Aptos surged 400% in 30 days. What fundamentals support the hype?

Aptos , dubbed the " Solana killer," has recently become popular. According to Bitpush terminal data, the Aptos (APT) token has soared by more than 400% in the past 30 days, continuously setting new historical highs. As of press time, the trading price is $18.47, making it one of the best performing altcoins in the crypto market since the beginning of the year.

The hype in the Asian market cannot be ignored. According to Coingecko data, as of press time, the total trading volume of APT tokens in the past 24 hours was $1.1 billion, of which more than two-thirds ($836 million) was traded in the Korean won on Singapore-based exchange UpBit. At the time of writing, APT is priced at $18.63 on UpBit, nearly $0.30 higher than the selling price on Binance and most other exchanges.

The overall market rebound

Without a doubt, the biggest reason for the growth of APT is the rebound in the entire cryptocurrency market since the beginning of 2023. During this period, the total crypto market capitalization has increased by about $250 billion. Many believe that the main reason for the rebound is that US inflation is slowing down, and the consumer price index in December was in line with expectations, further boosting the market.

When Bitcoin recovers, it will also bring a wave of market conditions to other altcoins, and APT is obviously the winner among them.

PancakeSwap and Aptos Ecosystem

Another potential reason for the price increase is the construction of the Aptos ecosystem. Aptos was just launched in October last year and is a "newcomer" in the L1 track. Although the number of projects built on its ecosystem is small, it is also growing.

DeFi Llama data shows that although Aptos is currently only the 30th largest DeFi ecosystem, it has grown significantly in the past month. DeFi transaction volume on Aptos increased from $14 million last month to $51 million in January, and the growth is still continuing.

It is worth noting that most of the value currently locked in Aptos is concentrated in PancakeSwap , the largest dapp in the Aptos ecosystem. Recently, a new proposal called "Confirmation Proposal for Aptos Multichain Farm Emission" was put forward, which, if approved, will consolidate the team's vision of "building on the basis of the initial deployment."

On January 20, Binance Liquid Swap launched APT/Tether and APT/Bitcoin liquidity pools. The platform rewards users for depositing funds into the pools through the exchange’s utility token, BNB. Liquidity pools facilitate peer-to-peer trading of crypto assets, where users are incentivized to “pool” or deposit their tokens so they can be exchanged with other users, which is essential for the operation of decentralized exchanges.

Aptos NFT sales surge

Demand for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) built on Aptos is also surging. One of the most popular markets – Topaz – recently saw a tripling or even quadrupling of trading volume for multiple NFT combinations. On the other hand, NFT data tracked by Tracemove also showed a surge in trading volume for many Aptos-based projects.

Some well-known traders on Twitter expect a surge in community interest in Aptos NFTs in the coming days, with quick buying and selling of NFTs gradually becoming a trend among opportunistic traders.

Whether Aptos can maintain its current gains remains to be seen. The project caused controversy in the community when it launched its mainnet last year because its team claimed that it could process 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). However, its processing speed was about 4 TPS at the time of launch, rising to 27 TPS in the following days, still far below its theoretical upper limit.

The Aptos founder team came from Facebook’s (now Meta ) Diem / Libra digital currency project and uses the same Rust-based Move programming language, which (in theory) should make it faster than many of its competitors.

Aptos has also been criticized for its token economics. Currently, about 80% of its total supply of 1 billion tokens has been staked, suggesting that the majority of its supply is controlled by the team and investors .

It is difficult to say whether this rise is driven by the capital behind it. Aptos' supporters include some star venture capital firms: Andreesen Horowitz ( a16z ), Multicoin Capital , Jump Crypto , Tiger Global Management, Blocktower Capital and Coinbase Ventures .

Aptos’ popularity is similar to other L1 blockchains (such as Solana and Avalanche ) when they first appeared. Some observers even believe that Aptos is ready to “disrupt” these old public chains, but apart from the celebrity venture capital and the founder’s background in large companies, Aptos’ technology has not made any breakthrough progress. It may take some time for it to provide the same utility as those larger and more mature blockchains.