Crypto market cap surpassed $1 trillion in Q1 2023

Bitcoin is still supreme, surpassing the NASDAQ, gold, and crude oil

Crypto’s total market cap hit $1.2trln by the end of first quarter of this year, led by a temporary uplift in daily trading volume after the banking collapses during early March, as per a CoinGecko report.

According to the report, bitcoin (BTC) is still supreme, surpassing the NASDAQ, gold, and crude oil. It scored a quarter on quarter gain of 72.4 per cent.

Joshua Frank, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Tie, told Blockworks that bitcoin led the overall crypto recovery in Q1.

Bitcoin’s strength in 2023 has come on the back of the banking failures since investors viewed bitcoin as a hedge against banks, as nervous investors looked for relative safe havens to move capital out of stablecoins (and) as Circle and other issuers have faced unpredictable banking situations, he stated.

With regards to stablecoins, this asset class decreased $6.2bln in value during Q1. The report referred to the USD Coin depegging after Silicon Valley Bank’s failure and Paxos stopping BUSD minting in February, as chief reasons for the decline.

The report also delved particularly into the growth of Decentralised Finance and DEXs. As a sector, Decentralised Finance’s market cap grew more than 65 per cent, meaning around $30bln in gains. In spite of the gains, Decentralised Finance only accounts for less than 5 per cent of crypto’s overall market cap, he said.

Still, there were gains nevertheless, and they were possible due to the growth of liquid staking governance tokens like Lido DAO (LDO) and Rocket Pool (RPL), which have climbed nearly 135 per cent and 167 per cent, apiece, since the start of the year.

With the successful implementation of Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade, liquid staking governance tokens saw a 210.9 per cent rise in market cap in the first quarter. It has now exceeded lending protocols to become the third biggest category in Decentralised Finance, according to the report.

DEX governance tokens instead faltered, dropping 5 per cent of their market share since January.

On the NFT front, trading volume for the digital asset surged 68 per cent to $4.5bln in the first quarter from $2.1bln last quarter. Blur additionally overtook OpenSea as the most popular NFT marketplace in Q1. OpenSea’s rebranded release of its pro platform is not reflected in CoinGecko’s report, however.