Bitcoin, the major cryptocurrency by market cap, turned 14 on Tuesday (3). Who stole the show this festive day were altcoins – a term used to define any crypto asset other than BTC.
No less than 142 alt digital assets tracked by the CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), an index that measures the price of the entire crypto market, are trading earlier this year.
The CMI rose 1.3% in the first few days of 2023, a reversal from the fourth quarter of last year, when it fell 12% from September to December 15.
Lido DAO (LDO), the governance token of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Lido that operates the ETH (passive cryptocurrency staking) platform, won the award and was the best performer of 2023 at CMI.
LDO rose from $0.95 at the end of 2022 to $1.20 yesterday, up 26%, according to data from CoinGecko. The gathering follows an announcement by Ethereum (ETH) developers on December 8, in which they said that the next hard fork (update) for the crypto project would take place in March.
The number two altcoin holder was JasmyCoin (JASMY). The token, which was created by a platform that develops projects in the Internet of Things (IoT) space, has gained 20% this year.
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In third place was MPL, Maple Finance’s native digital asset, which uses a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol for intermediary capital intended for financial institutions, which increased by about 15%.
Already in fourth place is Solana (SOL), which rose by 12% between January 1 and January 3, 2023, and almost 20% in the last 24 hours. Known as the “Ethereum Killers,” the cryptocurrency rose after news of the airdrop was released that sparked interest in the project community.
Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two main cryptocurrencies in the market, have also remained strong so far this year – the former, with a discreet increase of 0.55% in the last 24 hours, and the latter an advance of nearly 3% in the same period.
Bitcoin has fluctuated between $16,000 and $17,000 for 19 consecutive days, after 2022 losing about 65%.
Looking at the performance of the sectors, the CMIs were in the green during the first days of the year, led by the Culture and Leisure sector, up 5% through Tuesday. The DeFi sector is up around 4%.
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Big losers in the new year are Aragon (ANT) and Civic (CVC) tokens, both of which are down 6% in 2023.
Adam Farthing, risk manager for Japan at crypto platform B2C2, predicted that more cryptocurrency investors will be looking for “real-time and real-world applicability rather than betting on hope for some potential use case in the future.”
“It is hoped that the winners in 2023 will be those tokens that can demonstrate immediate cash-generating use cases in the real world, and that are not dependent on future crypto market growth and uptrends,” Farthing wrote in a note.