Crypto news on Stepn, Axie Infinity and STX
Although the crypto markets are literally dominated by ETH and BTC price movements right now, interesting things are happening on other fronts as well: analysis of Stepn, Axie Infinity and STX.
Focus on crypto assets Stepn (GMT), Axie Infinity (AXS) and Stacks (STX)
The crypto market appears to be quite compact these days, but that in no way means that there is nothing interesting beyond what concerns Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Stepn (GMT)
GMT is the token of the Stepn project and it is present on both Ethereum and BSC Chain and Solana.
The performance in 2023 is in contrast to the crypto markets, because after an initial big rise, it has now fallen for three months.
The 2022 low peak was reached at the very end of the year, with 94% below the peaks.
It rose from $0.227 during 2023, with an initial boom that took it above $0.66 in less than a month.
The remarkable +190% in four weeks was followed by a predictable retracement, which is actually still ongoing.
Indeed, while by mid-February it had already fallen to $0.40, in March it even returned below $0.30, or a level just 28% above its late-2022 low.
But just as January’s $0.66 was too high a price level, March’s $0.30 was too low a price level, so in April it returned to around $0.40.
This was probably the most natural level, so much so that it held this level for several weeks.
The problem is that starting with the fall in the crypto markets on April 19th, it began to fall again, with a decline that currently appears to have ended on April 23rd at $0.31.
This dynamic suggests that the $0.40 level was only sustainable until mid-April, while in recent weeks it has repositioned somewhat above $0.30. These are levels in line with the days following the March 2022 IPO, so it has effectively lost everything it had gained during the year.
Axie Infinity (AXS)
A similar reasoning applies to Axie Infinity’s token AXS, which is also found on Harmony, as well as Ethereum, the BSC chain and Solana.
During 2023, the price of AXS has followed a similar path to GMT.
In its first three weeks, it registered an excellent +128% which later proved to be unsustainable.
After rising from $6 to almost $14, the price of the Axie Infinity token fell below $11 in February, and in March it ended up falling even just above $7. By then it had lost almost all of its gains in January, but by April it had settled back into the $8 to $9 range.
Before April 19, it had even climbed back up to almost $9.5, but with the general decline in the crypto market at that time, it returned to just above $7.5.
So the current market cap is only slightly above the value at the start of the year, which was again very slightly above the 2022 annual low.
So far the track seems similar to Stepn’s, but if you go back in time you realize that Axie Infinity, listed on the stock exchange in November 2020, has not fared badly at all.
In fact, the initial price was only $0.18 and the current price is in line with that of the first speculative bubble in April/May 2021.
In other words, the price of AXS has only lost all the gains generated by the second part of the great 2021 bullrun, namely the autumn bullrun, but has retained the gains from the first part, the spring bullrun.
After all, the incredible price of $160 in November 2021 had clearly only been inflated by a speculative bubble that then inevitably burst.
Stacks (STX): comparison with cryptotrends Stepn (GMT) and Axie Infinity (AXS)
STX is Stacks’ native cryptocurrency.
The price path is different from GMT and AXS.
Until the end of February 2023, the price from the beginning of the year had only grown from $0.2 to $0.3, while in March it rose to $1.2.
Although this increase proved to be unsustainable here too, the subsequent decline was not particularly pronounced.
After April 19, it briefly fell below $0.7, then bounced back above that threshold. In other words, since the beginning of the year it has accumulated a total gain of 247% so far, without collapsing thereafter.
This is a completely different dynamic from almost all other cryptocurrencies, perhaps due to an exaggerated collapse in 2022.
In fact, after reaching an all-time high of over $3.6 in November 2021, during 2022 the collapse was 94%, and it was probably an excessive collapse.
It is worth noting that there is a very similar percentage collapse to many other tokens, but STX is not just a token: it is Stacks’ native cryptocurrency, a Layer-1 blockchain solution designed to bring smart contracts and dApps to Bitcoin.
So it is very likely that it has been driven not only by Bitcoin’s price growth, which is up 74% since the beginning of the year, but also by the success of somewhat similar initiatives, such as Ordinals.
It is therefore a completely different project from the previous two, which follows a separate path. Markets clearly seem to be happy with this path for now.
