Mobile Crypto Apps Are Climbing the Charts as Bitcoin Blasts Off

Mobile cryptocurrency apps have jumped towards the top of App Store rankings amid a surge for Bitcoin and other crypto prices, resulting in a major increase in the overall market cap for all coins—surpassing $3 trillion earlier this week.

Coinbase leads the charge, jumping from #26 on Election Day to #1 on Friday in the Free Finance category of Apple’s App Store for iOS devices. The ranking boost aligns with significant spikes in trading volume on the exchange, which surpassed more than $12 billion on Nov. 12, marking the highest volume day recorded this year according to data from CoinGecko.

Other major crypto apps like Robinhood and Crypto.com followed in Coinbase’s footsteps, making leaps inside the top 10 in the same category.

Historically, rising crypto prices correlate with an increased popularity of major exchanges and their respective apps, which are more accessible to mainstream retail buyers than decentralized platforms targeted towards crypto experts.

But this time, it’s not just the top crypto brands making their presence known in the App Store rankings. Moonshot, a mobile meme coin trading platform, has jumped 388 spots—from outside the top 400 apps—to #84 in the Free Finance category during the same timeframe.

Launched in July, Moonshot has amassed more than 90,000 downloads across the iOS App Store and Google’s Android Play Store based on data from SensorTower.

Aimed at onboarding retail participants—or those with less crypto knowledge—Moonshot allows users to bypass the complications of wallet seed phrases and decentralized exchanges to invest in meme coins, or highly volatile tokens based on internet memes, celebrities, and more.

Instead, Moonshot allows users to deposit with popular payment methods like Venmo or debit card, granting them nearly instant access to meme coins otherwise not available on centralized exchanges like Coinbase.

The rise up the rankings corresponds to company reported record breaking fiat deposits on Moonshot, and a new daily high revenue of more than $130,000 on Nov. 12 according to data from DefiLlama.

“Boomers are rotating. Coming for #1,” Moonshot commented on Twitter (aka X) as the app overtook TradFi investing app E-Trade.

However, competition is fierce—and more is coming. Established platforms like Photon and BullX offer more sophisticated traders access to a greater breadth of meme coins and earlier entry points directly on-chain. Meanwhile, the team behind Tensor—the Solana-based NFT marketplace—is gearing up to release its social trading platform Vector.fun.

That said, the success of Coinbase and other crypto apps in App Store rankings is sometimes viewed as a “top signal” in crypto circles, in other words—a signal that the cycle and prices may be reaching their local highs, with a correction imminent.

But maybe this time is different? DeGods NFT project founder and crypto personality Rohun Vora (aka Frank DeGods), tweeted, “Top isn’t in when Coinbase is #1 on [the] App Store, it’ll be when Phantom is.”

Phantom, the popular multi-chain crypto wallet, was ranked #6 in Apple’s Utilities category as of late Friday.

Edited by Andrew Hayward