newest players in the market, and it has accomplished incredible achievements since its launch in November 2023. The token has amassed a loyal community that seems to be focused on bringing the project “to the moon.”

After putting on their hats, WIF investors raised over $700,000 in a few days as part of its Las Vegas Sphere project, displaying the community’s extent. Furthermore, Cryptonary’s CTO, Asad Saddique, revealed in an X post that Dogwifhat has recently reached 100,000 “organic” holders.

Nonetheless, the divisive memecoin presale frenzy has created a fear of fatigue from overexposure to these tokens, with some investors arguing that memecoins are taking a turn for the worse. Despite this, interest has not faded away.

Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin, recently published a blog post titled “What Else Could Memecoins Be?” In the post, Buterin discussed the current state of the memecoins landscape and expressed his “disappointment” that innovation is not driving these projects to the market.

Just this month, many controversies have surrounded the crypto community regarding memecoins, including the appalling launch of racist and antisemitic tokens.

Undoubtedly, the memecoin market is broad, diverse, and full of enough potential that projects can develop and grow a strong community. Still, it appears efforts from projects working to be more than a meme are overshadowed by the controversial actors in the market.

crypto, WIFUSDT

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The Protocol: MetaMask’s Secret Weapon and Ethereum’s Dencun Debacle

In this issue of CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter on blockchain technology, we bring you Sam Kessler’s scoop on MetaMask’s in-development “intents” feature that could revolutionize how users interact with blockchains. Also: a post-mortem on Ethereum’s unexpectedly ugly Dencun testnet upgrade – and a glimpse of one of the new data blobs.

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Vitalik Buterin Blessing Boosts ENS Price: Token Soars On ‘Super Important’ Label

ENS, which stands for the Ethereum Name Service, witnessed a phenomenal increase of more than 50% in the value of its governance token on Wednesday.

The abrupt increase in price may be ascribed to the influential endorsement provided by Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain.

Investors were energized and the ENS token reached unprecedented heights as a result of Buterin’s unequivocal declaration concerning the project’s importance.

Buterin’s Endorsement: ENS And Ethereum’s Future

With Buterin calling ENS “super important”, the project’s potential influence on the Ethereum community and the decentralized web is clear.

The endorsement of Buterin frequently acts as a catalyst for increased interest and investment in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries, where his words carry considerable weight.

The Ethereum Name Service initiative offers a decentralized domain name system and is renowned for its contribution to the Ethereum ecosystem’s user experience simplification and improvement.

ENS simplifies blockchain interactions by linking human-readable names to complex Ethereum addresses, thereby increasing accessibility and user-friendliness.

The current value of the ENS token, according to the most recent update, is around $14.37, representing a significant increase of 40% over the past 24 hours.

Notably, the token has maintained a robust 50% increase over the past week, accumulating an impressive market capitalization of around $423.20 million.

During the same 24-hour period, the trading volume of the ENS token reached an impressive value of over $360 million, showing a heightened level of market activity.

According to CoinMarketCap, the current trading price of ENS has risen from a low of $8.50 on Wednesday to its highest level since April.

The considerable volume of transactions highlights the ever-changing characteristics of the market, as investors proactively participate in purchasing and selling in reaction to the latest advancements and endorsements within the ENS ecosystem.

Token Metrics And Buterin’s Support

ENS presently has a circulating quantity of 30 million tokens, resulting in a market capitalization of over $404 million.

Buterin emphasized in a statement on X the necessity for all Layer-2 solutions to concentrate on the development of trustless, Merkle-proof CCIP resolvers. The objective of this endeavor is to facilitate the registration, modification, and perusing of ENS subdomains directly on Layer-2 blockchains.

Buterin underscored the significance of ENS, pointing out the imperative for cost-effectiveness in its functioning. The designation “L2s” refers to blockchains at the most fundamental layer, Layer-2, which significantly improves the scalability of a Layer-1 blockchain by enabling transactions to occur at a quicker pace and at a lower cost.

Buterin brought attention to the markets’ need for universal name systems by describing ENS as extremely crucial, highlighting their importance to the blockchain experience.

Featured image from ICRYPEX