This Week in Coins: Dogecoin Outpaces Bitcoin and Ethereum Amid Musk’s Twitter Takeover

Crypto markets continued to see green for the second week running. 

In a typical week, market leaders Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) set the pace for everyone else, but this week they took a backseat to other impressive rallies. 

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Bitcoin gained 3% over the last seven days and currently changes hands at $21,314. Ethereum rose nearly 2% during that time and trades for $1,640. Both could have made more headway, but the U.S. Federal Reserve’s announcement on Wednesday of yet another 0.75% interest rate hike—the fourth this year—quickly scuppered their trajectory.

Interest rate hikes are typically (but not always) met with bearish sentiment among investors who go for riskier assets like crypto or equities. The reason being that higher rates make it harder for people to borrow money, so broadly speaking they hold onto their wealth and forgo their chancier investments. 

On Friday, the two market leaders recovered a little following the release of a Labor Department report showing that U.S. job growth was up. 

Several top thirty currencies positively mooned this week. Binance Coin (BNB) shot up 18.6%, Litecoin (LTC) surged 25%, Chainlink rose 20%, and Algorand (ALGO) rallied 24%. 

Uniswap (UNI) and Cosmos (ATOM) both added about 10% to their price. 

Top meme coin Dogecoin (DOGE) mooned 22% over seven days and topped 12 cents (yes, yes, a far cry from its high of 73 cents in May 2021). Like last week, everyone’s favorite memecoin is still responding positively to the news of Twitter’s new executive manager

And the most impressive rally among the top 30 coins was Polygon (MATIC), which ballooned 28% over the week in the wake of Reddit’s booming Polygon NFTs and an announcement on Wednesday by Meta that Instagram would integrate Polygon for its upcoming NFT minting feature. 

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