It has been a terrible year for the digital asset industry. An already bitter crypto winter was further intensified by the Terra and FTX meltdowns, which caused prices to nosedive tremendously over the last few months.
The world's largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is down 65 percent YTD. BTC's closest competitor, Ether, has also lost 68 percent of its valuation since the start of the year. And it is a similar story for many of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, with most coins in the red YTD.
However, a handful of tokens have managed to buck the trend and register massive gains during the same period. Tag along as we tell you more about these tokens and explain how they have managed to stay well above water while most other projects have sunk to scary lows.
Trust Wallet Token (TWT)
TWT is the native cryptocurrency of Trust Wallet, Binance's non-custodial, mobile-based crypto and NFT storage solution. Holders of TWT receive voting rights on major decisions concerning the Trust Wallet app and in-app discounts when buying cryptocurrencies.
In terms of YTD performance, TWT is currently leading the top 100 coins by market cap. At the time of writing, TWT was trading at $2.05, up nearly 180 percent from its January 1 valuation of $0.71. But what's fuelling this massive spike? Let's find out.
The biggest reason for TWT's recent spike is the collapse of FTX. The mega black swan event once again proved that custodial wallets could be a death trap for customer funds if the issuing platform begins to falter.
Blocking withdrawals is the first thing a platform does when it is faced with a liquidity crisis. As a result, users no longer have access to their crypto holdings. This is why #NotYourKeysNotYourCrypto has been doing the rounds on Twitter.
Therefore, in the aftermath of the FTX crash, users began withdrawing their funds from custodial wallets en masse and depositing them in non-custodial wallets. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao piggy-banked on this herd mentality. He directed crypto investors to Binance's non-custodial storage solution, Trust Wallet.
"TrustWallet, your keys, your coins," CZ tweeted on November 13, causing a massive influx of users on the crypto and NFT self-storage app. This resulted in an enormous uptrend for TWT, with the token hitting an all-time high of $2.71 on November 14.
BinaryX (BNX)
Another token that has done exceptionally well this year is BinaryX. BNX is currently trading at $145.04, up more than 131 percent from its January 1 valuation of $63.81. But what is BNX, and why has it shot for the moon this year? Let's find out.
BNX is the native cryptocurrency of the BinaryX ecosystem, which originally operated as a decentralised derivative trading platform. However, after noticing the boom of metaverse gaming, project developers decided to fully transition to the GameFi industry.
Since then, the platform has introduced several GameFi projects. Some of these projects include CyberDragon, CyberArena and CyberChess. The platform is also planning to introduce an IGO launchpad that will help speed up the development of third-party games.
BNX is used as a form of payment across the platform's games. It also provides holders with voting rights on governance proposals affecting the network. Moreover, as per the project's whitepaper, token holders will also be able to use BNX tokens to participate in IGOs and receive NFT airdrops of new games.
BNX began its rally on April 1 this year, when Binance announced it would enable futures trading in the BNX token. Following the announcement, the token more than doubled in valuation in little over a week, rising from $54.63 on March 31 to $118.78 by April 9.
The token saw another significant spike in September after the platform launched its new game, CyberChess. BNX jumped from $148.83 on September 22 to $160.82 on September 24 following the announcement. Finally, a few days ago, the token hit its highest point for the year, touching $172.62. This is after the platform confirmed its upcoming online multiplayer game, CyberLand, on November 25.
GMX (GMX)
The third and final coin on our list is GMX. It is the native cryptocurrency of a decentralised spot and perpetual exchange that goes by the same name. The main USP of GMX is that it offers extremely low swap fees and zero price impact trades. Another unique feature of this platform is that it allows users to trade BTC, ETH and other popular digital assets directly from their crypto wallets. To do this, GMX uses smart contracts rather than taking custody of a user’s assets. This is a major reason for the exchange's surge in popularity after the FTX meltdown.
GMX has been on a gradual upward trend since July this year. Its total value locked has grown from $225 million at the start of July to $435 million at the time of writing. This has helped the token defy this year's crypto rout and register an 86 percent increase YTD.
GMX also spiked nearly 17 percent after its FTX and Binance listing on October 4 this year. The latter even executed a two-week promotion to support the token. This caused GMX to spike from $37.21 on October 3 to $54.28 on October 5.
More recently, the downfall of FTX has caused a surge in the trading volume on GMX. In the week following the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried's empire, GMX registered a new daily high of $1.17 billion, per Dune data. The number of daily users also spiked, touching levels not seen since June this year. The jump makes sense considering that FTX US had popular derivative offerings, and GMX provides a viable substitute with up to 30x leveraged futures trading.
Around the same time, revenues also spiked for GMX. As Crypto Fees data, the GMX protocol managed more than $1 million in daily revenue the week after the FTX collapse, making it the third most profitable crypto project at the time, behind Ethereum and Uniswap. All these factors have reflected well on GMX’s price valuation.
