Bitcoin outperformed NFTs, US stocks in Q3, but not USD: CoinGecko report

The crypto industry showed a mild recovery in Q3 after taking a significant hit amid volatile conditions in the first half of 2022.

According to the last quarterly report published by cryptocurrency aggregator CoinGecko, the overall crypto market cap increased by 6.5%, roughly $100 billion, in Q3 compared to Q2.

Bitcoin outperformed other assets

Despite a choppy Q3, BTC outperformed all asset classes except the US dollar index, which measures the exchange rate of a basket of foreign currencies against the dollar.

While bitcoin’s price fell in line with US stocks, the digital asset bounced back quickly compared to the stock market, ending the third quarter with just a -1% change in price.

Stablecoins performed poorly

The CoinGecko report also revealed that the stablecoin market recorded poor performance in the third quarter, with the market capitalization of the top 15 stablecoins declining by 3%, approximately $4.7 billion quarter-over-quarter (QoQ).

The report noted that one factor behind the decline in the stablecoin’s market value is sanction imposed cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in August. The ban made it a criminal offense for US-based stablecoin issuers and users to interact with the platform.

The USD coin (USDC) suffered the most, falling 16% following the Tornado sanctions. USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin, saw a small increase in market value as it absorbed some of the selling of USDC.

The BUSD, on the other hand, benefited the most from the USDC selloff, with its market capitalization growing by 18%, roughly $9 billion, after the ban. The report also pointed out that this positive development for BUSD had coincided with Binance’s unveiling of automatic conversion of other stablecoins into BUSD.

The NFT market plunges 77% QoQ

Finally, the report highlighted that the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) recorded the most significant decline during the last quarter. A massive drop in trading volume on the top five NFT marketplaces, including OpenSea, LooksRare and more, affected the entire market.

Consequently, the sector registered a new 2022 all-time low (ATL), falling a whopping 77.4% from Q2 to Q3. Despite the drop in value, the number of wallets with NFTs increased by 1 million in Q3.