Aptos Surged 500% Because Of A Weird Joke In South Korea
Korean investors have been using Aptos (APT) to make a meme out of housing affordability.
The important stuff:
South Koreans pumped Aptos (APT) as a joke about housing affordability.
It ain’t a rumour: trading volume of APT on South Korean crypto exchange UpBit was often higher than all volume on Binance.
The Aptos Foundation have marketed Aptos to Koreans from day one, and they know what they’re doing by tapping into the Korean degen market.
At the beginning of this year APT — the native token of the new Layer-One blockchain network Aptos — was changing hands for a mere 3 dollars.
However, over the course of the last two months, the APT token has gone on a face-melting rally that saw it reach a new all time high of $19.92 on January 26, bringing its overall market cap to a whopping $2.5 billion.
This rally came as a bit of a surprise to anyone who’s been following Aptos on its ‘tumultuous’ journey since its launch on October 12, 2022.
When the Aptos mainnet first went live, Crypto Twitter was consumed by hatred for the cryptocurrency, with many agreeing that the new blockchain — which marketed itself as an “ethereum-killer” — was nothing more than yet another hyper-centralised venture capital-backed ‘scam’ token.
So, what’s the reason for APT’s recent sentiment change?
Did every crypto investor wake up on New Year’s day decide that Aptos is actually a viable alternative to Ethereum or Solana?
Not really…
The real reason behind APT’s up-only action on the charts is that a bunch of degenerates from South Korea actually kind of turned Aptos (APT) into a pump-worthy memecoin…
Why the Korea pump?
According Alex Shin, the cofounder of crypto venture capital firm Hashed, South Korean crypto investors have taken Aptos’ three-letter ticker ‘APT’ and turned it into a meme that plays on how absurdly expensive it is to purchase an ‘apartment’ in South Korea.
Much like the many other countries, housing affordability in major South Korean cities like Seoul pose serious concerns to many young people looking to buy a home, with some Koreans sharing stories of how housing prices have tripled since 2017.
So, instead of owning an apartment for real, they could own the next best thing, a digital “ApArRTm3nt” in the form of APT.
While many remain sceptical that a crew of Korean’s taking the piss out of owning an apartment could be the real reason behind the meteoric surge of Aptos in recent months, there’s actually a lot of hard data that lends a good deal of credibility to this thesis.
South Koreans are already well known in crypto circles for their ability to “pump” meme coins. As blockchain analyst Colin Wu says:
“Pumping up altcoins is one of the traditions in the Korean community.”
And it’s not just rumours of the Korean appetite for memecoin-pumping degeneracy that drove markets — South Koreans were genuinely buying APT at size.
According to data from South Korea’s largest crypto exchange Upbit, the 24-hour trading volume of APT to South Korean Won (KRW) on January 28 (the day APT reached its all-time-high) exceeded the sum of all the daily trading volume on Binance, with the total daily trading of APT on Upbit reaching a staggering US$566 million.
In January, volumes across trades for APT/KRW accounted for 12% of all trading activity which suggests that retail buyers in Korea drove much of the action that saw the price of Aptos surge throughout January and February.
Why is Aptos so popular in Korea?
Aptos seems to understand that Korean crypto investors are some of the most convicted, with the Aptos Foundation releasing a white paper written in Korean, one of the only cryptocurrency foundations to do so.
Not only this, but Aptos is backed by a number of South Korean venture capital firms, including Hashed, Hive and YG. Just two days ago, the foundation chose to launch a global hackathon in Seoul. You can probably see why APT is a Korean favourite.
As a result of Aptos’ Korea-first policy, a number of South Korean investors were also the first to recipients of a substantial airdrop that was issued to early Aptos users in late-October last year when the token was changing hands for just US$7.
Aptos Foundation Users who completed a specific application or minted a ‘testnet’ NFT were eligible to claim Aptos tokens, and according to Aptos’s existing community data a total of US$20 million worth of APT was airdropped to a total of 110,235 participants, many of whom were South Korean nationals.
Is there still money to be made in Aptos?
While a bunch of degenerates are desperately rushing to catch the remnants of the Aptos wave, it seems like the bulk of the interest has dried up for the time being.
Unless you’re hungry for relatively small gains with huge downside risk, I’d probably take the advice of crypto trader Hsaka and call it quits until there’s some more substantial pullback.
