Move over Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE).
You may be getting the lion's share of media attention lately. With no small thanks to Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) founder Elon Musk's penchant for tweeting about you. But other cryptocurrencies have delivered far larger gains over the past week.
How the big names like Dogecoin performed this week
Dogecoin started life as a light-hearted joke with a Shiba Inu mascot as its image. But it's no laughing matter today.
The Dogecoin price currently stands at 38 cents. While the price is now roughly half of the 74 cents it was trading for as recently as 8 May, it's still up an eye-popping 7,844% year-to-date. That gives it a market cap of US$48.6 billion (AU$62.7 billion). Certainly, nothing to laugh at.
And Dogecoin has put in a strong week, with the price up 26.6% over the past 7 days.
By comparison Bitcoin (CRYTPO: BTC), the world's biggest crypto by market cap is up 5.4% in the last full week.
Dogecoin also edged out Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), the second largest digital token. Ether has gained 20.2% over 7 days.
All solid returns, to be sure.
But these 2 lesser-known cryptos returned far more.
This week's top 2 crypto gainers
The best performing crypto over the past week is…drum roll, please… Theta Fuel (CRYPTO: TFUEL).
Theta Fuel is up 58.6% since this time last week. At the current price of 44 cents, Theta Fuel has a market cap of over US$2.4 billion.
And if you'd picked up some Theta Fuel at this time last year, you'd be sitting on a gain of 6,177%.
So what does Theta Fuel do?
According to CoinMarketCap, "TFUEL is the second token on the Theta blockchain that serves as the utility token in decentralised video and data delivery, it also acts as a gas token. This means that it is used to power all operations on the Theta blockchain."
This week's number 2 crypto asset is Curve DAO Token (CRYTPO: CRV). Curve is up 55.1% in 7 days, currently trading for US$2.52. That gives it a market cap of US$896 million.
For an insight into what Curve is all about, we turn back to CoinMarketCap, which tells us, "Curve is a decentralised exchange for stablecoins that uses an automated market maker (AMM) to manage liquidity."
As a handy reminder on the high levels of volatility and risk surrounding cryptocurrencies including Dogecoin, Curve which launched early in 2020, was trading at US$31.38 on 14 August last year. Meaning even with the past week's hefty gains, it's still down 92% from those levels.
