According to the latest crypto industry report from Coingecko, during the first quarter of 2023, bitcoin became the best performing asset after its US dollar value rose from just under $17,000 seen on December 31, 2022 to shortly more than $28,000 in March. January 31, 2023. The report attributes the resurgence in crypto assets to “increased volatility from the banking crisis” and Binance’s decision to end part of its zero-fee incentive scheme for bitcoin transactions.
Bitcoin Outperforms Nasdaq Index and Gold
After closing last year trading below $17,000, bitcoin staged a comeback that saw it close the first quarter (Q1) of 2023 trading above $28,000. With this performance, bitcoin, which eventually broke above the $30,000 level, outperformed major asset classes including the Nasdaq index and gold, data from the latest Coingecko cryptocurrency industry report shows.
As shown in the report, bitcoin’s quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) growth of 72.4% makes it the best performing asset over the period. The Nasdaq index and gold were the second and third best performers with gains of 15.7% and 8.4%, respectively.
Although the recovery of bitcoin and the entire crypto market is known to have started sometime in January, according to the report, the US banking crisis could be the main reason why interest in this asset class has increased.
“Trading volume experienced a spike in January 2023, when the market began to recover. It then spiked momentarily in early March due to increased volatility from the banking crisis, before tapering off in late March when Binance removed some of its zero-fee trading incentives for BTCthe Coingecko report said.
Stablecoins lose ground in Q1
Regarding stablecoins, the report says that the market capitalization of this asset class dropped by 4.5% or $6.5bn “due to the Paxos shutdown of Binance USD (BUSD) and the brief event unpegging of USD Coin (USDC) during the SVB. collapse.”
Meanwhile, the Coingecko report also reveals that the decentralized finance (defi) market capitalization rose 65.2% to end the quarter at $29.6bn. Liquid staking governance tokens saw their value grow by 210.9% in Q1, making them “the third largest category in defi.”
During the same period, trading volumes on non-fungible token (NFT) platforms also increased from $2.1bn in the last quarter of 2022 to $4.5bn. According to the report, a large portion of these volumes came from Blur, which recently took Opensea’s place as the most dominant NFT platform.
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