[Review] Last Week's Top 5 Performing Crypto & NFT to Watch

Period: 18^th October 2022 – 25^th October 2022

· The stock markets had a big swing last week but not so much is happening to the crypto market. According to a data provider, bitcoin’s volatility is now lower than Nasdaq and S&P 500 since 2020. Crypto, at least for bitcoin, is on its way to becoming a less volatile and legitimate asset class for investors.

· The Opensea NFT trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain might be seeing its lowest point in months. While there is no concrete evidence, trading in the newly launched Aptos chain has taken a fair share of the Ethereum NFT market. A free mint project named “Aptomingos” is the winner of all.

Compared to the stock markets, S&P 500 for example, bitcoin the largest market capitalization crypto is becoming lesser volatile. According to data provider Kaiko, bitcoin’s volatility is now lower than that of both the Nasdaq and S&P 500, after hovering at the $19K level for more than a month. The biggest single-day price swing for bitcoin last week happened on Tuesday when the difference between the highest and lowest price is just $611. It is quite a rare sight that bitcoin does not swing more than a thousand dollars in the span of a week.

Bitcoin and stock market volatility readings from Kaiko

Meanwhile, the stability of the bitcoin price does not apply to the rest of the cryptocurrencies, altcoins are still as volatile as they used to be. One of the most highly anticipated Layer 1 (L1) blockchains, Aptos, successfully launched last week. The native token of Aptos (APT) is now the crowd-favourite coin. The first day of the Aptos Mainnet’s launch did not get large approval from the Web3 community due to its shady tokenomics and low TPS (transactions per second). However, things changed on Day 2. Many lucky Web3 users received free airdrop tokens that worth thousands of dollars from the Aptos team, immediately turning criticisms into compliments. You can hardly hear any complaints about Atpos now. In fact, the hands-on experience of the Move-based blockchain is pretty satisfying. Another highlight of the week belonged to Klaytn (KLAY), an enterprise blockchain platform developed by the South Korean internet giant Kakao. The L1 blockchain that focuses heavily on metaverse and GameFi passed its proposal on reduction in block rewards and allocations. These adjustments will be effective in mid-November. The new deflationary mechanism can effectively optimize the level of KLAY emission, sending KLAY price up 42% in a week.

The Ethereum-based NFT trading volume in OpenSea hit its lowest in months due to the newcomer Aptos. The fifth-largest NFT project in weekly trading volume has failed to go beyond the 1K ETH mark, making it the first case since the start of this weekly column in July. Speaking of the hottest NFT project in Aptos, Aptomingos, it attracted a total of 86.8K APT in trading volume since launch, that’s roughly 590 ETH. Besides these pixelated flamingos, other projects have also eaten up a fair share of the ETH NFT market too.

The two of the top NFT marketplaces in Aptos

So, what’s special about the Aptomingos? To be honest, I don’t have any clue. A wild guess is that probably it is one of the first batches of NFT collections in Aptos and also comes with a low supply. With just 1,212 flamingos in the Aptos chain, the project that started as a free mint reached the floor price of 32.5 APT (~approx $260) within an hour, hitting the 100 APT floor price the next day and achieved the highest at around 170 APT. However, the hype cooled down pretty quickly. As of the time of writing, Aptomingos is sitting at 79 APT, a massive 50% retracement from its ATH. People can be easily FOMO whenever new stuff launched; it is a must for us to learn to control our emotions to avoid incurring huge losses.

Aptomingos hitting 32.5 APT floor price within an hour