The Ethereum Merge is set to happen this week, and evidently, the crypto community has been quite vocal about the same on social platforms. However, a recent analysis by market intelligence and on-chain metrics platform Santiment revealed that there’s another prominent crypto—a new entrant to the meme-coin boat—that’s being widely spoken about.
The meme-king crown
Meme-coins have majorly been thriving in the crypto ecosystem because of the support received from community members. Without that, they’d more or less be handicapped. At different times in the past, the meme king crown belonged to Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and SafeMoon. However, per Santiment, there’s “no doubt” that the name of the game is Luna Classic today.
Per Santiment,
“… now it turns out, the phoenix has risen from the ashes, and a whole new wave of speculation is rolling up to the crypto shores.
Here it is worth recalling that Dogecoin’s price movements were also quite similar during the beginning of last year. It had an initial run-up that was followed by a flat consolidation. Post that, around the SNL period, the real craze began. In fact, when the social data is peeked into, a similar picture appears.
Question Marks
A rise in social sentiment has not always transpired into a rally. And per Santiment, if LUNC crashes going forward, it will only serve as a testament to the crypto crowd “not learning” from the past. Its analysis noted,
“If next, we see a crash in LUNC to around $0.25 per 1000, followed by the last leg up above $0.8, then we can safely say that the crypto crowd truly never learns anything from the past, and it’s only a matter of time until a carbon copy of today’s event happens again.“
Price rises usually serve as an invitation for more people to join the network. In the past, with respect to other coins, the same has materialized, thanks to the FOMO factor. However, now, as far as LUNC is concerned, the number of asset HODLers in the network has gradually risen over the past fortnight.
Nonetheless, over the past few days, as illustrated below, they’ve remained stagnant. The same indicates that the hype social hype has not necessarily fruition into network growth, raising question marks about the sustainability of the alt’s rally.
How have Shiba Inu, and SafeMoon been faring?
Per data from LunarCrush, SafeMoon-related mentions on social media have dropped by 76%. For Shiba Inu, however, the number saw a moderate rise of 11% in the same timeframe.
Nevertheless, the same has not had any ripple effect on Shiba Inu’s network growth. Per ITB’s data, the new address growth has shrunk by 5% over the past week, while the active addresses have dropped by almost 2%, indicating that Shiba Inu is also in the same boat as Luna Classic.
How is LUNC faring after the CPI data release?
After the release of the CPI data which was higher than expected for the market at 8.3%, the cryptocurrency market got rekt in an instant. Bitcoin has dropped by more than 8% in a couple of hours, while Ethereum dropped by almost 9%. That was not the case for LUNC. As illustrated in the chart, LUNC has managed to recover after the hourly drop and it is presently moving in a bullish direction which is unlike the rest of the market. There isn’t a clear-cut explanation for this rally at the moment, as LUNC remains a volatile asset to trade.