The market value of the Portuguese cryptocurrency Appcoins is around USD 27.7 million and there are around 245.4 million coins in circulation.
Each is traded at 11 cents, a 99.6% decrease from the record $4,287, a price he switched hands-on in the first wave of virtual currency euphoria, on January 10, 2018.
Headquartered in Lisbon, the company has developed and manages a virtual store of applications competing with Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store, with an expression in the Asian market.
Those who own Appcoins can use these currencies in payments within applications at Aptoide, or other partner stores of the project.
Token came to be considered one of the 50 most valuable cryptocurrencies in the world by the site Coinmarketcap, which tracks the market fluctuations of these crypto assets.
Currently, it is necessary to descend more than 600 positions in the table until you find the Appcoins, a result of the marked devaluation of this cryptocurrency over the last few years.
March 13, 2020, in the aftermath of the world stock market crash triggered by the pandemic, the value of the Appcoins hit rock bottom.
Those who sold at that time will have incurred significant losses, 99.6%, if they had purchased the coins for the $4,287 they quoted in 2018, or about 80% if they had purchased them at the ICO (Initial Coin Offering), held during the 2017 Web Summit in Lisbon.
In that initial offer, at a time when the price of bitcoin was skyrocketing to stratospheric values (albeit well below the record reached as early as 2021), the Appcoins were made available at a price of USD 10 cents, subject to a discount for the participants of the international fair.
The amount raised - which Álvaro Pinto, co-founder, tells ECO was US$17 million - was used to finance the development of the platform and protocol for the use of Appcoins in the mobile application ecosystem.
Álvaro Pinto estimates that there are about 170,000 people with Appcoins in the "wallet", accounting for another parallel "currency", the Appcoins Credits, which the company launched to circumvent some limitations of the blockchain.
As it issues new Appcoins Credits, the company responsible for the project has "burned" the original tokens and has withdrawn over 820,000 of circulation.
According to data from the official platform Appcexplorer, which centralizes a set of statistics on Appcoins, the use of cryptocurrency in in-app purchases has been steadily increasing since August.
In December, 169797,87 coins were traded in these purchases (the equivalent of nearly $18.7 million in transactions).
The divergence between the increase in the number of transactions and the drop in volume can be explained by another indicator: the number of applications that accept Appcoins as a means of payment jumped in the last months, growing from 420 to 694.