Top 5 Crypto Performers as VELVET Soars 155% in a Week
Five tokens separated themselves from the wider crypto market on August 15. VELVET was the clear outlier, while ETHFI, JTO, LINK and ICP posted daily gains ranging from 5% to 9%.
The developments behind them fall into three categories: mechanisms that buy tokens with protocol revenue, changes that restrict new supply, and headlines that mainly improve visibility or market access. Only the first two alter token economics directly, and even then the price effect depends on execution and investor demand.
1. Velvet (VELVET): A 155% Rally Meets a Supply Test
At $1.18 at the time of writing, VELVET had gained 26% in one day and 155% in one week. The scale of that move leaves little room for product adoption to disappoint.
Velvet’s trading terminal combines spot, perpetual and yield markets across seven networks, including Base, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana and Hyperliquid. Its AI-powered routing is designed to spare traders from moving between separate interfaces. That expansion becomes relevant to VELVET only when it produces sustained trading volume and greater use of the token for rewards, governance or fee cashback.
Velvet’s Epoch 11 reward structure provides a separate, supply-side explanation. Only 12% of distributed VELVET is liquid; the remaining 88% is locked and staked for 12 months. That reduces the amount immediately available for sale but does not destroy it. The locked allocation can become an overhang when it is released.
Coverage of an earlier VELVET surge linked it to speculation around SpaceX and pre-IPO exposure. That helps explain how VELVET attracted attention, but it is not a new catalyst after SpaceX’s market debut. Following a 155% weekly rally, current platform use carries more weight than a recycled IPO narrative.
2. Ether.fi (ETHFI): Buybacks Create a Clearer Demand Channel
ETHFI gained 9% in 24 hours and 25% over the week, bringing its price to about $0.48. Its latest update provides a direct, though still unquantified, link between protocol revenue and the token.
On August 13, ether.fi introduced programmatic ETHFI buybacks funded across its products and revenue lines. Ether.fi had purchased tokens before; the change is that buybacks are now recurring and tied to a broader revenue base.
The announcement did not disclose enough to determine how much buying pressure the program can generate. Revenue can grow without producing a proportionate rise in ETHFI demand if only a small share funds purchases or if bought tokens later return to circulation.
Ether.fi also made a $100 million allocation to a real-world asset vault on Plume. The vault could expand assets and fee income, which may eventually support larger buybacks. The allocation itself does not represent $100 million of ETHFI purchases.
3. Jito (JTO): A Buy-and-Burn Proposal Meets Solana Risk
JTO rose 7% for the day and 23% for the week to trade near $0.60. Access changed in both directions: Bitstamp added JTO trading, while CoinTR removed its JTO pairs in August. The first can improve liquidity and bring in new buyers; the second reduces access in one market. Neither changes Jito’s underlying revenue.
JIP-38 goes further by proposing that the Jito DAO’s share of JTX revenue fund JTO market buybacks and burns through the fourth quarter of 2027. Completed purchases would add demand and the burns would remove the acquired tokens from supply. Until JTX produces meaningful fees and those transactions occur, however, the policy remains more important as a framework than as a source of buying pressure.
JTO also carries some of Solana’s operating risk because Jito supplies staking and transaction infrastructure to the network. A routing problem reported by Marinade Finance recently pushed about 29% of Solana’s stake offline and brought the network close to its finality threshold, although blocks and transactions did not stop. More Solana activity can increase Jito’s revenue opportunity; instability can undermine confidence in the same business.
4. Chainlink (LINK): The Reserve Matters More Than a Price Target
LINK advanced 6% in 24 hours and 12% over the week, reaching $9.27. Standard Chartered’s newly initiated coverage gave traders a striking set of numbers: a $13 target for the end of 2026, $200 by 2030 and a tokenized-asset market projected to reach $4 trillion by 2028.
Those are forecasts, not protocol cash flows. They can improve sentiment, but the valuation case still requires banks, asset issuers and blockchains to pay for Chainlink services at a much greater scale. The bank’s target does not place a floor under LINK.
Transactions worth more than $100,000 reportedly reached a five-month high, while wallets holding 100,000 to 10 million LINK controlled about 47% of supply. The activity may reflect accumulation, but large transfers can also be internal movements, collateral changes or preparations to sell. Heavy concentration becomes a risk if major holders distribute into the rally.
The Chainlink Reserve provides the direct economic link. Through Payment Abstraction, service fees paid in stablecoins or other assets can be converted into LINK and accumulated in the Reserve. That can turn paid network use into token purchases. It is not a burn, and its effect will depend on how quickly the Reserve grows relative to LINK entering the market elsewhere.
5. Internet Computer (ICP): Lower Inflation Still Needs Higher Usage
ICP was the fifth-ranked performer at $2.27, with a 5% daily gain and a 9% weekly advance. Mission 70 aims to cut token inflation by at least 70% by the end of 2026, but that goal has two separate parts.
Reward reductions were approved in April, and implementation is underway. The Mission 70 white paper estimates that these supply measures can lower gross minting from roughly 10% in January 2026 to about 5% in January 2027. That would reduce dilution and the amount of newly issued ICP available for sale.
The remaining reduction cannot come from reward cuts alone. Reaching inflation of about 3% would also require cycle burning to rise by roughly 15 times. Internet Computer therefore needs greater commercial demand for its cloud and computing services, with users consuming enough resources to burn substantially more ICP.
Lower voting and node-provider rewards may also weaken participation if network use does not grow fast enough to offset the smaller incentives. Mission 70 can reduce supply growth, but demand must do the rest.
What to Watch After the Rally
- VELVET: routed trading volume and the schedule for locked reward releases.
- ETHFI: the value of completed buybacks relative to ether.fi’s revenue.
- JTO: JTX fees and verifiable JTO purchases and burns.
- LINK: fee conversions and growth in the Chainlink Reserve.
- ICP: gross minting, cycle burn and changes in network participation.
The ranking shows where traders placed money this week. The harder test is scale: buybacks, burns and emission cuts must be large enough to matter beside normal trading volume and new token supply. A mechanism can work exactly as designed and still be too small to support the price. Until the data show otherwise, these are strong rallies, not proof that the new token economics have worked.
- Disclaimer: All cryptocurrency price and performance data in this article were sourced from CoinMarketCap at the time of writing. Because crypto markets move continuously, the figures may have changed by the time you read this article. Project announcements, proposals, listings and analyst forecasts do not guarantee adoption or future returns. This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
