Who Won Crypto in 2023? The CoinDesk Market Index Broken Down in 6 Charts

Tokens from Injective, a layer-1 blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem, and Render, a GPU rendering network that migrated this year to Solana from Ethereum, dominated the year's return rankings among the CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) benchmark index of 184 digital assets.

Can you say 32x? That was the return for Injective Protocol's INJ token (INJ). Injective is a blockchain built for finance, using Cosmos blockchain technology, that claims to be the fastest among layer 1s. In August we reported on its “2.0” tokenomics upgrade to “dramatically increase the amount of INJ burned weekly,” citing a blog post at the time.

RenderToken (RNDR) from Render, a GPU rendering network that migrated this year to Solana from Ethereum, surged 972%. (RenderToken, for what it's worth, was the top performer in the top-performing Computing sector.) Solana's SOL zoomed 833%.

In notoriously volatile digital-asset markets, there is exactly zero guarantee that any of these gains are deserved or enduring. What is safe to say is that digital-asset markets in 2023 saw the reappearance of the type of mind-blowing returns – and high risk – that historically have attracted a lot of traders to crypto.