The market continues to chop and change as sanctions influence the global economy and inflation drives investor behaviour. Despite the macro environment, some tokens continue to rise ahead of the rest and offer opportunities for investors to make strong and quick returns.

The Usual Suspects: Steady as the World Watches

Bitcoin and Ethereum held steady this week as the world watched the situation in Ukraine unfold. Increased sanctions on Russia caused further volatility in global markets, which crept into the crypto markets as prices continue to slide. Bitcoin and Ethereum are both on a bear-run with little evidence that this will change anytime soon.

Bitcoin started the week at $52,900 and held steady to finish the week at $53,200 a very shallow gain of 1%. Day traders may have taken advantage of the short-term spike in price this week as Bitcoin surged to $58,000 overnight but this was short lived as it crashed back down to the low 50s. With the US releasing their annual inflation figures sitting at 7.9% between February 2021 and 2022 but Bitcoin remaining on a volatile bear run, it safe to say that Bitcoin is no longer a hedge against inflation.

Ethereum finished down 1% this week, starting at $3560 and ending the week at $3500. Ethereum high coincided with Bitcoin on Thursday night, peaking at $3700. Ethereum popularity as a blockchain continues to soar despite the sliding price, with LimeWire (yes you read that right!) relaunching as an NFT platform using an Ethereum-based blockchain. We've discussed how Ethereum could continue to rise in value as more use cases and decentralised applications (dApps) are built on Eth, and this is just another use case that could propel it forward.

The Best of the Rest: Stagnation in Second Tier

Our next tier of popular coins painted the week red; Cardano, Ripple, Solana, Avalanche and Polygon all experienced stagnated growth or negative price drops.

XRP and Avalanche both finished the week flat and stagnated in price despite minor fluctuations throughout the week.

Cardano, Polygon and Solana all finished the week with single-digit losses, closing down 4%, 3% and 3% respectively. Polygon could continue to slide even further as their proof-of-stake protocol went down this week, eroding some of their market cap.

The Weekly Loser: Fantom is a Menace for Investors

Fantom (FTM) dropped by over 25% this week and their price could continue to plummet. Their price drop shed more than $500m in market cap for the coin, which adds greater losses to the coin overall decline the past three months.

Fantom is a high performance blockchain that offers unparalleled speed, security and reliability or so they say. This was put to the test this week as Fantom-based protocol Fantasm Finance was hacked for over $2.6m in FTM tokens.

In addition to this exploit, one of Fantom star developers announced their resignation from the project, which has shocked investors who were bullish on Fantom.

The combination of these two this week has dropped Fantom price to a low of $1.60 and it likely that this will continue to decline.

Our Weekly Winners: ImmutableX and Waves Continue to Rise

This week is a rare one in that we have two winners but the major gains for both ImmutableX and Waves this week were too good not to write about.

Immutable, a blockchain gaming start-up based in Sydney, was announced as Australia next unicorn with their recent fundraising round. News of the round broke midweek and propelled their token, ImmutableX (IMX) to over 60% in a few hours. Although this stabilised and dropped in the subsequent days, this opportunity gave investors a quick 60% gain if they were quick enough.

And the second weekly winner is Waves (WAVES). Last week the token grew by more than 60% and this week Waves continued its growth trajectory rising by over 50% to $37 with a market cap of over $4bn. The token continues to outpace other coins in market and could be positioned for further growth in the future.

Sources: BTC Markets, CoinMarketCapThis post was written by Fresh Capital Media.