2024 Highlights: Which Cryptocurrencies Beat Bitcoin's Gains?

Written by Mat Di Salvo  Compiled by Daisy, Mars Finance

Bitcoin hits all-time highs this year, boosted by the approval of spot ETFs in the U.S. and the subsequent election of Donald Trump as president - although other assets have performed even better.

Decrypt conducted an analysis using data from CoinGecko and Nasdaq to determine the best performing cryptocurrencies. Eligible assets must have a starting market value 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 Meme Coin

PEPE is one of the newer meme tokens to come to the forefront, having launched last year. The token 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 reached a market cap of $9.4 billion, an increase of 1,492%.

Pepe made headlines – in typical meme style, for its absurd growth 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, little-known Sui (SUI) burst onto the scene: Launched in May 2023, the blockchain was developed by ex-Meta (ex-Facebook) engineers and now has an active DeFi community taking advantage of its fast network.

Fast BlockchainSui’s native token, SUI, has surged this year. In January, SUI had a market cap of $925 million. After a 1,193% gain, by December it was worth nearly $12 billion. SUI is now the 18th largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

MicroStrategy (MSTR) – Winning Bitcoin Stock

Michael Saylor’s software company went all-in on Bitcoin this year – the company’s stock shows that it started the year with a share price of less than $70.

By December, the share price 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. At the start of 2020, the company began buying Bitcoin and rebranded itself as “Bitcoin Treasury.” This year, the Tyson, Virginia-based company accelerated its Bitcoin purchases, promising to offer speculators the best Bitcoin investment opportunities.

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

Dogecoin

The original meme coin. Originally created as a joke to mock the creation of a slew of altcoins, Dogecoin (DOGE) has become the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

This year, its market cap has grown 342%, now at $45.9 billion. Bitcoin’s rise has undoubtedly helped.

This is largely thanks to Tesla CEO Elon Musk: The world’s richest man frequently tweeted about Dogecoin in 2020 and 2021, and this year he mentioned it again 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 has surged in market value and is now the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market value, growing 286% from $34 billion to $131.2 billion. It briefly surpassed Tether as the third-largest cryptocurrency by market value 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, alleging that the company sold unregistered securities to investors to raise funds.

But last year, Ripple won a partial victory in a battle 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 for institutional sales constituted unregistered securities sales, the ruling was still 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 it an honorable mention. This year has 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 open 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.