Who lost the least? Best Performing Crypto Assets of 2022

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What a year for parts.

Few could have predicted that the Bitcoin bull run that started in late 2020 and pulled the entire market up by its bootstraps would have crashed and wiped out nearly all of its gains.

Yet in a year that has seen an industry-wide liquidity crunch catalyzed by the collapse of stablecoin Terras UST, the bankruptcy of FTX and the contagion that followed, some observers might say that they are lucky to still be standing.

According to data from CoinGecko, Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest coin by market capitalization, is trading at a 75% discount from its all-time high of $69,045, released on November 10, 2021. It has also fallen up more than 60% from its New Year’s Day price of $46,320.

The second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH), which started the year at $3,686, is trading at $1,215 as of December 21.

Credit should be given where it’s due, and the two market leaders weren’t the strongest crypto assets this year. Decipher data accessed from across the industry to round up this year’s top performing coins, DeFi tokens, and stocks for your reading pleasure (or pain).

Given the wild unknowns in the market, this list is certainly not investment advice, but it highlights not only some of the biggest stories of the year, but also perhaps some of the most surprising.

DeFi token: Lido Staked ETH (stETH) Image: Shutterstock. How much

For the second year in a row, Lido Staked ETH held the throne as our top DeFi token of the year based on market capitalization. It also turned out to be the most robust. It started the year with a market cap of $5,985,253,189 and is now heading into Christmas at $5,793,073,401, which means its corner of the market has only contracted by around 3%. .

What is that

Lido is a staking protocol that allows people to stake any amount of ETH through smart contracts and automated self-executing financial contracts. Users earn a return in stETH, an ETH-linked token that can be traded 1:1 against Ethereum. The token can also be lent, staked, and traded for other tokens in DeFi.

It’s not just ETH either; users can also stake Solana, Polygon, Polkadot, and Kusama.

The Lido was at the center of controversy this year after crypto lender Celsius froze withdrawals to stop a bank run that could have further depleted the price of stETH, after sliding 6% in June. It emerged that Celsius had staked client funds on Lido. Similarly, bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) cited Lido as one of three trades that ultimately blew up the company.

Despite these controversies, stETH’s performance was also boosted this year in part by users rushing to stake their ETH ahead of this year’s merger event, which dropped Ethereum from a consensus mechanism of proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.

Of the total 15.7 million ETH deposited on all staking platforms, including Coinbase and Binance, approximately 30% of these tokens were staked on Lido and converted to stETH.

Read more:

How Ethereum players on Lido Finance are negotiating the merger

Lido token jumps 24% as staked Ethereum slowly repegs

Finalists:

Dai (DAI) down 42% ($8,945,308,696 to $5,178,770,761)

Uniswap (UNI) down 48% ($7,753,293,079 to $3,987,950,916)

Currency: Trust Wallet (TWT) Image: Shutterstock. How much

While various outlier cryptocurrencies have made bigger gains this year, for this category and the next, we’ve stuck with cryptocurrencies that are in the top 100 by market capitalization. Given the flash-in-the-pan nature of many tokens, a high market cap is a good indicator of how many people believed in the project enough to open their wallets.

Trust Wallet soared 116% from $0.71 on New Year’s Day to a current price of around $1.54 as of December 21.

What is that

Trust Wallet is a governance token used to vote on new developments of the self-custodial wallet owned by Binance. After the collapse of various centralized crypto lenders and exchanges this year, consumer and industry conversations have turned firmly to security, especially self-custody solutions, like decentralized exchanges and wallets. self-custody, which also includes hardware wallets.

Binance acquired Trust Wallet in 2018; its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, then shilled the project and helped pump the native token’s price from wallets after FTX collapsed.

Read more:

Trusted Wallet Token Soars 47% Thanks to Binance CEO Shills’ Self-Custody Solution

Finalists:

GMX (GMX) up 103%, LEO Token (LEO) up 6.5%

Memecoin: Dogecoin (DOGE) Image: Shutterstock. How much

Dogecoin did not fall as sharply as its nearest rivals. This year, the best memecoin has depreciated by around 58%, from $0.17 at the start of the year to around $0.07 by December 20.

What is that

Dogecoin was created by software programmers Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus in 2013, who wanted the project to be a tongue-in-cheek satire of the then-emerging craze for minting altcoins that have little value beyond mere novelty symbolism. . The cryptocurrency attracted a rabid fan base when Bitcoin began its bull run in late 2020. They are known colloquially as the Doge Army.

The coins’ avatar is the iconic chubby dog ​​Shiba Inu, whose face has risen to prominence as a meme alongside adorable broken English phrases, like Much wow and Very impress. It has since spawned waves of copycat coins, such as the Shiba Inu (SHIB) top 100 cryptocurrencies and has the most famous Doge fan and father, Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, whose Doge-shilling tweets often drive the price up.

Read more:

Elon Musk and Crypto: No one should have all this power

Finalists:

Shiba Inu (SHIB), down 75%, ($0.00003345 to $0.00000825)

Dogelon Mars (ELON), down 81% ($0.00000156 to 0.000000296875)

Publicly traded crypto company: Block (SQ) Image: Shutterstock. How much

SQ stock fell 56% from $141.54 in early January to $61.41 per share as of December 20.

What is that

Block, Inc, formerly known as Square, is a crypto-enabled payments company run by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is an avid bitcoin bull and through the company has spent hundreds of millions on bitcoin so far. He has also avidly defended Bitcoin against criticism of the environmental impact of the networks’ mining operations. Understandably, crypto companies have fared little better than cryptocurrencies this year, with most of them in the red since early January.

Read more:

Jack Dorsey Block Announces $36 Million Impairment on Bitcoin Holdings

Block’s Bitcoin Revenue From Cash App Hit Nearly $2 Billion in Q4

Finalists:

Coinbase (COIN) fell 85% (from $232.33 to $35.12)

MicroStrategy (MSTR) fell 64.5% (from 482.95 to 171.52)

Publicly-listed crypto-curious company: Visa (V) Image: Shutterstock

Visas’ stock price started the year at $216.96, and it depreciated only 4.9% to $206.28 as of December 21.

What is that

Visa is no stranger to the world of finance, leading the payments industry with Mastercard. Aside from previous opportunities to launch crypto projects, this year has been particularly active when it comes to the company turning to decentralized money. In October, for example, the payments giant filed several trademark applications alluding to a cryptocurrency wallet, launching non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and more.

On December 19, Visa announced its continued interest in the industry despite being burned by the collapse of FTX. We want the opportunity to actively contribute to the technical developments that are happening in the crypto ecosystem, CBDC Head of Visas and Protocols Catherine Gu told Decrypt. The best way to do this is to learn by doing by going deeper into Web3 frameworks and blockchain protocols, areas that I believe will be very important for payments.

Read more:

Visa, PayPal and Western Union among fall wave of crypto trademark filings

Visa Ends FTX Partnership and Ends Debit Cards: Report

Finalists:

Western Union Company (WU) fell 28% (from $19.01 to $13.68)

Listed Crypto Miner: Canaan Inc (CAN) Image: Shutterstock. How much :

Shares of Canaan Inc (CAN) fell from $4.67 at the opening of markets this year on January 3 to $2.14 on December 21, a depreciation of 54% in a very difficult year for investors. mining companies.

What is that

Chinese company Canaan Inc. was an early crypto player. Founded in 2013, Canaan manufactures high performance chips and other hardware for crypto mining rigs. It is a popular company, its products are sold in over 150 countries and it has also recently launched a new line of mining rigs called the Avalon Made A13 (A13) Series. In 2018, it launched what it claims is the world’s first 7-nanometer ASIC chip, setting a new standard for power efficiency.

Read more:

Bitcoin Mining Company spends $10 million to buy back shares

Bitcoin Mining Company Canaan Faces Investor Lawsuit Over $90M IPO

Finalists:

Riot Blockchain (RIOT) fell 81% (from $20.36 to $3.83)

Hive (HIVE) fell 85% (from $11.45 to $1.77)

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment or other advice.

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