The price of the Aptos token ($APT) surged five times today as it started gaining traction at the beginning of 2023. The layer 1 blockchain Aptos native token, $APT, has hit its all-time high with its prices pumped up 500% since Jan 1.
Aptos’ unprecedented price surge vastly outperformed some of the blue-chip cryptos recently, making its entry into the increasingly competitive token niche. Aptos was launched on mainnet in October 2022 and many touted it as another “Ethereum killer”.
Though it has little to no on-chain activity as compared to Ethereum, the Aptos token has been one the strongest performers in the crypto market over the last few weeks. In this article, we will analyze whether Aptos’ token is overvalued or becoming five times its value is just the beginning.
How did $APT climb from $4 to $20?
Aptos was developed by former Meta (Facebook) employees and emerged as a high-performance PoS chain that garnered a lot of interest from partners and projects like PancakeSwap. In October, the proposal about PancakeSwap deployment on Aptos passed, followed by an AMA session.
One of Aptos ecosystem leads addressed the crypto community in that session, saying “Aptos is permissionless, no whitelist, and no approval from Aptos. Anyone who wants to build on Aptos can do so!”
So far, the partners and backers of Aptos raised $200 million in the first round led by a16z, Binance, and Multicoin among many others. Another $200 million in Series A round was co-led by Jump and FTX, in which Binance and Dragonfly participated as well.
For the first few months of its launch, the Aptos token was stuck at $4-$5 but the uptick in activity in January has now pumped $APT over 5x and it is currently changing hands at $18.30.
It all started when Aptos hosted their first “AptosMoveMonday” of 2023 on Jan 9th, which coincided with the upward move in the $APT. Its co-founders Mo Shaikhs and Avery Ching conducted “Ask me Anything (AMA)” on Twitter about upcoming developments.
This triggered newly found interest in people and many joined, seeing the potential in Aptos. Now, let’s get into key factors that contributed to the sudden price surge.
Growing Aptos NFTs craze
The hype for $APT was partly driven by rising NFT demand such as Aptomigos and Aptos Monkeys NFT collections. Both of which have attracted tens of thousands in trading volume in such a short span of time. Consequently, in the first two weeks of January, Apton tokens were up 250%. The token’s rally temporarily surpassed recent moves from the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, bitcoin and ether.
The overall impact on the market due to the sudden price surge of the Aptos token added to its popularity among traders and investors.
Aptos NFTs saw a significant increase in both floor price and trading volume as NFT enthusiasts started collecting them to become early adopters. Taking the advantage of the growing Aptos network, more NFT investors accumulated Aptos NFTs to make flipping opportunities work in their favor. The growing Aptos NFTs market was one of the primary reasons why Aptos tokens skyrocket in no time.
Aptos Collaborations and Projects
The crypto community is perceiving Aptos as a promising venture since it has been in the headlines for actively making efforts to set its foothold in the decentralized world. Since the mainnet launch, PancakeSwap, Wormhole, Trust Wallet, and Pyth have all integrated with Aptos.
The recent collaboration with Aptos also marks PancakeSwap’s first integration outside of the BNB chain, making Aptos the first network to issue its native tokens $CAKE. In a recent AMA session, Aptos co-founders Mo and Avery announced upcoming community engagements such as Aptos World Tour, conferences, and developer meet-ups. This Twitter space session stirred a new wave of excitement in anticipation of Aptos 2023 developments mentioned in the AMA event.
In the session, the Aptos team mentioned that it is utilizing the Move programming language and enforcing resource invariants in Move. Furthermore, its co-founders shed some light on governance-based contract upgrades on Aptos.
Binance lists $APT Trading Pairs
The major milestone was Binance listing $APT on its platform. On January 20th, Binance announced the opening of two new liquidity pools for Aptos with $APT/ BTC and $APT/ $USDT. This push from Binance played a pivotal role to drive the $APT price up by at least 56% and trading volume up by 147% on a 5-day average.
In a tweet thread, Binance vouched for Aptos saying that there are some unique features that the team hope can make Aptos the next major #Layer1. Summing up all the events, it can easily be seen how Aptos’ token skyrocketed in the last three weeks.
Aptos Token Trend: What to expect
Last year, the crypto community backlashes Aptos for being centralized and heavily venture capital-backed with no transparent tokenomics. Early Aptos backers included major exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, and now bankrupt FTX.
Due to this, Aptos token price crashed 45% after its launch and remained flat for around months before price pumps. Since then, Aptos has come so far and has improvised on its programming language ‘Move’ which enables a parallel executive engine for scalability, It also leveraged a modular architecture supporting frequent upgrades.
Over the past month, Aptos tokens surged a whopping 500% and pushed the price to a new all-time high of $20 on January 26. However, crypto analysts are skeptical about whether the Aptos hype is sustainable or slump again as did after its launch. Moreover, they believe a pullback can draw prices back to $15 quickly.
As per Technical analysis, experts have predicted that Aptos Token will soon begin to show a downtrend as it has achieved the peak price. As early adopters will start selling their $APT, we can see a sharp decline in prices in the coming weeks. Oscillators indicate that Aptos tokens have achieved a short-term target which makes the right time to book profits.
Note that, the funding rates for the Aptos token have turned negative, which means there are more shorts than longs on it in the market, suggesting the $APT rally can be short-lived. Though Aptos tokens will show bearish tendencies, it would be interesting to see how Aptos will maintain its position in the list of top performers in the crypto market.
