What's Driving Token Prices? August 28, 2024

TON (-18%) - Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of messaging app Telegram, was arrested over the weekend in France. Durov is charged with aiding and abetting criminal activity that occurred through the Telegram app. Although not directly connected, layer-1 protocol The Open Network originally created and spun out of Telegram, and many of its apps are directly integrated into the messaging app. The arrest, therefore, was directly reflected in the price of the TON token, which fell by 17.5% this week.
UNI (-17%) - Last week, crypto firm Prometheum, announced it would support Uniswap (UNI) and Arbitrum (ARB) on its platform, which only lists digital asset securities, effectively declaring that these two assets are securities. Prometheum announced that ARB and UNI can be custodied on its platform alongside Ethereum. Although the ARB price did not react to the announcement, UNI took a nosedive on the announcement and is -23% since the announcement and -17% on the week.
AVAX (+2.2%) - Layer-1 protocol Avalanche saw quite the boost this week after asset manager Grayscale announced the launch of its Avalanche Trust, a private fund for investors to gain exposure to AVAX without holding the underlying asset. The token was on quite the tear until Sunday when news broke that hackers had taken over Avalanche’s community Discord group, which sent the token from $27.09 to $26.
NEAR (+6.6%)—Layer-1 protocol Near launched its Nightshade upgrade last week, pushing the token up 6.6%. The upgrade, the largest since the protocol launched, improves upon the protocol’s scaling solution, sharding. Near’s sharding is combined with stateless validation technology, which it claims will remove the bottleneck many blockchains face. Near currently ranks 27th in TVL with only $287M.

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