CoinGecko’s top 20 for the week of February 21-27 is worth reading carefully, because a few of the names on it say something specific about where the market’s attention is pointing right now.
Bitcoin leads at a $1,354.8 billion market cap. That part surprises no one. It’s second place that raises an eyebrow.
Pudgy Penguins, the NFT-turned-token project, is the second most searched asset on CoinGecko this week, sitting at a $448.8 million market cap. For an NFT collection’s associated token to land above Solana, Ethereum, and XRP in a trending search ranking during a period of broad market pressure is not a typical outcome.
Whether that interest translates into sustained buying or represents a speculative spike tied to a specific catalyst isn’t clear from the ranking alone. But the fact that retail attention is gravitating toward a $448 million asset over a $245 billion one, Ethereum sits at fifth, points to the kind of risk appetite rotation that tends to show up near local bottoms in larger assets.
Solana comes in third at $49.7 billion, Ethereum fifth at $245.9 billion, XRP fourteenth at $86.1 billion. The spread across those positions is notable, three of the largest assets in crypto are distributed across the top twenty rather than clustered at the top, which suggests trending interest is genuinely fragmented this week rather than concentrated in one narrative.
Hyperliquid at seventh ($6.9B), Sui at ninth ($3.7B), and Aave at seventeenth ($1.8B) represent the DeFi and infrastructure layer of the list. Their presence alongside meme-adjacent assets like Punch ($17.3M at sixth) and pippin ($769.1M at eighth) captures something honest about how the market works, institutional-grade protocols and low-cap speculative plays competing for the same search bar.
A handful of assets in the lower half of the list carry market caps under $100 million — Aztec at $69.2M, ETHGas at $61.0M, which means trending interest in those projects is being driven by something other than existing holders. People are finding them for the first time. Whether that discovery leads anywhere depends entirely on what those projects are actually building, but the search volume itself is a leading indicator worth tracking.
Bittensor at eleventh ($1.8B) continues showing up in trending lists consistently, a reflection of sustained interest in AI-adjacent blockchain infrastructure that hasn’t faded with the broader market pullback. Morpho at sixteenth ($1.0B) and Canton at twentieth ($6.6B) round out a list that, taken as a whole, skews toward infrastructure and DeFi more than pure speculation, which is mildly encouraging given where prices are.
Trending on CoinGecko means people are looking. It doesn’t mean they’re buying, and it certainly doesn’t mean prices are about to move. What it does reveal is where narrative energy is concentrated in a given week, and this week, that energy is split between Bitcoin dominance, unexpected NFT token interest, and a layer of DeFi and infrastructure projects that have been quietly building audiences.
