What's Driving Token Prices? March 20, 2024

NEAR (-14%)—The co-founder of Layer-1 protocol, Near, spoke at Nvidia’s AI conference this morning and was the only crypto project to receive a speaking slot. Near's token has risen 92% in the last month in the lead-up to the conference. Its upcoming AI product, Near Tasks, designed to offer high-quality data for training AI models, is also credited with propelling Near into the AI spotlight.
WIF (-3.5%) - Solana memecoins have been the latest craze this past week, but one stood out above the others. Dogwifhat (WIF) surged on Monday after the original photo that inspired the memecoin was sold as an NFT for $4.3M. The NFT was purchased by Gigantic Rebirth Ventures (GCR), a notable crypto trader on Twitter. Last week, the WIF community also successfully raised $650k in funds to display the WIF image on the Las Vegas sphere for a week. Although the token surged 39% on the NFT sale, the token has since given back most of its gains with the market and is down -3.5% for the week.
ETHFI (+1.1%) - On Monday, liquid restaking protocol, Ether.fi, airdropped its native governance token ETHFI to its community who staked ETH on the protocol. The protocol, which has been live for about a year, allows users to deposit ETH or a liquid staking token such as stETH, which is then deposited in EigenLayer. The user, in turn, receives a “Liquid Restking Token” (LRT), a derivative token representing their staked ETH in EigenLayer. Ether.fi has been the most successful restaking protocol, boasting $2.8B in TVL. The initial airdrop allocation announced on Friday was later adjusted and expanded after the community pushed back on last-minute depositors who earned an outsized portion of the airdrop. Specifically, Tron’s founder, Justin Sun, reportedly deposited 120K ETH one day before the airdrop snapshot, earning him about 3.4M ETHFI tokens (or ~5% of supply). In response, the Ether.fi team expanded the airdrop amount from 6% to 6.8% of the total supply.
RNDR (+3.2%) - The parent company of Render, OTOY, announced a partnership with StabilityAI, one of the largest open-source-focused AI companies, with the CEO Emad joining the board of Render. Render, a decentralized GPU DePIN project, has been pushing into AI as demand for GPUs has increased with several companies rushing to train individual AI models that require GPU chips.

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