[비즈한국] This week, assets linked to business structures—such as token burns and new service launches—as well as assets sensitive to market supply and demand, such as privacy coins and meme coins, rose to the top of the gainers list. While risk appetite shifted toward altcoins as Bitcoin rebounded mid-week, the market turned bearish by the end of the reporting period, causing the top five coins to drop simultaneously over the last 24 hours.
According to CoinMarketCap, a global crypto market data aggregator, Lyther took the #1 spot in the cryptocurrency market with a weekly gain of 15.74% from 6:00 AM on October 16 to 6:00 AM on October 23. Its current price is 4,712 KRW, though it has given back some of its weekly gains with a 6.79% drop over the last 24 hours. Lyther is a decentralized trading platform that supports perpetual futures trading using an order book system similar to centralized exchanges on an Ethereum Layer 2 network utilizing zero-knowledge proofs.
Monero ranked 2nd with a weekly gain of 10.88%. Its current price is 800,690 KRW, down 1.96% over the last 24 hours. Monero is a privacy coin that essentially hides the transacting parties and amounts using ring signatures and stealth addresses.
Worldcoin rose 8.19% over the week to take 3rd place. Its current price is 719 KRW, with a 24-hour fluctuation of -5.54%. Worldcoin aims to build a network that issues World ID, a digital identity that verifies a user is a real human through the iris-scanning device 'Orb' while minimizing personal information disclosure.
BitTorrent recorded a weekly gain of 7.09%, placing 4th. Its current price is 0.0004961 KRW, down 3.05% over the last 24 hours. BitTorrent provides rewards to participants in file sharing, decentralized storage, and cross-chain services using tokens based on the TRON network.
Pepe rose 6.21% over the week to place 5th. Its current price is 0.005797 KRW, down 5.93% over the last 24 hours. Pepe is a frog-themed meme coin issued on Ethereum's ERC-20 standard, and its price is heavily influenced by trading volume and risk appetite in the meme coin market rather than separate business performance.
The 6th-place Just (JST) recorded a weekly change of 5.37% and traded at 184 KRW. The 7th-place Venice Token rose 4.99% over the week to trade at 34,532 KRW. The 8th-place MemeCore recorded a weekly gain of 4.34% at 1,127 KRW, and 9th-place BinanceLife rose 3.97% to trade at 661 KRW. The 10th-place Dash recorded a weekly change of 3.15% and traded at 67,878 KRW.
Lyther’s Plan to Enter Regulatory Fold, World ID’s Pivot to Enterprise Services
Lyther is a perpetual futures exchange that verifies order and liquidation results on its own Layer 2 using zero-knowledge proofs to ensure both speed and transparency. Its structure of buying back LIT tokens from the market using trading fee revenue and burning them also links the token price to supply and demand.
Lyther burned 2,452,017 LIT tokens acquired through program buybacks up to the end of the third quarter. Subsequently, at their Q3 investor briefing, they announced plans to apply for a derivatives-related license from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in November. While the intention to provide on-chain derivatives within a regulatory framework boosted weekly gains, the application plan must be distinguished from actual approval. The price drop in the final 24 hours of the reporting period indicates that short-term buyers who flowed in chasing this news exited after the spike.
For Monero, no single business announcement was identified to explain the entire gain. The software update released on October 16 was a small-scale patch fixing communication and data processing errors, far from a major network overhaul. The price moved in tandem with a rotation into privacy coins. During the reporting period, rising spot trading volume and open interest in futures increased upward momentum, and Dash also joined the top 10. However, privacy coins, which are listed on a relatively limited number of exchanges, can experience magnified price volatility on both the buy and sell sides when liquidity thins.
The driver for Worldcoin was the expansion of World ID from an experimental identity verification technology to an enterprise-level service. On October 18, World released World ID services for financial institutions, the World ID app, and AI agent authentication tools, and made ‘World ID for Zoom’ available on the Zoom Marketplace. This structure reduces deepfake risks by verifying that video conference participants are real humans authenticated by an Orb. While the cooperation with Zoom had been announced previously, the shift to actual service usage was the key difference. However, since the extent to which WLD is directly linked as a service fee or essential payment method is limited, it is difficult to explain the entire weekly gain solely based on the announcement. The recent 24-hour drop can be seen as profit-taking following the overlap of service launch expectations and a market rebound.
Burn News and Meme Rotations: Buying Spreads to Mid-Cap Altcoins
BitTorrent burned its first batch of BTT bought back from the market using profits from its decentralized services on October 16. The burn scale was 21.62 trillion tokens, which is significant in that the previously announced long-term buyback and burn plan was actually executed through on-chain transactions. BitTorrent also presented a rebranding plan to expand its business scope from file transfer to decentralized storage, AI computing, and infrastructure connecting multiple blockchains. In contrast, no new products or changes to the token structure that could drive up the price were confirmed for Pepe. Considering that MemeCore and BinanceLife were also in the gainers' range, Pepe's rise is interpreted as being influenced more by a meme coin rotation than by individual business achievements. As the market turned bearish while long positions were accumulated in the derivatives market, the recent 24-hour decline was relatively larger.
The composition of the 6th to 10th places shows that buying was not concentrated in a single technological sector. Just handles lending and stablecoin finance within the TRON ecosystem, with JST used for governance. Venice Token has a structure where tokens are deposited to secure computing resources and API access for AI services that minimize personal data collection. MemeCore is a gas/staking token for a blockchain specialized in meme coin issuance and activity rewards, and BinanceLife is a meme coin based on internet culture on the BNB Chain. Dash, which provides selective privacy and payment features, joined the mix. The fact that DeFi, AI, privacy, and meme coins were all in the top tier at the same time is closer to a market trend where funds moved into mid-cap altcoins with high volatility rather than a specific industry narrative.
The top performers this week varied in character based on the combination of individual catalysts and market rebounds. Lyther and BitTorrent had verifiable changes in the form of license application plans and token burns, while Worldcoin’s price movement was tied to the launch of an enterprise identity verification service. In contrast, Monero and Pepe were influenced more by rotations into privacy coins and meme coins, respectively.
While Bitcoin's mid-week rebound provided a foundation for altcoin buying, it is too early to conclude that the upward trend has solidified as a new market-wide trend, especially given that all of the top five coins fell in the final 24 hours of the reporting period. It is more reasonable to interpret these results not as confirmation of a long-term bull market, but as a flow where funds entered coins with specific announcements first, spread to high-volatility assets like privacy and meme coins, and then partially retreated along with the market's bearish turn.
※ This article was written by Bizhankook and MetaVX’s generative AI together.