Velvet has emerged as the standout crypto performer this week, with its VELVET token climbing 26% in 24 hours and 155% over seven days to trade near $1.18. Its Epoch 11 reward structure provides a supply-side explanation: only 12% of distributed VELVET is liquid, while the remaining 88% is locked and staked for 12 months. That reduces immediate sell pressure but creates a future overhang if released. The scale of the move leaves little room for product adoption to disappoint.
Velvet positions itself as a unified DeFi layer operating across BNB Chain, Base, Solana, Ethereum and Sonic. Its intent-driven engine translates plain-language goals into structured on-chain actions, while an AI Co-Pilot and SocialFAI feed surface market insights and prepare transactions for user approval. VELVET powers governance through veVELVET, staking discounts and revenue sharing.
Ether.fi’s ETHFI gained 9% in a day and 25% over the week to about $0.48 after ether.fi introduced programmatic ETHFI buybacks on Aug. 13. The buybacks are tied to a broader revenue base, but no exact buying pressure was disclosed. Ether.fi also allocated $100 million to a real-world asset vault on Plume, which may expand fee income rather than directly purchase ETHFI.
Jito’s JTO rose 7% daily and 23% weekly to near $0.60. Bitstamp added JTO trading while CoinTR removed its JTO pairs in August. The more significant catalyst is JIP-38, a proposal to use the Jito DAO’s share of JTX revenue for JTO market buybacks and burns through Q4 2027. Jito also carries Solana network risk after a Marinade Finance routing problem pushed about 29% of Solana stake offline and brought the network close to its finality threshold.
Chainlink’s LINK advanced 6% in 24 hours and 12% weekly to $9.27. Standard Chartered initiated coverage with a $13 end-2026 target and a $200 target by 2030, citing a tokenized-asset market that could reach $4 trillion by 2028. Large LINK transactions worth more than $100,000 hit a five-month high, while wallets holding 100,000 to 10 million LINK controlled about 47% of supply. The Chainlink Reserve remains the direct economic link, converting service fees into LINK purchases through Payment Abstraction, though it is not a burn.
Internet Computer’s ICP gained 5% daily and 9% weekly to $2.27. Its Mission 70 initiative aims to cut token inflation by at least 70% by end-2026. Reward reductions approved in April could lower gross minting from roughly 10% in January 2026 to about 5% in January 2027, but reaching about 3% inflation would require cycle burning to grow roughly 15 times. That depends on substantially higher commercial demand for Internet Computer cloud services.
Across the leaderboard, traders are watching whether these buybacks, burns and emission cuts reach a scale large enough to matter beside normal volume and new supply. The weekly gains are strong, but for now the data shows a mix of real tokenomic shifts and still-unproven demand narratives.
