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Although crypto markets are literally dominated by ETH and BTC price movements right now, interesting things are happening on other fronts as well: analysis of Stepn, Axie Infinity, and STX.
Focus on crypto assets Stepn (GMT), Axie Infinity (AXS) and Stacks (STX)
The crypto market appears fairly compact these days, but that by no means means that there is nothing interesting beyond what revolves around Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Stepn (GMT)
GMT is the token of the Stepn project, and it is present on both Ethereum and BSC Chain and Solana.
Its performance in 2023 is counter to that of the crypto markets, because after an initial big rise it has now been declining for three months.
The low peak of 2022 was touched on the very last of the year, at a 94% below the highs.
It rose from that $0.227 over the course of 2023, with an initial boom that took it above $0.66 in less than a month.
That remarkable +190% in four weeks was followed by a predictable retracement, which in fact is still ongoing.
Indeed, while in mid-February it had already fallen to $0.40, in March it returned even below $0.30, or a level only 28% above the low of late 2022.
But just as January’s $0.66 was too high a price level, March’s $0.30 was too low a price level, so in April it returned to around $0.40.
This was probably the most natural level, so much so that it held this level for several weeks.
The problem is that starting with the drop in the crypto markets on 19 April it started to fall again, with a decline that for now seems to have ended on 23 April at $0.31.
This dynamic suggests that the $0.40 level was only sustainable until mid-April, while in recent weeks it has been repositioning itself somewhat above $0.30. These are levels in line with those in the days following its listing in March 2022, so it has effectively lost everything it had gained over the course of the year.
Axie Infinity (AXS)
A similar line of reasoning applies to Axie Infinity‘s token AXS, which is also present on Harmony, as well as Ethereum, BSC chain, and Solana.
Over the course of 2023, the price of AXS has followed a similar path to that of GMT.
In the first three weeks, it registered an excellent +128% that later proved to be unsustainable.
After rising from $6 to nearly $14, the price of the Axie Infinity token fell below $11 in February, and in March it ended up slipping even just above $7. By then it had almost lost all of its January gains, but by April it had settled back into a range of $8 to $9.
Prior to 19 April, it had even climbed back up to almost $9.5, but with the general decline in the crypto market in those days it returned to just above $7.5.
So its current market value is only slightly above its value at the beginning of the year, which in turn was only very slightly above the annual low of 2022.
So far the path seems similar to Stepn’s, but going back in time one realizes that Axie Infinity, listed in November 2020, has not fared badly at all.
In fact, the initial price was only $0.18, and the current price is in line with that of the first speculative bubble in April/May 2021.
In other words, the price of AXS has only lost all the gains generated by the second part of the big 2021 bullrun, namely the fall bullrun, but has retained the gains from the first part, the spring bull run.
After all, the incredible price of $160 in November 2021 had evidently only been inflated by a speculative bubble that then inevitably burst.
Stacks (STX): comparison with crypto trends Stepn (GMT) and Axie Infinity (AXS)
STX is Stacks’ native cryptocurrency.
Its price trajectory differs from that of GMT and AXS.
Until late February 2023, the price from the beginning of the year had only grown from $0.2 to $0.3, while in March it soared to $1.2.
While this surge proved unsustainable here as well, the subsequent decline was not particularly pronounced.
After 19 April it fell briefly below $0.7, then returned above that threshold. In other words, since the beginning of the year it has accumulated a total gain of 247% so far, without collapsing thereafter.
This is a completely different dynamic from that of almost all other cryptocurrencies, perhaps due to an excessive collapse in 2022.
In fact, after hitting an all-time high at over $3.6 in November 2021, during 2022 the collapse was 94%, and it was probably an excessive collapse.
It is worth noting that it is a very similar percentage collapse to many other tokens, but STX is not just a token: it is Stacks’ native cryptocurrency, a Layer-1 blockchain solution designed to bring smart contracts and dApps to Bitcoin.
So it is very likely to have been propelled not only by Bitcoin’s price growth, which has risen 74% since the beginning of the year, but also by the success of somewhat similar initiatives, such as Ordinals.
It is therefore a completely different project from the previous two, pursuing a path of its own. Evidently markets seem to be fond of this path for now.