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Hyperliquid (HYPE)
L1 tokens have pretty much taken a beating across the board, with one rare exception.
The exception is unsurprisingly Hyperliquid’s HYPE, which has actually posted a 15.8% gain on the week. The perps DEX generated $18.2 billion in trading volumes and ~$4 million in fees on Sunday.
Those price gains are coming in against a deep backdrop of red. When we zoom in on larger market cap L1s, almost none were spared the guillotine. From previous generation L1s like Cardano (ADA ($0.76)), Avalanche (AVAX ($26.99)) and Algorand (ALGO ($0.30)), to newer generation L1s like Near (NEAR ($3.48)), Sei (SEI) and Ton (TON), all saw 20%+ price declines on the week.
RON saw the greatest price crash of 27%.
One other L1 that bucked the market crash is the little-known Kava Network L1, which is undertaking an AI pivot. The KAVA ($0.51) token ($539 million market cap) saw a 15.7% gain on the week. Kava launched its mainnet in October 2022 after carving out a niche for itself with an interoperable Maker-like collateralized debt position (CDP) product.
The OM token, which is 31st largest token by market cap, is up 27% on the week.
For a token this large, I’m embarrassed to say I had no idea what OM was, so I looked it up.
OM is apparently the token behind the MANTRA project, a real-world assets-focused L1 catering to the institutional TradFi world.
Its mainnet launched relatively recently in October 2024. The OM token is used for validator staking, gas and governance — all pretty standard use cases. I expected to find huge TVL numbers on rwa.xyz, but they’re not even listed.
As far as I can tell, there is nothing particularly out of the ordinary that explains OM’s impressive price action. But look upon this price chart, ye Mighty, and despair.
Onyx (XCN) was a lending market for fungible and non-fungible tokens built on Ethereum, until it suffered a $3.8 million exploit in September 2024 and shut down.
Is it possible to summon an explanation for why XCN (96th largest token by market cap) is up 7% on the week? Perhaps, but the mental gymnastics aren’t worth it.
All I have to offer is this: Onyx yesterday announced XCN Ledger, a new L3 blockchain built with the Arbitrum stack, but settling on Base.
AI agents
The AI agent sub sector has taken a pretty hard beating since it peaked at a market cap of ~$20 billion in early January.
When agents were still going parabolic, everyone wanted to know: How high would this market go? Analysts far smarter than I were making bold predictions that placed the agentic market at a range of $100 billion (base case) to $250 billion (bull case).
It’s been a month since, and market caps have cratered to $8 billion. Yikes.
Source: cookie.funThe top tokens in the AI agent sector haven’t held up: VIRTUAL is down 24% on the week, while FARTCOIN and AI16Z are down 22.5% and 38.6%, respectively.
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