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One fun thing to do in the aftermath of every major crypto market crash is to look at which tokens were able to defy the laws of speculative gravity. So I filtered out the top 100 market cap coins over the last seven days on CoinGecko. Here were the top three gainers: HYPE, OM and XCN.

Gas limit signaling:

Ethereum’s validators have voted with their nodes to raise the network’s gas limit, increasing block capacity by about 20%.

The chart shows the steady march of blocks exceeding this threshold, since the concerted "Pump the Gas" initiative got underway late last year. By passing a majority today — pumping the max gas allowed in a block from 30m to 36m — proponents have achieved their goal to improve network throughput and reduce transaction fees.

Both Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist were among those who backed the idea, arguing that a modest increase could help alleviate congestion while maintaining network stability.

The gas limit had remained unchanged for nearly three years. With the gas price at under 3 gwei Tuesday, a mainnet DEX swap can be executed for about $2, while bridging to or from an L2 rollup costs less than $1.

It’s a great day to deploy that Safe, register that ENS domain, or ape into that yield aggregator vault you’ve been meaning to.

 — Macauley Peterson 

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SKALE, the gas-free invisible blockchain, is “Built Different” for mass adoption: high-throughput, scalable, and fair. As a network of interoperable EVM-compatible L1s, SKALE’s user experience focus has accelerated a strong ecosystem across gaming, AI, and more. Due to SKALE’s gas-free nature, blockchain can be integrated invisibly, creating accessible Web2-like experiences for users and developers.

SKALE has:

• Over 50M UAWs

• 9 Games on the Epic Games Store

• Saved Users over $9.5B on Gas Fees

Dive in to learn more.

Which tokens held up?

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), Avalanche (AVAX) and Algorand (ALGO), to newer generation L1s like Near (NEAR), 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 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.

MANTRA (OM)

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)

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.

The 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.

— Donovan Choy

Puffer's Unifivaults — A new yield frontier

Puffer Finance, a decentralized liquid restaking protocol focused on enhancing Ethereum’s network security and decentralization, is pushing beyond ETH with the launch of unifiBTC and unifiUSD Vaults.

These vaults accept a variety of BTC proxies and stablecoins, offering yield-hunters some fresh opportunities — particularly if you want to accumulate PUFFER tokens.

The vaults integrate Nucleus DeFi strategies and receive incentives currently quoted at upward of 300% APY in CARROT, an ERC-20 token which will eventually convert to PUFFER, the protocol’s native token, as part of their season two rewards. The reward rate will of course fall as the vaults gather deposits.

You should also be comfortable with the risk profile of lvlUSD, which is collateralized by restaked stablecoins, as the unifiUSD Vault is exposed to USDC, USDT and lvlUSD.

The BTC vault supports wBTC, LBTC, cbBTC, pumpBTC and solvBTC. In both cases, Merkl manages incentive distribution.

Puffer raised $18 million in Series A funding in 2024.

— Macauley Peterson

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