The crypto market experienced significant price constrictions during this year’s second quarter. Crypto trader CryptoKoryo reported that only three of the top 50 tokens by market capitalization recorded a positive price performance during this period.
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The report highlights that Solana performed the worst among the top five assets, losing about 31% of its value. Bitcoin followed, dropping by 12%. Despite potential ETF developments, Ethereum fell by around 6%. Meanwhile, Binance-backed BNB coin fared the best, with only a modest 4% loss.
Toncoin takes the crown
Toncoin (TON) from The Open Network led the price performance among the top 50 tokens by market capitalization for the second quarter. According to the report, TON’s value surged over 40% in the last 90 days, elevating it to the eighth position among top cryptocurrencies by market cap.
During the period, daily activity on the network surged to new highs, with its daily active address briefly flipping that of Ethereum at some point in the last quarter. Analysts have attributed TON’s meteoric rise to its association with the social messaging application Telegram, whose integration has opened the door to crypto for millions of mainstream users.
Prithvir, the founder of Loch, said:
“[Telegram mini apps] is why people are most bullish on TON…This has lead to lots of users being onboarded to blockchain rails via click based casual games that allow users to farm tokens without the hassle of creating a wallet with a seed phrase.”
TON was followed by layer-1 proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain Kaspa, whose native KAS token saw gains of around 41% during the period. Market observers linked KAS’s gain to Marathon Digital, the largest Bitcoin mining company, which decided to start mining the PoW blockchain’s token as part of its revenue diversification efforts. Meanwhile, the top three gainers list is completed with PEPE memecoin, which recorded a 35% increase during the reporting period.
L1 and L2 tokens plunge
The poor performance of most cryptocurrencies in Q2 2024 spanned various asset categories. Both Layer-1 (L1) and Layer-2 (L2) tokens, as well as memecoins, faced significant declines, underscoring the volatility of the crypto market.
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Among the worst-hit were Ethereum L2 projects like Polygon (MATIC), Arbitrum (ARB), Optimism (OP), and StarkNet (STRK), whose native tokens declined by more than 40%, respectively. Interestingly, even the Bitcoin L2 network Stacks saw its STX token plunge by 53% during the reporting period. However, despite the overall downturn, these networks scored significant on-chain network growth, suggesting their adoption was rising.
Similarly, the layer-1 tokens of the Sui Network (SUI), Aptos (APT), Internet Protocol (ICP), Avalanche (AVAX), Polkadot (DOT), and Cosmos (ATOM) all saw significant price drops of over 50% each.
However, CryptoKoryo noted that this steep decline was not restricted to only major crypto projects. The trader stated that an analysis of the top 5000 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization revealed that those with a positive second quarter were exceedingly rare.