The altcoin market has started the weekend with amazing gains, with Chainlink (LINK) regaining its bullish momentum and Bitcoin Gold (BTG) making a double-digit win.

Chainlink Regains Its Bullish Momentum

The price of the Chainlink (LINK) token continues to rise, striving to push its recent two-month high of $30.40. At the time of writing, the token is trading around $28.88, according to data from CoinGecko.

The price jump comes in direct correlation with the rise in its network activity to its recent three-month high. A day before that, Chainlink price feeds went live on the Fantom Opera mainnet, a scalable platform for hosting DeFi apps and enterprise software. All this collectively contributed to its price rise.

At the beginning of the year, Chainlink’s price was at sky-high, amid announcements of multiple new partnerships. The token’s last all-time high was reached on May 10 at $52.88.

Over the past week, the trading volume of LINK has increased by a whopping 71.0%, while the overall circulating supply has increased 0.25% to over 447.51 million. This makes an estimated 44.75% of its max supply, which is 1 billion. The current market cap for LINK stands at 13th, at 12.62 billion.

Bitcoin Gold Making Double-Digit Gains

The price of Bitcoin Gold (BTG) seems to have paid well for investors this year, with a gain of more than 600% since January. At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency is trading at $75.19 after a 15.4% gain in the past 24 hours.

If the bullish momentum continues, BTG could soon reach the resistance of $78 to create a new monthly high. If it slumps, the altcoin could see the lower support level of $74, which could also be retested if investors want another rally.

Bitcoin Gold is a hard fork of the original Bitcoin network that was created to improve efficiency in the mining process. The other major Bitcoin forks are Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin.

A decentralized finance (defi) project that utilizes the Solana blockchain called Luna Yield has allegedly committed a “rug pull,” according to various individuals on social media. Reports indicate that the investors who put funds into the project lost an estimated $6.7 million according to an “anonymous source.”

Luna Yield Creators Reportedly Dip Off With $6.7 Million in Funds, Solpad Platform Promises Compensation to IDO Participants

The world of defi has reportedly seen another rug pull but this time in the Solana blockchain ecosystem, according to numerous reports. Solana’s website that had a page dedicated to describing the Luna Yield decentralized exchange (dex) aggregator protocol now shows a 404 error. The aggregator project promised high yields and then suddenly the platform went dark and users could not access the funds locked into the dex aggregator.

The Luna Yield team was anonymous and the project developers allegedly got away with $6.7 million in tokens. Coindesk reporter Sebastian Sinclair details he was told by an “anonymous source” that “$6.7 million in assets had been taken.” Furthermore, Sinclair insisted that the team verified the amount via the “SOL scan block explorer.” On various channels like Twitter, discussions concerning the subject are littered across social media.

The platform that helped launch the Luna Yield IDO, Solpad detailed that the project would help compensate IDO participants who were affected. “After internal discussion within Solpad Foundation, we have finalized the compensation plan for Luna Yield IDO participants,” the team tweeted. “We will sort out the list and directly [distribute] the compensation into the participant’s wallet (the same wallet that joined the IDO on August 16th. We will compensate users in USDC, with a value equal to 60% of the purchased amount.”

The official Solpad Twitter account further noted:

For example, if user A bought 400 USDC of allocation in the round, he will get 400*60% = 240 USDC, airdrop directly user A wallet. The distribution will start next week, and we expect it to finish within a few days. Thank you so much for being so patient with us.

about:blank

Critics Warn Other Chains Like Cardano, Solana Daily Hopes Project Staves Off More Rug Pulls

The Luna Yield website has been taken down by the creators it seems and archive.org has crawled the platform on various occasions, but has had a hard time showing the site. On Twitter, one individual said that once Cardano upgrades to Alonzo Purple, it too could see a rug pull like Solana (SOL) has seen this week.

“The rug pull that recently occurred in the Solana ecosystem from Luna Yield is something I can see happening in the Cardano ecosystem literally days to weeks after Alonzo if proper scrutiny isn’t exercised by the community involved,” the individual said. “Good tech isn’t immune to stupidity.”

The Twitter account Solana Daily told its 28,700 followers about the rug pull on August 20. “Rug pull on Solana,” Solana Daily detailed. “Yesterday, [Solpad] announced that their second IDO of Luna Yield went wrong, when the dev team of the project decided to shut down all the social media and withdraw the liquidity. Hope that no more rug pulls appear [in] our ecosystem.”

While SOL is up 66% in seven days after the news went viral on social media, the price of SOL dipped by 1.8% against the U.S. dollar and down 3.8% against bitcoin (BTC).

The pair is trading little changed around 0.6790 at the moment as the RBA offered little in terms of anything new for traders and investors on the day.

They mentioned that monetary policy is set to remain accommodative for as long as required while keeping their forward guidance on rates and the yields target unchanged.

That perhaps gives them room to scale back on some recent policy actions if need be, but ultimately they would still prefer it to be accompanied by progress in the labor market and inflation. For some context, the RBA had already stopped QE for a few weeks now:

Overall, I think what was not said is perhaps more important than what was said.

The RBA made no special mention to the recent rise in the Aussie – the currency has gained by over 5% against the dollar since its May meeting – and that may provide buyers with some relative comfort that the central bank doesn’t see it as being a pressing issue yet.

Back to the AUD/USD chart, the 0.6800 level is offering some daily resistance at the moment as the risk mood is keeping more tepid to start the day, but technically there is little stopping a move back towards 0.7000 potentially given the recent run.

A lot will come down to headline risks and how stocks perform, but so far, there hasn’t been any significant hiccup with US-China tensions from last week being brushed aside for now.

The civil unrest in the US remains a wildcard, but it is also the case for the US dollar.