The Defiant

The markets suffered a heavy sell-off this past week, with Bitcoin tagging a low of $60,950, marking a 17% retracement from its all-time high posted during the previous week. Ethereum also slumped from its year-to-date high above $4,070 to test $3,070.

Despite a short-lived bounce from the low, the markets have since resumed their downward momentum, with BTC last changing hands for $64,300 and ETH trading at $3,340. According to CoinGecko, just 11 top 100 cryptocurrencies are closing the week with gains of more than 1%.

Toncoin (TON) was the week’s strongest-performing asset with a seven-day gain of 33%. TON’s bullish momentum was propelled by The Open Network announcing it will launch a more than $120 million incentives campaign rewarding developers and users interacting with the network from April 1.

The Open Network was among a handful of Layer 1 networks bucking the crypto meta-trend, with Fantom, Aptos, Sui, Internet Computer, and Sui also closing the week at a gain.

Despite the bearish momentum, it was a strong week for Ethereum and its broader ecosystem. Layer 2 adoption continued to rise following the activation of Ethereum’s long-awaited Dencun upgrade last week — which reduced Layer 2 transaction fees by more than 95% on several networks.

Base posted the strongest growth among major L2s, with network TVL testing $2 billion while its native DeFi TVL trends above $800 million. The impressive performance coincides with Base setting a new all-time high for on-chain trading volume at $394 million while Base hosted more than one million transactions daily over the past week.

Several L2s are also gearing up to ship major upgrades, with Starknet releasing its 2024 roadmap, Optimism launching faults proofs on testnet, and Polygon preparing for its Feijoa fork next month. Polygon also completed its Napoli fork this week, in addition to launching a $100 million GameFi fund with Immutable and River King Capital.

It was also a big week for Ethereum, with BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager boasting more than $9 trillion in assets under management, launching a tokenized fund on the network. Fidelity also updated its Ether ETF filing in a bid to stake ETH as part of the prospective fund.

However, it wasn’t exclusively bullish news for Ethereum, with a Github commit revealing that the Ethereum Foundation received a “voluntary enquiry” an unnamed state authority in recent weeks. However, analysts are torn as to whether the news is cause for concern.

Solana continues to make headlines as well, with transaction fees on the network jumping more than 1,000% since January amid unprecedented memecoin trading activity.