Crypto Markets Today: Popsicle Heats Up as Bitcoin Stays Cold

The native token of Popsicle Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) market-making and yield-earning protocol, is surging as the controversial yet prolific blockchain developer Daniele Sestagalli said he was returning to the project. This article originally appeared in Crypto Markets Today, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter diving into what happened in today’s crypto markets. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.

• Popsicle’s ICE token’s price jumped some 220% in the last 24 hours, according to cryptocurrency price tracker CoinGecko. The token currently is trading at 36 U.S. cents, only two days after hitting an all-time low of 9 cents.
• Popsicle was part of a loose conglomerate of DeFi projects known as “Frog Nation” that were helmed by Sestagalli as recently as January, including Abracadabra.money, whose stablecoin was partly collateralized by the collapsed FTX exchange’s FTT token, and the since-failed Wonderland, a fork of OlympusDAO.
• The sudden surge came after Sestagalli tweeted Wednesday that he was “focusing right now on rebuilding the OG Popsicle Finance,” breaking a four-month-long silence on Twitter.
• Sestagalli, also known as Dani Sesta in crypto circles, garnered a cult following in crypto due to his community-based approach to building projects, CoinDesk wrote in January.
• But his reputation took a hit earlier this year when influential crypto vigilante ZachXBT revealed that Sestagalli was working at Wonderland with an executive of the failed QuadrigaCX exchange, which allegedly defrauded investors of at least $190 million.

Token Roundup

Bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH): The largest cryptocurrency by market value looked remarkably stable Wednesday, trading around $16,780 and almost flat in the past 24 hours as traders wrestled with the uncertain market outlook for next year. ETH followed BTC’s trajectory, down 0.3% around $1,209. U.S. equities were a bit more buoyant: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 1.6%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was up 1.5%, while the S&P 500 was up 1.4%. Waves (WAVES): The native token of decentralized blockchain dropped 5% to $1.51 on Wednesday and plunged by more than 40% over the past two weeks as Waves’ founder Sasha Ivanov has asked crypto exchanges to deactivate futures markets tied to the WAVES token. The coin’s slump has been attributed to the volatility of USDN, an algorithmic stablecoin that is designed to be pegged 1:1 with the U.S. dollar. The stablecoin is backed by the WAVES token and has de-pegged on multiple occasions this year. dYdX (DYDX): The token price dropped over 14% to $1.18 as many investors are “front-running a huge supply unlock that begins in February,” Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at Fundstrat, wrote in a Wednesday note.