coindesk.com
After spending 2022 in the doldrums, the cryptocurrency market has soared in January, with the biggest winners tokens that fell by the most last year.
Layer 1 blockchain Aptos’ APT token was the biggest winner among 160 assets in the CoinDesk Market Index, a measure of overall market performance, surging 387% this month. Gaming- and metaverse-affiliated tokens including Gala Games’ GALA token and Decentraland’s MANA token gained 233% and 149%, respectively.
“It’s not unusual to see the hardest-hit coins rallying the most when the market turns bullish,” Martin Leinweber, digital assets product specialist at MarketVector Indexes, said. “Those smaller altcoins have a higher beta to bitcoin on the way up and on the way down.”
The increases come during a broad-based swoop upward in digital assets that has seen bitcoin and ether, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, rise about 40% and more than 30%, respectively. The CoinDesk Market Index has climbed 38%.
Other crypto winners have included the LCX cryptocurrency exchange’s LCX token and Fetch.ai's native FET token, which recently rose 292% and 201%, respectively. Solana’s SOL token surged 146% in January to recently trade around $24, rebounding from its December record low of $8.19. A favorable, late December tweet by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who expressed “hope” that the Solana community “gets its fair chance to thrive,” has helped spark SOL’s rally.
January’s Losers
Chain’s XCN token in the CMI's Currency sector was one of two monthly laggards, falling 10%. MXC, the native token of the MXC Supernode network in the Computing sector, declined by roughly 5%.