Bitcoin hit an all-time high this year, mainly due to the approval of spot ETFs in the United States and later after the election of Donald Trump, although other assets outperformed.
Decrypt analysis carried out using data from CoinGecko and Nasdaq to identify the best performing coins. To be eligible, assets had to have an initial market capitalization of at least $500 million, observed from January 1 to December 17.
Other investments related to digital assets, notably those from large companies, have also performed quite well. Here’s a look at this year’s best-performing assets.
Pepe, this year’s winning meme coin
One of the newest meme tokens at the top of the market, Pepe (PEPE), launched last year. The token is based on Pepe the Frog, an internet cartoon later labeled a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League after far-right groups strangely adopted it.
Pepe reached a new all-time high in December. The Ethereum-based token started the year with a market capitalization of $590.8 million, but reached $9.4 billion on December 17, an increase of 1,492%.
Pepe made headlines for, in typical meme style, his absurd increase in value and how much it enriched a small number of traders. But unlike many assets in the bizarre meme token space, Pepe has continued to grow and it is now the 28th largest coin by market cap.
Sui (SUI), king of altcoin
Not so long ago, the little-known Sui (SUI) entered the scene: launched in May 2023, the blockchain was developed by former engineers from Meta (formerly Facebook) and now has a DeFi community lively using its fast network.
Rapid blockchain’s native SUI token Sui has exploded this year. In January, its market capitalization stood at $925 million. A 1,193% increase means that by December it had reached almost $12 billion. SUI is now the 18th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
MicroStrategy (MSTR): Winning Bitcoin Stocks
Michael Saylor’s software company has been betting on Bitcoin this year – and the company’s stock shows it was trading at less than $70 a share at the start of the year.
By December, it had almost quintupled, reaching $386. That’s a 464% increase and better than everything else on Nasdaq, including Nvidia.
MicroStrategy was once a low-key software company. It then started buying Bitcoin in 2020 and rebranded itself as a “Bitcoin cash company”. This year, the Tyson, Virginia-based entity accelerated its orange coin purchases, promising speculators the best deal for Bitcoin exposure.
Investors, including hedge funds seeking volatile returns, rushed into the stock.
Dogecoin
The OG meme piece. Created as a joke to mock the silly amount of altcoins being created, Dogecoin (DOGE) is now the seventh largest crypto by market capitalization.
Its market capitalization has jumped 342% this year and now stands at $45.9 billion. The rise of Bitcoin has certainly helped.
It was mainly thanks to Tesla CEO Elon Musk that the world’s richest man frequently posted about the asset in 2020-2021, and did so again this year amid speculation that the piece would be used on its X platform (formerly Twitter).
XRP, the kid back
XRP has had a good year. The token facilitates transactions on the Ripple network, which provides institutions with a blockchain solution for cross-border payments.
The token’s market capitalization has grown so much that it is now the fourth largest cryptocurrency, increasing 286% from $34 billion to $131.2 billion. It was briefly the third largest this month, surpassing Tether; and on January 1 of this year he was sixth.
The play made headlines due to its connections with authorities. The SEC filed a $1.3 billion lawsuit against Ripple in 2020, alleging that the company sold unregistered securities to investors to raise funds.
But last year, the company won a partial victory against the regulator when a judge ruled that programmatic sales of XRP on crypto exchanges to retail investors were not considered securities.
The decision was interpreted as a victory by Ripple – and the crypto industry as a whole – despite the judge’s ruling that $728 million in tokens intended for institutional sales constituted unregistered securities sales.
BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT)
Let’s call this one an honorable mention, given the title of this article. It’s been an incredible year for Bitcoin, and the world’s largest asset manager has played a role in making the largest and oldest cryptocurrency available to everyone via an ETF.
The iShares Bitcoin Trust is a traditional investment vehicle that allows investors to buy and sell stocks that track the price of Bitcoin. The shares are traded on Nasdaq.
When it began trading in January, IBIT broke record after record in terms of trading volume and inflows: as of December, it had more than $50 billion in assets under management, reaching that milestone in just 228 days, faster than any other ETF in history.
Several other large asset managers also trade Bitcoin ETFs, but BlackRock’s product has been the most successful.
Edited by Sébastien Sinclair
Daily debriefing Newsletter
Start each day with the biggest news stories of the day, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
