What Were the Top Crypto Gainers of 2023?
Bonk (BONK) is the top crypto gainer of 2023, increasing by 7,302.9% from $0.0000002 on January 1 to $0.0000146 on December 28, 2023. Bonk made 2.5 times more returns than Injective, the second top crypto gainer of 2023. Bonk’s airdrop marked a turnaround for Solana, drawing trader and investor attention.
Injective (INJ) comes in as the second top crypto gainer of 2023, increasing by 2,976.4% from $1.27 to $39.07. Injective rose when Helix, its decentralized exchange (DEX), introduced pre-launch token futures. Moreover, Injective established a $150 million ecosystem fund early in the year, aimed at accelerating the adoption of interoperable infrastructure and DeFi.
CorgiAI (CORGIAI) is the third largest crypto gainer of 2023, increasing by 1,959.7% from $0.00014 to $0.00282. CorgiAI gained traction as the main meme coin on the Cronos blockchain, following the trend where each chain is expected to have its own 'meme coin'.
The top 10 crypto gainers saw returns ranging from 632.8% to 7,302.9%. Holding any of these crypto at the beginning of the year would have outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum by at least 3.9 times.
Top Crypto Gainers Have Popular Narratives
All 10 of the top crypto gainers in 2023 were also among themost popular narratives, namely meme coins, layer 1 protocols, artificial intelligence and layer 2 solutions.
Bonk, the top crypto gainer, had multiple narratives throughout 2023. The popularity of meme coins and the revival of the Solana ecosystem, both being the most popular narratives in 2023, played a significant role to its success.
8 Out of the Top 100 Crypto Ended 2023 With Losses
8 out of the top 100 crypto recorded price declines from the beginning of the year up to December 28, 2023. This group includes Tether (USDT), USDC (USDC), Dai (DAI), BUSD (BUSD), TrueUSD (TUSD), Toncoin (TON), Chiliz (CHZ), and Sui (SUI).
5 out of these 8 are stablecoins which experienced a slight decline below their USD peg of $1.00, resulting in price declines of up to 0.3%.
TON, CHZ and SUI are the only non-stablecoin losers in 2023, with their price declines from 0.6% to 40.6%. However, do note that Sui was launched only on May 3, 2023, where its price closed at a high of $1.40, before reaching $0.83 on December 28, 2023.
Bitcoin Performance in 2023
Bitcoin (BTC) outperformed 65 tokens in the top 100 crypto, increasing by 162.5% from $16,540 to $43418 since the beginning of the year up to December 28, 2023. This suggests that randomly picking a crypto from this group and beating Bitcoin's growth in 2023 had about a one in three chance.
In 2023, Bitcoin gained attention with spot ETF applications from giants like BlackRock and Fidelity. Approval could significantly broaden investor access and boost Bitcoin's value.
Bitcoin Performance vs Layer 1s
Bitcoin outperformed Ethereum (ETH), in 2023 by 1.7 times. Bitcoin gave price returns of 162.5%, higher than Ethereum’s price returns of 98.6% in 2023.
Bitcoin also outperformed 18 of the 30 layer 1s in the top 100 crypto in 2023. However, Bitcoin lagged behind the remaining 11 layer 1s, with four of them being in the top 10 crypto gainers.
Holding INJ, KAS, SOL, or CFX, would have yielded at least a 4.8 times greater return compared to holding Bitcoin and Ethereum at the start of the year. However, it is crucial to note that the smaller layer 1s carry a much higher risk as they contend to gain market share from the two more established crypto, Bitcoin and Etheruem.
Top Crypto Gainers 2023
2023 price returns for the top 10 crypto gainers, Bitcoin and Ethereum are:
| Rank | Crypto | Price Returns |
| 1 | Bonk | 7302.9% |
| 2 | Injective | 2976.4% |
| 3 | CorgiAI | 1959.7% |
| 4 | Kaspa | 1865.6% |
| 5 | Render | 1139.0% |
| 6 | Solana | 973.9% |
| 7 | Conflux | 773.6% |
| 8 | WEMIX | 758.7% |
| 9 | Fetch.ai | 697.9% |
| 10 | Stacks | 632.8% |
| 35 | Bitcoin | 162.5% |
| 51 | Ethereum | 98.6% |
Methodology
This study analyzed the price returns of the top 100 crypto assets by market capitalization on CoinGecko from January 1, 2023 to December 28, 2023.
This study is for illustrative and informational purposes only, and is not financial advice. Always do your own research and be careful when putting your money into any crypto or financial asset.
If you use these insights, we would appreciate a link credit to this article on CoinGecko. A link credit allows us to keep supplying you with data-led content that you may find useful.
Curious to find out more about our previous research studies & statistics? Check out this one we did on the most popular crypto narratives in 2023.
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Nicholas Boey
Nicholas is a Market Research Intern at CoinGecko. He can be seen crawling around the vast crypto space, be it NFTs, crypto or memecoins from time to time. People in web3 call him picnicmou. Follow the author on Twitter @picnicmou
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