Written by: Mat Di Salvo Compiled by: Daisy, Mars Finance

Bitcoin hit a record high this year, favored by the United States Spot ETF approval and Trump's election boost - but some assets are performing even better.

Bitcoin has hit all-time highs this year, largely driven by the approval of a U.S. spot ETF and the subsequent election of Donald Trump as president — although other assets performance is even better.

Decrypt conducted an analysis using data from CoinGecko and Nasdaq to identify the top-performing cryptocurrencies. Eligible assets must have a starting market capitalization of at least $500 million between January 1 and December 17.

Other digital asset-related investments, including those from some major companies, also performed well. Here's a look at this year's best-performing assets.

PEPE – This Year’s Winning Meme Coin

PEPE is one of the newer meme tokens that has risen to the forefront of the market, launching last year. The token is based on Pepe the Frog, an internet cartoon character later labeled a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League because of 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 capitalization of $590.8 million and by December 17, had a market capitalization of $9.4 billion, a 1,492% increase.

Pepe made headlines — in typical meme fashion, for its ridiculous growth in value and for making a handful of 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 capitalization.

Sui (SUI) – The King of Altcoins

Not long ago, the little-known Sui (SUI) came to prominence: the blockchain was launched in May 2023 , developed by former Meta (ex-Facebook) engineers and now has an active DeFi community leveraging its fastFast network.

SUI, the native token of the fast blockchain Sui, has surged this year. In January, SUI had a market capitalization of $925 million. After a 1,193% gain, it had a market capitalization of nearly $12 billion by December. SUI is now the 18th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

MicroStrategy (MSTR) – Winning Bitcoin Stock

Michael Saylor’s software company is all-in on Bitcoin this year – stock shows , the stock price was less than $70 per share at the beginning of the year.

By December, the stock had almost quintupled, to $386. That's a 464% gain, outperforming every other stock on the Nasdaq, including Nvidia.

MicroStrategy was once an obscure software company. Starting in 2020, the company began buying Bitcoin and rebranded itself as the “Bitcoin Treasury Corporation.” This year, the Tyson, Virginia-based company has accelerated its Bitcoin purchases, promising to provide speculators with the best Bitcoin investment opportunities.

Investors - including hedge funds looking for volatile returns - have piled into the stock.

Dogecoin

The original emoticon coin. Dogecoin (DOGE) started as a joke to mock the creation of a large number of altcoins and has now become the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

This year, its market capitalization has grown 342% and now stands at $45.9 billion. Bitcoin’s rise has certainly played a role as well.

This is mainly due to Tesla CEO Elon Musk: The world’s richest man frequently posted about dogs between 2020 and 2021. News of Dogecoin, which he mentioned again this year amid speculation that the coin would be used on his social platform X (formerly Twitter).

XRP - The comeback kid

XRP has been strong this year. The token supports transactions on the Ripple network, whichThe network provides institutions with blockchain solutions for cross-border payments.

The token's market capitalization has soared and it is now the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, growing 286% from $34 billion to $131.2 billion. This month it briefly surpassed Tether to become the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization; as of January 1 this year, it was the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The coin has made headlines due to disputes with regulators. 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 investors to raise funds.

But last year, Ripple won a partial victory in a lawsuit with regulators, when a judge ruled that XRP sold to retail investors on cryptocurrency exchanges Programmatic sales do not constitute securities.

Although a judge ruled that the institutional sale of $728 million worth of tokens constituted an unregistered securities sale, the ruling was still criticized by Ripple and the entire cryptocurrency industry. Interpreted as a victory.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT)

Given the title of this article, we can consider it an honorable mention. It’s been an incredible year for Bitcoin, and the world’s largest asset manager has contributed to making the largest and oldest cryptocurrency available to everyone by launching an ETF. .

iShares Bitcoin Trust is a traditional investment vehicle that allows investors to buy and sell stocks that track the price of Bitcoin. These stocks trade on Nasdaq.

When it began trading in January, IBIT kept breaking records with record trading volumes and capital inflows: by December, it had more than It took just 228 days to reach this milestone, 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.