By James Davis
According to CoinGecko, no crypto has had more increase in value over the past seven days than Aptos. Priced at $3.17 on January 1, the Aptos chain’s native token, APT, is currently trading at $18.71, representing a 350% increase. The token has recorded a 47% jump in the past 24 hours.
UpBit Accounts for Over 50% of APT Trading Volume
It is tricky to pinpoint the exact reason behind the rally. However, Data on CoinGecko indicates that over 50% of the APT token’s $2 billion trading volume in the past 24 hours is a result of the South Korean won trading pair on UpBit, a Singapore-based crypto exchange.
As of this writing, APT is trading at $18.90 on UpBit, and that’s $0.21 more than it is priced at on leading exchange Binance. Also, that means most of the trades involving APT are arbitrage trades. In simpler terms, arbitrage traders take advantage of price discrepancies of a certain token between various exchanges.
Most South Korean-based exchanges tend to list cryptos at inflated prices compared to their global counterparts. That difference has been labeled as ‘Kimchi premium’. The South-Korean prosecutor’s office recently launched investigations into unlawful payments made to arbitrage traders, amounting to $2 billion.
Binance Accounts for 10% of APT Trading Volume in the Past Day
About 10% of APT trading volume in the past 24 hours has come from the APT/BUSD trading pair on Binance. In addition, the top exchange recently launched two APT liquidity pools accounting for another 19% of the total APT’s volume.
Last Friday, Binance introduced its APT/Bitcoin and APT/Tether liquidity pools. Moreover, the exchange announced that it would reward users who deposit their funds into the pools with its native token, BNB. Binance promised yields of 92.4% and 99.5% on APT/USDT and APT/BTC, respectively.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that Aptos is the only DeFi ecosystem among the top 20 DeFi projects that has grown massively in the past month. According to DeFi Llama, the DeFi volume on Aptos in January sits at $52 million compared to $14 million last December.
Aptos’ Value Rises Despite Last October’s Backlash
Evidently, Aptos has outperformed many tokens in the past 30 days. However, it didn’t start smoothly when its mainnet went live last October. Many criticized the project for promising high speeds of up to 145,000 transactions per second but only to deliver speeds of just four transactions per second at its launch.