This week was the market equivalent of standing around the barbecue waiting for someone else to flip the snags. Everyone was staring at the Fed's two-day meeting on the 28th and 29th, so Bitcoin and Ethereum spent the week going precisely nowhere — BTC finished roughly flat at −0.4%, ETH scraped out a whole +1.1%, and the total crypto market cap sagged about 2.7% to around $2.25 trillion even as Bitcoin dominance held near 56.4%. The Fear & Greed Index sat at 26 — "Fear" come Sunday close, which is a very average result for what was, underneath the calm BTC/ETH chart, an absolute demolition derby everywhere else.
Because while the majors napped, the DeFi corner of the market had what one outlet cheerfully called a "Hackers' Day" — three separate exploits in roughly 24 hours. And then there was DeXe (DEXE), which printed an all-time high of $48.89 on July 13 after a short squeeze, then spent the following fortnight round-tripping to under two bucks. Whether that was a staking-contract exploit letting someone mint unlimited tokens, or just thin liquidity and a stampede for the exit, depends which report you read — either way, it's this week's masterclass in why the 2% rule (Chapter 3) exists.
The coins that put a smile on somebody's dial this week:
| # | Coin | Price | Move | Poida's take |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PONS (Pons) | $0.0551 | +179% | Nobody's heard of it, everybody's up 179% on it. That's crypto in one sentence, mate. |
| 2 | EUL (Euler) | $1.47 | +135% | Euler's out here doing calculus while the rest of your portfolio's stuck on kindergarten maths. |
| 3 | BEAT (Audiera) | $3.60 | +50% | Pumping hard into an early-August token unlock like it hasn't seen how that movie ends. |
| 4 | SHIB (Shiba Inu) | $0.0000046 | +35% | Some mystery South Korean buying got the doggo running again. Zero mystery about what usually happens next. |
| 5 | VVV (Venice) | $14.55 | +9% | Buying back its own token with actual API revenue. An AI coin with a business model — steady on. |
Pour one out — then check none of them are sitting in your portfolio without a stop (Chapter 4 exists for a reason):
| # | Coin | Price | Move | Poida's take |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DEXE (DeXe) | $1.77 | −90% | From $48.89 to under two bucks in a fortnight. That's not a correction, that's a cliff with a chart stapled to it. |
| 2 | BMX (BitMart Token) | $0.058 | −64.9% | BitMart's shutting the whole exchange down by next January, and the token found out early. |
| 3 | STAR (Starpower) | $0.277 | −38.5% | Down over a third in a week — the Virtual Power Plant idea's sound, the chart's currently having a blackout. |
| 4 | NIGHT (Midnight) | $0.0018 | −26.7% | Its own bridge got drained for millions and the token went, well, dark. |
| 5 | ZEC (Zcash) | $478 | −10.16% | Last fortnight's winner, this week's loser. Zcash reminding everyone why nobody bets the house on one coin. |
Not tips. Not targets. Just three established, still-heavily-used networks trading a long way below their best days — the kind of thing a Chapter 6 DCA-and-hold Boganster researches while everyone else doom-scrolls. Do your own research, size by the 2% rule, and remember: cheap can always get cheaper.
Spent this week going nowhere while everyone waited on the Fed — which, for a network that's quietly up big year-to-date and still runs most of DeFi, stablecoins and NFTs, is arguably a feature. Still a fraction of its 2021 all-time high near $4,900. The bear case (fee compression, L2 competition) is real — but you're pricing the road network under the whole suburb, not one shop on it.
Buyers defended the $74 area all week after fading from a July peak above $82 — still one of the busiest chains going by users and transactions (half this week's winners and losers table lives here), yet nowhere near its old highs near $260. Usage hasn't left; the price is still arguing with itself about where it should be.
Lost the $8.38 support level this week even as roughly $7 billion in token value reportedly rotated onto its CCIP cross-chain rails during the bridge-hack chaos, and whales added millions of dollars of LINK on-chain. Still sitting a long way under its 2021 high near $52. When a bad week for everyone else is a good week for your plumbing, that's worth a second look — do your own research first.
Market data: Liquid markets snapshot at time of writing. News & context: AMBCrypto — weekly winners & losers (Jul 26) · CoinGabbar — top gainers & losers (Jul 27) · LiveVolatile — BTC/ETH weekly move (Jul 26) · Yahoo Finance — prices rise after Fed holds rates · Bitget — Fear & Greed Index, 26 (Jul 26) · CryptoTimes — $47M lost across AFX Trade, Wanchain, Verus · CryptoTimes — Blockaid H1 2026 hack report · KuCoin — DEXE crash analysis · CoinDesk — new CLARITY Act draft · Cryptonomist — SEC's July rulemaking initiatives · The Coin Republic — LINK whale accumulation & CCIP migration. Prices are snapshots and move constantly.
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