The Defiant

GM Defiers!

The crypto markets have pulled back significantly from last week’s all-time highs, with BTC and ETH tagging local lows on March 17 after retracing by 12% and 15% respectively.

In other news, EtherFi’s token debuted at a more than $500 million market cap, FTM is surging in anticipation for Fantom’s Sonic upgrade, Runestones boasts a four-figure floor price following airdrop, Ronin Chain rallies, and NetMind suffers after early miner exploited.

Plus, BOME is the latest memecoin to capture the imagination of the Solana community.

✍️ In today’s newsletter:

Cryptocurrencies dip from record highs
ETHFI airdrop debuts at $566M market cap
FTM rallies on Sonic hype
Runestones’s Ordinals airdrop
Ronin Chain recovers
NetMind tumbles after miner hack
BOME quickly ascends memecoin rankings

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📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:

	Ticker	Value	24h

Ticker	Value	24h
Bitcoin	$68,2094.47	%
Ethereum	$3,646 3.74	%
Gold	1st Future$2,157	-0.26 %
S&P 500	5117.09	-0.65 %
Arch Web	33.04 6.80	%
Learn more about Arch Indices ,[object Object]		%

🎬 WATCH

Check out our latest episode of Crypto With Cami recapping all of last week’s hottest headlines. Also watch our podcast with Evan Cheng, the former Apple Engineer who co-founded Mysten Labs, the team behind Sui Network, to learn about the Layer 1 blockchain’s roadmap and ambitions.

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👇 Crypto Retraces This Week’s Gains as Traders Take Profits

Bitcoin and leading crypto assets have posted heavy retracements from posting new all-time highs last week. BTC dropped nearly 12% to trade below $65,000 on March 17, while ETH dipped 15% to tag $3,456.

🪂 EtherFi Airdrop Announced For March 18

Claims for EtherFi’s highly-anticipated airdrop are now live, with the ETHFI token debuting at a $566 million market cap. The drop distributed 6% of ETHFI’s supply to early adopters, with the token’s price sliding 27% after just a few hours of trading.

🚀 FTM Rockets As Fantom’s Sonic Upgrade Looms

The price of FTM has doubled in the past 30 days as Fantom gears up for its Sonic upgrade next quarter. Sonic is set to reduce transaction costs and increase throughput by introducing the Fantom Virtual Machine on mainnet.

💧 It’s Raining Runestones As Bitcoin Ordinals Project Launches Airdrop

The Bitcoin ordinals sector received a shot in the arm in the form of the Runestones airdrop, which distributed tokens to prolific Ordinals collectors. While most airdropped tokens initially post price declines, the floor price of Runestones has tripled since the token began trading.

🎮 Axie Infinity’s Ronin Chain Sees Renaissance As Gamers Return

Ronin Chain is riding strong activity in the web3 gaming sector, with the RON token up 30% in two weeks as the network’s GameFi ecosystem expands. The move marks an impressive recovery since Ronin was decimated by a $600 million exploit two years ago.

⬇️ AI Token NetMind Tanks After Early Miner Suffers Hack

NetMind, an upstart project targeting the bubbling AI sector, suffered a major hit when an early miner with sizable NMT holdings was hacked. NMT’s price quickly sank 75% amid the incident and is now down 43% in two weeks.

🕮 Solana Memecoin BOME Hits $600 Million Market Cap In Less Than Two Days

Solana’s memecoin sector continues to surge, with Book of Meme (BOME) already ranking as the 8th largest meme token by capitalization within five days of launching. BOME currently boasts a market cap of $725 million, after topping out at nearly $1.46 billion two days ago.

🌍 ELSEWHERE

Base network sees big surge in transactions and new users following Dencun upgrade (The Block)
Binance offers $5M reward for insider trading tip-offs (Cointelegraph)
Nearly $100M Wagered on U.S. Presidential Election on Polymarket (CoinDesk)