Bitcoin has hit record highs this year, boosted by the approval of a U.S. spot ETF and the election of Donald Trump — but some assets have performed even better.

Bitcoin has hit record highs this year, driven largely by the approval of a spot ETF in the U.S. and the subsequent election of Donald Trump as president — even as other assets have outperformed.

Decrypt conducted an analysis using data from CoinGecko and Nasdaq to determine the best performing cryptocurrencies. Eligible assets must have had a starting market cap of at least $500 million between January 1 and December 17.

Other digital asset-related investments, including those of some major companies, have also performed well. Here is a look at the best performing assets this year.

PEPE – This Year’s Winning Emoji Coin

One of the newer meme tokens to come to the forefront is PEPE, which launched last year and is based on Pepe the Frog, an internet cartoon character that was later labeled a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League due to its unusual adoption by far-right groups.

Pepe hit a new all-time high in December. The Ethereum-based token started the year with a market cap of $590.8 million and by December 17, it had a market cap of $9.4 billion, an increase of 1,492%.

Pepe made headlines — in typical meme style — for its absurd rise in value and for making a few traders rich. But unlike many of the oddball assets in the meme token space, Pepe has continued to rise and is now the 28th largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

Sui (SUI) — The King of Altcoins

Not long ago, the little-known Sui (SUI) came to prominence: launched in May 2023, the blockchain was developed by former Meta (ex-Facebook) engineers and now has an active DeFi community taking advantage of its fast network.

The native token of the fast blockchain Sui, SUI, has surged this year. In January, SUI had a market cap of $925 million. After a 1,193% gain, by December, its market cap was close to $12 billion. SUI is now the 18th largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

MicroStrategy (MSTR) – Winning Bitcoin Stock

Michael Saylor’s software company is going all-in on Bitcoin this year — its stock was trading at less than $70 a share at the start of the year.

By December, the stock had nearly quintupled to $386. That was a 464% gain, outperforming every other stock on the Nasdaq, including Nvidia.

MicroStrategy, once an obscure software company, began buying Bitcoin in 2020 and rebranded itself as "Bitcoin Treasury." This year, the Tysons, Virginia-based company accelerated its Bitcoin purchases, promising to provide speculators with the best Bitcoin investment opportunities.

Investors — including hedge funds seeking volatile returns — have piled into the stock.

Dogecoin

The original meme coin. Dogecoin (DOGE) started out as a joke meant to mock the proliferation of altcoins and has now become the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

This year, its market value has increased by 342% and now stands at $45.9 billion. The rise of Bitcoin has undoubtedly played a role.

This is mainly thanks to Tesla CEO Elon Musk: the world's richest man frequently posted about Dogecoin between 2020 and 2021, and he mentioned Dogecoin again this year amid speculation that the coin would be used on his social platform X (formerly Twitter).

XRP — the comeback kid

XRP has had a strong year. The token powers transactions on the Ripple network, which provides institutions with a blockchain solution for cross-border payments.

The token’s market cap has surged, and it is now the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, growing 286% from $34 billion to $131.2 billion. It briefly surpassed Tether as the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap this month, and was the sixth-largest cryptocurrency on January 1 of this year.

The coin has made headlines for its disputes with regulators. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a $1.3 billion lawsuit against Ripple in 2020, accusing the company of selling unregistered securities to investors to raise funds.

But last year, Ripple won a partial victory in a lawsuit with regulators when a judge ruled that programmatic sales of XRP to retail investors on cryptocurrency exchanges did not constitute securities.

Although the judge ruled that $728 million worth of tokens intended for institutional sales constituted unregistered securities sales, the ruling was interpreted as a victory by Ripple and the cryptocurrency industry as a whole.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT)

Given the title of this article, we can consider this an honorable mention. It’s been an incredible year for Bitcoin, and the world’s largest asset manager has contributed to it by launching an ETF that makes the largest and oldest cryptocurrency accessible to everyone.

The iShares Bitcoin Trust is a traditional investment vehicle that allows investors to buy and sell shares that track the price of Bitcoin. These shares are traded on the Nasdaq.

When it began trading in January, IBIT continued to break records with record trading volumes and inflows: By 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 top asset managers have launched bitcoin ETFs, but BlackRock's product has been the most successful.

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