2024 Highlights: Which Cryptocurrencies Beat BTC's Growth?

Original Title: Bigger Gains Than Bitcoin: Top-Performing Crypto Assets of 2024

Original Author: Mat Di Salvo

Original Source:

Compiled by Daisy, Mars Finance

Bitcoin hit a record high this year, boosted by the approval of the US spot ETF and Trump’s election - but the performance of some assets is even better.

Bitcoin hit a record high this year, mainly due to the approval of the US spot ETF and the subsequent push by the election of Donald Trump as president - although other assets outperformed.

Decrypt uses data from CoinGecko and Nasdaq to analyze and determine the best performing cryptocurrencies. Eligible assets must have a minimum market value of $5 billion between January 1 and December 17.

Other digital asset investments, including investments from major companies, have also performed well. Here is a list of this year’s top-performing assets.

PEPE- The winning meme coin of this year

PEPE is one of the newer meme token in the market, launched last year. The token is based on Pepe the Frog, an internet cartoon character that was later designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League due to its adoption by far-right groups.

Pepe hit a new all-time high in December. The market value of the Ethereum-based token was $590.8 million at the beginning of the year, and by December 17th, it had reached $9.4 billion, an increase of 1,492%.

Pepe became headline news - with its typical meme style, it has attracted attention due to the absurd increase in its value and the fortunes made by a few traders. But unlike many strange assets in the meme token space, Pepe has continued to rise and is now the 28th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Sui (SUI) - King of altcoins

Not long ago, the relatively unknown Sui (SUI) emerged: the blockchain was launched in May 2023, developed by former Meta (formerly Facebook) engineers, and now has an active DeFi community that leverages its fast network.

The native token SUI of the fast blockchain Sui has surged significantly this year. In January, SUI’s market value was $9.25 billion. After a 1,193% increase, by December, its market value approached $12 billion. SUI is now the 18th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

MicroStrategy (MSTR) - Winning Bitcoin stocks

Michael Saylor’s software company has fully bet on Bitcoin this year - the company’s stock shows that the stock price was less than $70 at the beginning of the year.

By December, the stock price had nearly quintupled to $386, a 464% increase, outperforming all other stocks on the Nasdaq including Nvidia.

MicroStrategy was once an unknown software company. Since 2020, the company has started to purchase Bitcoin and rebranded itself as the “Bitcoin Treasury Company”. This year, the Tysons-based company in Virginia has accelerated its Bitcoin purchases, promising the best Bitcoin investment opportunities for speculators.

Investors, including hedge funds seeking volatile returns, have flocked to the stock.

Dogecoin

The original meme coin. Dogecoin (DOGE) was originally created as a joke to mock the birth of numerous altcoins, and has now become the seventh largest cryptocurrency by market value.

This year, its market value has grown by 342% to $45.9 billion. The rise of Bitcoin has undoubtedly played a role in driving this growth.

This is mainly thanks to Tesla CEO Elon Musk: the world’s richest man frequently released news about Dogecoin from 2020 to 2021, and this year, in the speculation about the coin being used on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), he mentioned Dogecoin again.

XRP - The Child Rising Again

XRP has performed strongly this year. The token supports transactions on the Ripple network, which provides institutional blockchain solutions for cross-border payments.

The market value of this token has skyrocketed and has now become the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, growing from $34 billion to $131.2 billion, an increase of 286%. This month, it briefly surpassed Tether to become the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. On January 1st of this year, it was still the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The coin made headlines due to its dispute with regulatory authorities. 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 raise funds.

However, last year, Ripple won a partial victory in a lawsuit against regulatory agencies, with the judge ruling that the XRP programmatic sales to retail investors on cryptocurrency exchanges do not constitute securities.

Despite the judge’s ruling that the $7.28 billion tokens used for institutional sales constitute unregistered securities sales, Ripple and the entire cryptocurrency industry still interpret this ruling as a victory.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust Fund (IBIT)

Given the title of this article, we can consider it as an honorary nomination. This year has been an incredible year for Bitcoin, and the world’s largest asset management company has contributed to making Bitcoin, the largest and oldest cryptocurrency, accessible to everyone by launching ETFs.

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 trade on Nasdaq.

When it began trading in January, IBIT broke records with its record-breaking trading volume and influx of funds: by December, its assets under management exceeded $50 billion, reaching this milestone in just 228 days, faster than any other ETF in history.

Several other top asset management companies have also launched Bitcoin ETFs, but BlackRock’s product is the most successful.