Introduction: Volatility Hits Us Again
This week in July 2025, the world of cryptocurrency has again flexed its volatile muscles. From a bullish rally in AI and Layer 2 projects to nasty corrections in meme coins and DeFi tokens, investors experienced the full range of price action during the past week. This week of price action was driven by technology announcements, exchange announcements and listings, governance proposals and whale movements — giving investors opportunity, and risk, in every corner.
Below we break down the top 5 movers up and down for the week — including why they moved, the price details, and what it all can mean for weeks to come.
2. Fetch.ai (FET)
Price rise: +24.9%
Current price: $2.85
Market cap rank: #36
Why it gained:
The AI sector in crypto is hot again. Fetch.ai led the way after Microsoft recently announced it will integrate Web3 using decentralized AI agents. FET started to rise because it helps power autonomous machine-to-machine communication — think smart transport systems and decentralized energy trading etc. With the hype around AI x Crypto convergence, a lot of new money will flood into AI based tokens. This week, Fetch.ai has received the lion’s share of investment.
Investor takeaway:
AI tokens are speculative but there is a rapid rise. If you want a long-term play consider FET’s real-world use cases before getting into this hype train.
3. Starknet (STRK)
Price rise: +21.4%
Current price: $0.98
Market cap rank: #45
Why it gained:
Starknet is a zero-knowledge Layer 2 solution for Ethereum and recently launched its native STRK staking program and this incentive encouraged both retail and institutional investors. Additionally, being integrated with the leading NFT marketplaces has provided them broader exposure to more users. While the technical crowd circulates their interest in Starknet’s scalability and zk-rollup architecture, they have an edge over others in the Layer 2 arms race.
Investor takeaway:
STRK is gaining traction due to legitimate developer adoption.
4. Shiba Inu (SHIB)
Price Gain: +19.6%
Current Price: $0.000021
Market Cap Rank: #13
Reason for Gain:
SHIB got a new boost from the launch of ShibaSwap 2.0 this past week. It also didn’t hurt that SHIB trended #1 on X (formerly Twitter) for 48 hours straight.
Investor Takeaway:
As always with meme coins, don’t get carried away. SHIB still has no credible utility, but it does sustain itself off the energy from its community.
5. Render Token (RNDR)
Price Gain: +18.8%
Current Price: $5.10
Market Cap Rank: #31
Reason for Gain:
Render, a decentralized GPU rendering network, saw a substantial boost after Apple announced a strategic deal with a metaverse technology platform that uses RNDR to build out AR/VR performance. This sparked renewed investor interest in Web3 infrastructure tokens. Considering its value in gaming, development of metaverses and design of digital environments, demand for RNDR increased.
Investor Takeaway:
If AR/VR adoption and the expansion of metaverses continues, Render is set for considerable growth and development over time. Keep an eye on engagements from developers and hardware integration.
Top 5 Crypto Losers (July 2025 Week 3)
1. Pepe Coin (PEPE)
Percentage in Price Decline: -17.9%
Price: $0.00000102
Market Capitalization: #69
Reasons for the Downfall:
After a meteoric climb up in early July, PEPE had a very steep correction due to massive whale sell-offs and short traders cashing out. It struggled with a lot of volatility and little fundamental news to justify the prior price run-up.
On-chain metrics were showing a large increase, upwards of 40% to centralized exchanges for PEPE. It is not uncommon for that to occur when whale players are cashing in their profits.
What Investors Can Learn:
Memecoins are definitely high-risk investments. PEPE is likely to rebound to some extent, but there is no way to expect any sort of stability from them unless they developed real-world utility.
2. Aptos (APT)
Percentage in Price Decline: -14.6%
Current Price: $6.42
Market Capitalization: #28
Reasons for the Downfall:
APT was expected to roll out a smart contract upgrade this week, which had a lot of developer and community excitement.
In addition, there will be increased competition from newer Layer 1 chains that have better tokenomics and speed. Some dApps even made public announcements they would be migrating to other chains away from Aptos.
What Investors Can Learn:
This is still a good chain, but delays are momentum killers, they were highly anticipated and impactful. Going forward, it will be interesting to see how the team engages fronts its community going forward.
3. Maker (MKR)
Price Change: -13.5%
Current Price: $1,832
Market Cap Rank: #38
Reasons for Price Drop:
Opposition to the MakerDAO proposal to alter DAI’s interest rate model, although they have some builders who feel they are altering the onboarding process and strategists who fear centralization of governance. The community seems already divided and it’s feared that they will lose their peg to DAI.
Investor Takeaway:
Governance tokens expose investors to risks beyond thematic. Community cohesion is even more deliberate in DAO ecosystems.
4. SUI (SUI)
Price Change: -11.8%
Current Price: $0.92
Market Cap Rank: #40
Reasons for Price Drop:
Before you get into the “technical discussions”, SUI has suffered a loss of TVL as multiple DeFi projects cite cheaper operational costs and greater community backing from projects migrating to Polygon and to a lesser extent Arbitrum. To further dampen TVL, liquidity mining rewards were reduced to zero which detrimentally affected a short-term yield opportunity to retail investors.
Investor Takeaway:
SUI is a reserve technology with some things to resolve in retaining builders and their liquidity, however, retailers who are interested in SUI as yield vehicle for income generating are every hopeful for community updates that signal a return of interest to the SUI platform.
5. The Graph (GRT)
Price Decrease: -10.2%
Current Price: $0.162
Market Cap Rank: #50
What Caused the Drop:
GRT serves an essential purpose by providing important indexing services for Web3; however it was ultimately buried this week with the AI token frenzy. In turn, investors rotated capital out of the infrastructure plays into speculative AI tokens AGIX and FET.
The absence of notable updates from The Graph Foundation contributed to the poor performance as well.
Investor Key Takeaways:
Utility tokens like GRT may not be trending right now, but they are nevertheless important. Keep them on your long term watch list.
Final Thoughts
This week serves as a reminder of at least one undeniable thing: the crypto space cannot be classified as slow moving, stagnant or boring! Regardless if you are using the time to buy meme coins, AI tokens or foundational chains — if you stay informed, you can have an edge.
Price movements can be random and extreme, but knowledge is your best defense.
