In May 2023, the market’s bullishness and positivity were doubted, making it the first month of the year to face such concerns. The total market cap experienced a decline of almost 6%. However, despite substantial bearish pressure, the market managed to confidently navigate through the month. Read on to explore the month’s market summary!
Crypto Market Has Started to Cool Down
May was fairly quiet, with no surges of negativity or positivity. There was also a slight drop in trading volumes, which also indicates a calm sentiment. The popular expression “Sell in May and go away” seems to hint that the summer could become very low-volatile. May 2023 looks particularly still compared to the previous year, when a series of negative events was just beginning.
Overall, the market showed a negative sentiment for the period. The majority of projects showed a decline, and only TRON, XRP, Litecoin, Ethereum and a few others (among top-100) showed some growth.
Bitcoin had its weakest month since the beginning of the year, and it basically was the first month of 2023 with negative returns (unless you count February, when bitcoin was down just 0.01%).
During the beginning of May, memecoins experienced a robust surge, reaching a record-breaking weekly trading volume of US$2.7 billion. However, trading volume has subsequently diminished, indicating a return to more typical trends. Regrettably, many memecoins closed the month with negative price performances.
Surprisingly Not Dead: Token Sales Market
Despite the general market cool-off, the market for token sales continues its recovery. Activity in public sales continues to grow, and some of the major launchpads have resumed activity after a long break.
The total raised amount and the number of sales slightly increased in May compared to April. However, the positive momentum has been maintained since February and the contrast between 2023 and the previous year is very noticeable.
Also this month there were no projects showing huge ROI after TGE, most of them posted moderate performance. The reason for this is that no major trend has emerged this month (except for memecoins, which are not the subject of the launchpads).
DAO Maker stood out when it came to fundraising, surpassing even Coinlist (with two ICOs and larger raises). This launchpad quickly took advantage of the bullrun’s opportunities and started launching projects one after another.
If the current trend persists, we can anticipate a continued revival of the public token sales market. This market presents an excellent opportunity for projects to enter and serves as a profitable source for investors. However, previous months have shown that only hype, such as Artificial Intelligence, can revive launchpads and show truly high returns. Without global growth, the token sales market is still a long way from its 2021 state.
Decentralization Matters
So far, 2023 has been a very positive year for DeFi. In many ways, it echoes the transition from centralized institutions to decentralized ones triggered by the collapse of FTX. Despite the market downturn, May is just continuing to move towards the right path.
Most blockchains showed a decline of TVL in May, with only a few networks showed a meaningful growth. It is worth noting that Polygon zkEVM and other new layer 2 blockchains (notably zkSync and Starknet) continue to show TVL growth despite the market downturn.
However, the optimism becomes evident when examining the specific details. First and foremost is the increase in trading volumes on decentralized exchanges. Undoubtedly, a share of this growth is related to the rise of memcoins at the beginning of the month. However, the trend looks much stronger than just an one-time bounce.
Decentralized exchanges strengthen their positions amid the decline of trading volumes on the centralized exchanges. As a result of these changes, the ratio of DEX to CEX volumes on the spot market rose to a new high of almost 22%.
DEX remains one of the key indicators of decentralization. However, despite their high importance, since the Ethereum Merge, the Liquid Staking projects have also pulled ahead strongly in terms of TVL and even outpaced the total TVL of DEXs.
Market recovery has led to increased use of DeFi protocols. DeFi (DEX in particular) is one of the key elements of the crypto market after blockchain infrastructure projects, thus its strong position is not surprising. One of the most important things to improve for most decentralized projects is the user experience.
BRC 20 – New Trend on NFT Market
May brought a new trend to the NFT market, which has been in a long decline over the past few months. It is still too early to talk about global growth of NFTs, as we can only see it in terms of trading volumes (as was the case with the Blur airdrop in February and March).
Bitcoin Ordinals became the new NFT market trend at the beginning of the year. But at the time, it was only a tiny fraction compared to the NFT market on Ethereum. However, with the launch of the new BRC-20 standard, NFT on Bitcoin became even more popular.
The BRC-20 token standard is a fungible token standard designed for the Bitcoin blockchain, created using the Ordinals protocol.
The popularity of BRC-20 tokens and their trading volumes boosted Bitcoin’s NFT trading volumes, which even overtook Solana (Ethereum’s main competitor in the past) and all other blockchains at the end of May. However, volumes on Ethereum are still a long way off.
The Bottom Line
To summarize, May could be described as the first test of the 2023 bull run. However, despite these challenges, the crypto market did well this month, learning valuable lessons and becoming even stronger.
Launchpads continue to delight investors with new projects, and projects are starting to raise large sums again, after a lull of more than a year. Token sales are still proving to be a workable scheme for earning money, as well as a booster for start-up projects.
Decentralized exchanges continue to capture its market share, which is still small, but growth is very visible. So, the DeFi ecosystem is getting even stronger.
Who would have expected Bitcoin, rather than Polygon or Arbitrum, to be the impetus for NFT trading volumes… The new BRC-20 standard has inspired many traders to get back to business and shown new possible ways to develop and apply NFT.
Despite local difficulties, the market continues to evolve. New users arriving early in the year on the mini-bullpen and from behind the airdrop are investigating new activity and thereby driving the development of blockchain technology and the crypto market.
