title — ETH Completes Upgrade, Prices Complete Move Higher; Shapella is Here, Higher Prices are Following

GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 Here’s an overview of this week’s newsletter:

• The usual market overview and analysis detailing another green week throughout crypto 🤑
• Updates on this week’s noteworthy news and developments
• Breaking down Ethereum’s recent Shapella upgrade and ETH’s positive price movement
• Reading & thinking about memes, crypto markets and what drives them
• Providing Tweets & Memes that showcase the week in crypto
• Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.

Market Overview

Whew, we’ve all once again survived another week in crypto and we’ve been appropiately rewarded with green prices and charts across the board! 🤑  The main event of the week, ETH’s Shapella upgrade which we’ll dig into in-depth below, has come & gone with ETH closing the week 13% higher than where it started, comfortably above the key pyschological level of 2k! 🤩

As for BTC, it kindly paved the way for ETH and alts throughout the ecosystem to expand higher as it gained a strong but trailing 8.5%! As with ETH, BTC currently resides above its own key pyscholigical level of 30k, something to monitor in the comind days and weeks.

Now, to the rest of the ecosystem. As we’ve written multiple times, when ETH leads the charge upwards ahead of BTC, altcoins throughout the space are given the green light to expand upwards alongside ETH. Expand they did, and the leading tokens across various sectors include:

Layer 2 & Scaling Tokens — INJ +58%, ARB +40%, ROSE +27%, OP +19%, KLAY +13%, MINA +12%

DeFi — DYDX +17%, CVX +15%, MKR +14%, JOE +11%, OSMO +11%, GMX +10%, COMP +9%, SNX +8%, AAVE +7%,

Alternative L1s — SOL +22%, NEAR +17%, ADA +16%, ATOM +16%, FTM +12%, APT +12%, BNB +12%, DOT +10%, AVAX +10%, CANTO +10%,

Infrastructure Tokens — RNDR +37%, HNT +27%, GRT +17%, LINK +12%, AR +12%, FIL +9%, RUNE +7%,

Gaming Tokens — RON +31%, MAGIC +21%, IMX +15%, APE +7%,

Miscellaneous Tokens — Bridging (SYN +33%, STG +14%), Dog Coins (FLOKI +15%, DOGE +10%) NFT platforms (BLUR +32%), Liquid Staking Tokens (RPL +29%)

As you can see, the alternative L1 token sector was one of the strongest this week and ETH’s rally carried the entire sector higher. Rational or not, when ETH rallies higher increasing its market cap and fully diluted valuation, so do alternative L1 tokens as the entire sector is repriced on the fly. In addition to L1 tokens appreciating, essentially all sectors of crypto rally when ETH gains more than BTC as market participants expand their exposure down the risk curve! 😇