Crypto Markets Start Year on Positive Note After Horrendous 2022

The crypto market kicked off a new year of trading in a positive mood.

The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) is up 1.3% so far in 2023, with all six sector indices in the green. That’s a reversal from the fourth quarter of last year, when the benchmark index slid 12% from September through Dec. 15.

“The entire market is generally stabilizing, accompanied by apathetic market participation,” Arcane Research, which provides analysis of digital asset trends, wrote in a newsletter on Tuesday.

Lido DAO (LDO), the governance token of the Lido decentralized autonomous organization, grabbed the trophy as the top performer so far in 2023 in CMI.

The LDO token’s price has risen from 95 cents at the end of 2022 to $1.20 on the third day of the new year, surging 26% so far in 2023, according to data from CoinGecko. The rally follows Ethereum developers' Dec. 8 announcement that the network's next hard fork that will take place in March.

LDO is one of 142 assets out of 163 assets in the CoinDesk Market Index that are trading higher so far in 2023, with 25 assets trading more than 5% above their closing levels on the last day of 2022.

Runner-up JasmyCoin (JASMY), the token of a platform that develops internet of things (IoT) flipped the downward momentum from the 4th quarter of 2022 and gained 20% in the new year so far. Maple Finance’s native MPL token has also seen a roughly 15% increase.

Solana's SOL has surged roughly 12% in 2023 so far and about 20% in the past 24 hours as a decision by newly launched shiba inu-themed token Bonk to do a large airdrop generated interest in the Solana community.

Bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) have also held strong so far this year despite being down 0.4% and 0.8% in the past 24 hours.

Bitcoin has hovered between $16,000 and $17,000 for 19 consecutive days, after a horrendous 2022 during which the largest cryptocurrency lost 64%.

Looking at sector performance, CoinDesk Market Index sector indices are in the green across the board during the first few days of the year, led by the Culture and Entertainment sector, up 5% through Tuesday. The DeFi sector is up nearly 4%.

Big losers in the new year include Aragon (ANT) and Civic (CVC), both down 6% in 2023.

Adam Farthing, chief risk officer for Japan at crypto market maker B2C2, predicted that more crypto investors will look for “real-time, real-world applicability, as opposed to betting on the hope of some future potential use-cases.”

“One would expect the winners of 2023 to be those tokens which can demonstrate immediate cash-generative use cases in the real world, which do not depend on future crypto market growth and uptrends,” Farthing wrote in a Tuesday note.