Bitcoin hit an all-time high this year, mainly thanks to the approval of spot ETFs in the U.S. and later after the election of Donald Trump—though other assets outperformed.
Decrypt conducted analysis using data from CoinGecko and Nasdaq to identify top-performing coins. To qualify, assets needed a starting market cap of at least $500 million, observed from January 1 to December 17.
Other digital asset-related investments, including those of major companies, also did quite well. Here's a look at this year's top-performing assets.
Pepe, this year’s winning meme coin
One of the newer meme tokens to sit near 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 alt-right groups strangely adopted it.
Pepe hit a new all-time high in December. The Ethereum-based token started the year with a market cap of $590.8 million, but landed at $9.4 billion by December 17—a 1,492% surge.
Pepe grabbed headlines for—in typical meme style—its absurd rise in value and how rich it made a small number of traders. But unlike many assets in the bizarre space of meme tokens, Pepe kept going up, and it’s now the 28th biggest coin by market cap.
Sui (SUI), altcoin king
It wasn’t long ago that the little-known Sui (SUI) came on the scene: Launched in May 2023, the blockchain was developed by ex-Meta (formerly Facebook) engineers and now has a buzzing DeFi community using its speedy network.
Rapid blockchain Sui’s native SUI token has boomed this year. In January, its market cap stood at $925 million. A 1,193% rise means that by December, it had hit nearly $12 billion. SUI is now the 18th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap.
MicroStrategy (MSTR)—winning Bitcoin stock
Michael Saylor’s software company went all in on Bitcoin this year—and the firm’s stock shows that it was trading for less than $70 a share at the start of the year.
By December, it had increased nearly fivefold—touching $386. That’s a 464% increase and better than everything else on the Nasdaq, including Nvidia.
MicroStrategy was formerly a quiet software company. It then started buying Bitcoin in 2020 and rebranded itself as a “Bitcoin treasury company.” This year, the Tyson, Virginia-based entity accelerated its orange coin buys, promising speculators the best deal for Bitcoin exposure.
Investors—including hedge funds looking to get volatile returns—piled in on the stock.
Dogecoin
The O.G. meme coin. Created as a joke to poke fun at the silly amount of altcoins being minted into existence, Dogecoin (DOGE) is now the seventh largest crypto by market cap.
Its market cap jumped by 342% this year and now stands at $45.9 billion. Bitcoin’s rise certainly helped.
It’s mainly got Tesla CEO Elon Musk to thank for that: The world’s richest man posted frequently about the asset in 2020-2021, and did so again this year amid speculation that the coin would be used on his platform X (formerly Twitter).
XRP, the comeback kid
XRP has had a strong year. The token facilitates transactions on the Ripple network, which provides institutions with a blockchain solution for cross-border payments.
The token’s market cap has shot up so much that it’s now the fourth-largest cryptocurrency, increasing 286% from $34 billion to $131.2 billion. It was briefly the third largest this month, overtaking Tether; and on January 1 of this year, it was sixth.
The coin has made headlines over its dealings with the authorities. The SEC hit Ripple with a $1.3 billion lawsuit in 2020, alleging that the company sold unregistered securities to investors to raise funds.
But last year, the company scored a partial win against the regulator when a judge ruled that programmatic sales of XRP on crypto exchanges to retail investors did not qualify as securities.
The ruling was interpreted as a win by Ripple—and the crypto industry as a whole—despite the judge ruling that $728 million worth of tokens for institutional sales constituted unregistered securities sales.
BlackRock’s 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 biggest asset manager has played a part by making the biggest and oldest cryptocurrency available to all via an ETF.
The iShares Bitcoin Trust is a traditional investment vehicle that allows investors to buy and sell shares that track Bitcoin’s price. The shares are traded on the Nasdaq.
When it started trading in January, IBIT broke record after record with trading volume and inflows: By December, it had more than $50 billion in assets under management, achieving the milestone in just 228 days—quicker than any other ETF in history.
Several other top asset managers also have Bitcoin ETFs trading, but BlackRock’s product has been the most successful.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair