Market Stagnation

Chart of the Day

We are already 2 weeks into the new year, and, so far, the crypto market's movements have been much less exciting than anticipated. BTC is still hovering near the $43k level with no clear direction on its next move, whilst ETH has also remained rangebound at the $3,200 level. Although BTC has recovered decently well from its sluggish start to the year, it is still more than 30% down from its all-time high price that was attained just 2 months ago. It is not just BTC's price that is down, its realized volatility has also been plunging amid low trading volumes and waning demand across the various spot and derivatives markets. Concomitantly, BTC's implied volatility has recently been pushed to a one-year low. This decline in implied volatility is also partly due to the surge in TVL in many of the top L1 protocols as well as the emergence of a multitude of other strong altcoin performers, as said factors served to provide market participants with other non-BTC options to pour their money into, thereby compressing the yields within the BTC options market. Speaking of strong altcoin performers, a few of the smart contract protocol tokens that have been consistently outperforming the larger crypto market since the start of this year have still been posting significant gains even through this market stagnation. These include tokens like FTM and ATOM, and constitute high potential projects that we should definitely keep our eyes on for the rest of 2022. 

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