Comprehensive Summary of CoinMarketCap H1 2023 Report

According to the Q2 market analysis and CoinMarketCap‘s H1 2023 research, DeFi, Memes, and AI top the crypto trends.

Comprehensive Summary of CoinMarketCap H1 2023 Report

According to a Q2 analysis by CoinMarketCap (CMC), the cryptocurrency market experienced major advancements and trends in the first half of 2023. The worldwide crypto market valuation rose 48% year to date to $1.17 trillion, while Q2 saw little progress compared to Q1.

The market cap of certain industries, including as DeFi, Memes, and AI, has grown significantly year to date, while blue-chip DeFi projects and infrastructure are making a strong comeback. The research from CMC also lists the top industries, cryptocurrencies, and significant themes for the second half of 2023, such as liquid staking derivatives and decentralized public infrastructure networks.

Overview of the Cryptocurrency Market for Q2: Slower Growth and Uncertain Trends

While the Total Spot Trade Volume of the Top 20 Crypto Exchanges peaked in March and decreased by almost 36% quarter-over-quarter, the CMC Crypto Fear and Greed Index improved from Fear to Neutral. While blue-chip DeFi projects and infrastructure are making a strong comeback, VR/AR, AI, and Big Data have demonstrated an impressive increase in market cap year so far. The Memes sector is the most active in terms of new listings, having added over 260 new currencies so far this year.

What Are the Most Viewed Sectors and Popular Coins?

Data from CoinMarketCap shows that numerous sectors had a rise in interest in the cryptocurrency market during the first half of 2023. Particularly in the final three months of H1 2023, the Memes sector attracted the most attention. The furious rally of over 3700X that PEPE put on from April to May largely contributed to this. The most widely used segment of this continued to include other meme coins from previous meme cycles, including DOGE, SHIB, and BabyDoge.

Following the network’s successful Shapella upgrade on April 12, which allowed staked ETH on the beacon chain to be withdrawn, Ethereum became the main topic of discussion in the Smart Contracts industry. Due to technical advancements like the scaling solution Hydra and the governance proposal CIP 1694, Cardano (ADA) also attracted a lot of interest.

The Terra Classic (LUNC) token had the greatest concentration of the DeFi market, probably as a result of events like Binance burning 2.65 billion LUNC tokens, valued at $236K, and TFL’s introduction of Alliance, a cross-chain yield trading protocol. In the first three months, the Collectibles & NFTs sector attracted a lot of attention, largely because of the Blur Season 1 airdrop, but interest waned in the second half of H1.

Following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, AI & Big Data entered the list of the most popular industries in 2023. The two firms with the most views were SingularityNET (AGIX) and Fetch.ai (FET), which had recovered roughly 40% from their mid-June lows.

The Most Active Communities

Memes have the highest views and are the section of the CMC Community that is most active. Coins like PEPE, SNEK, and LADYS experienced tremendous pumps in April and May during the meme coin season. Tokens from the Arbitrum, Radiant Capital, and Optimism ecosystems, as well as layer-one blockchains like Dione Protocol, Conflux, and Injective, are among the top gainers for H1 2023. AI-related tokens like SingularityNET and Render are among the top gainers.

H2 2023’s Major Topics

There are eight different salient topics for H2 2023.

Bitcoin ETF

BlackRock filed for a Bitcoin spot ETF in June 2023, while other companies like Valkyrie, Fidelity, ARK Invest, and 21 Shares have applied for similar Bitcoin ETF approvals. By providing regulated solutions for asset allocation, these ETFs may increase institutional investor demand for Bitcoin.

Networks with a Decentralized Public Infrastructure

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) offers approaches for sharing physical resources or services, such as data networks and warehouses. Helium, IoTeX, Arweave, and Filecoin are notable participants.

Real World Assets (RWA)

There is a thriving ecosystem of initiatives aimed at enabling on-chain trading of RWAs. These initiatives include the tokenization of RWAs, such as real estate, collectibles, stock, intellectual property, and more, which can be exchanged on-chain more easily, as well as credit market protocols like Maple Finance and Goldfinch that enable firms can use DeFi to acquire funding.

Liquid Staking Derivatives

Due to the Ethereum Shapella upgrade, Lido and Rocket Pool, two market leaders, observed a spike in activity for Liquid Staking Derivatives (LSDs), with their respective total value locked (TVL) increasing by 138% and 220%, respectively. Through the rest of 2023, platforms like Pendle, Lybra, and Flashstake are projected to continue to proliferate in the linked LSDfi landscape.

Restaking

There is substantial demand for restaking services, as evidenced by EigenLayer’s Restaking Smart Contracts, which were implemented in June 2023 and surpassed their upper limits one day after mainnet activation. The platform is going to boost its capacity for LST restaking, which will let in a whole new influx of projects.

ZkSync

The Ethereum optimistic rollups Optimism and Arbitrum faced competition from zkSync, a well-liked layer-2 Ethereum solution. ZkSync is positioned to be a major player in 2023 with a potential zkSync airdrop and a number of projects that are expected to launch on the platform.

Modular Blockchains (Celestia)

Execution, settlement, consensus, and data availability are the four layers that are divided into three by modular blockchains like Celestia. Modular execution environments and settlement layers are offered by other platforms, such as Rollkit (for settlement) and Fuel (for execution).

FTX Bankruptcy Developments

Following its failure in 2017, FTX depositors were placed in limbo for months. It was disclosed in January that more than $5 billion had been bolstered in liquid assets from various sources, and that amount would rise to more than $7.3 billion by April 2023. A “Customer Bar Date” of September 29, 2023, was recently provided to creditors by the restructuring company handling the matter.