Bitcoin has hit all-time highs this year, largely driven by the approval of a U.S. spot ETF and subsequent Trump election — although other assets have outperformed.

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

Other digital asset-related investments, including investments in some major companies, also performed well. Here's a look at this year's best-performing assets.

$PEPE — This year’s winning meme coin

$PEPE is one of the newer meme tokens that rose to the forefront of the market, launching last year. The token is based on Pepe the Frog, an online cartoon character later labeled a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League because of 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 capitalization of $590.8 million and by December 17, had a market capitalization of $9.4 billion, a growth of 1,492%.

Pepe made headlines — in typical meme fashion, for its ridiculous growth in value and for making a handful of traders rich. But unlike many of the weirder assets in the meme token industry, Pepe has continued to rise and is now the 28th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Sui ($SUI) – The King of Altcoins

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

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

MicroStrategy ($MSTR) – Bitcoin Stock to Win

Michael Saylor's software company has made a full bet on Bitcoin this year - its shares started the year at less than $70 a share.

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

MicroStrategy was once an obscure software company. Starting in 2020, the company began buying Bitcoin and rebranded itself as the “Bitcoin Treasury Corporation.” This year, the Tyson, Virginia-based company has accelerated its Bitcoin purchases, promising to provide speculators with the best Bitcoin investment opportunities.

Investors - including hedge funds looking for volatile returns - piled into the stock.

Dogecoin

The original meme coin. Dogecoin ($DOGE) started as a joke to mock the creation of a host of altcoins and has now become the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

This year, its market capitalization has grown 342% and now stands at $45.9 billion. Bitcoin’s rise has certainly played a role as well.

This is mainly due to Tesla CEO Elon Musk: The world’s richest man frequently released news about Dogecoin from 2020 to 2021. This year, he announced that the currency will be on his social platform X (formerly Twitter), he once again mentioned Dogecoin.

$XRP – The comeback kid

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

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

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 a judge ruled that the institutional sale of $728 million worth of tokens constituted an unregistered securities sale, the ruling was interpreted as a victory by Ripple and the entire cryptocurrency industry.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT)

Given the title of this article, we can consider it an honorable mention. It’s been an incredible year for Bitcoin, and the world’s largest asset manager has contributed to making the largest and oldest cryptocurrency available to everyone by launching 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 stocks trade on the Nasdaq.

When it began trading in January, IBIT continued to break records with record trading volumes and capital inflows: by December, it surpassed $50 billion in assets under management, reaching the 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.

  • This article is reproduced with permission from: (MarsBit)

  • Original article by Mat Di Salvo

"The most powerful coin in 2024!" Foreign media: These 4 currencies all outperform Bitcoin, and the micro-strategy has increased by nearly 500% year-on-year." This article was first published in "Crypto City"