The year 2021 has undoubtedly been a bull market with Bitcoin (BTC) raising the all-time high price bar several times this year. But not all crypto assets have performed equally. There have been a number of losers in addition to the majority of winners in terms of price gains.
Since the beginning of 2021, total crypto market capitalization has gained 190% from just under $800 million to over $2.3 trillion. It hit an all-time high of just over $3 trillion in early November.
Top 3 crypto gainers in 2021
The crypto top-ten in terms of market capitalization looked a little different on Jan. 1, 2021, as it contained Litecoin (LTC), Chainlink (LINK) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). These have dropped out and have given way to Solana (SOL), USD Coin (USDC) and Avalanche (AVAX) by the year’s end.
Dogecoin (DOGE)
Dogecoin (DOGE) has skyrocketed this year, driven primarily by Elon Musk’s surreptitious social media posts. On New Year’s Day, DOGE was priced at just $0.004 and largely ignored by the majority of crypto traders. DOGE had its first little spurt in February following the first of what would be a number of subsequent Elon pumps.
DOGE prices really went on a wild ride in April and May when they surged more than 1,100% to an all-time high of $0.731 on May 8, pushing it up the crypto market cap charts to the fourth spot.
Musk extolled the virtues of DOGE as a payments network in June, resulting in another round of FOMO for the meme coin.
DOGE has been falling from that epic pump since May, both against Bitcoin and USD. But all of the additional mainstream media it has got, in addition to major trading platform listings, has still given the Shiba Inu-inspired joke coin a monumental gain of 3,800% so far this year. In BTC terms, DOGE has gained 2,100% on the year from 168 satoshis to 3,696 sats in mid-December.
DOGE/USD YTD – coingecko.com
Starting position by market capitalization on Dec. 15: 26 — Final position: 11
Solana (SOL)
The native token for the enterprise blockchain Solana (SOL) has also had a bumper year in terms of gains. At the beginning of 2021, SOL was priced at just $1.52, at the time of writing it was trading…
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