Top 10 Performing Cryptocurrency of the First Half of 2024
With the official approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs at the beginning of this year, the crypto market saw a significant rise. Apart from Bitcoin, some MEME coins also performed remarkably well. Although the market started to decline from April onwards, certain tokens still showed impressive overall performance.
Recently, Forbes released a list of the top 10 best-performing cryptocurrencies with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion in the first half of 2024. The list includes WIF, PEPE, ASI, FLOKI, JASMY, AR, CORE, TON, BGB, and BONK. Notably, MEME coins occupy four spots on the list, with three belonging to the Solana ecosystem.
WIF
WIF is a MEME coin in the Solana ecosystem with a total supply of approximately 998 million tokens. Its symbol is a Shiba Inu wearing a knitted beanie. Among the 70 tokens with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion, WIF has the highest return rate, with a price increase of about 1,300%.
WIF was first listed on November 20, 2023, at a price of $0.00016. On January 11, 2024, its price reached around $0.17 when a whale lost 77,247 SOL (worth approximately $7.7 million at the time) in a large WIF transaction, causing the token’s price to temporarily spike to $3.99. The whale had bought 17.22 million WIF, valued at over $30 million.
About a week later, Binance launched WIF perpetual contracts. On March 3, WIF’s total market capitalization (about $1.685 billion) surpassed that of BONK (about $1.591 billion), ranking 66th in the crypto market. Just two days later, on March 5, Binance officially launched WIF spot trading pairs. By March 18, its market capitalization surpassed PEPE, reaching an all-time high of $4.86 on March 31.
PEPE
PEPE was launched on April 15, 2023, with an initial price of approximately $0.000000001 and a total supply of 420.69 trillion tokens. Within a month, PEPE’s market capitalization exceeded $400 million, entering the top 100 cryptocurrencies. Created as a rebellion against the complex tokenomics of “dog series” MEME coins, PEPE avoided presale, burning, and taxation in its tokenomics. Its frog image is also well-loved in Western pop culture.
On October 24, 2023, 6.9 trillion PEPE tokens were burned. On February 28, 2024, PEPE’s market capitalization surpassed $1 billion for the first time. On March 13, following a tweet from Elon Musk, PEPE’s price surged to $0.000009, and the next day it achieved its first “zero-out.” On May 22, its market capitalization broke the $5 billion mark, reaching a peak of over $7 billion a week later.
ASI
In March of this year, SingularityNET (AGIX), Fetch.ai (FET), and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) announced the merger of their tokens to create a decentralized AI alliance named ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). The alliance aims to provide a decentralized alternative to projects currently controlled by large tech companies. The merger vote passed in April, and the merger was completed on July 15.
Before the merger, each of the three AI project tokens had significant returns. Riding the wave of a bullish market and the AI trend, OCEAN rose from $0.5 at the beginning of the year to over $1.4. FET increased from $0.7 to over $3.2, and AGIX surged from $0.3 to around $1.4.
FLOKI
Named after Elon Musk’s Shiba Inu, FLOKI saw significant gains. Last October, Floki launched its TokenFi platform, distributing 56% of the TOKEN allocation to FLOKI stakers. TOKEN’s price surged from $0.01 to over $0.2, a 20x increase.
At the beginning of this year, FLOKI rose from $0.00003 to $0.000313, nearly a 10x increase, but did not reach its previous bull market high. On May 27, Floki introduced a Telegram-based trading bot on the BNB Chain network, which boosted FLOKI’s price by over 23%, from $0.00022 to $0.00029.
On June 4, DWF Labs purchased $12 million worth of FLOKI tokens to support the FLOKI ecosystem, pushing FLOKI to a new high of $0.000349 on June 5.
JASMY
JASMY is a Japanese DePIN project, one of the few tokens listed on both Binance and Coinbase. It provides data security, storage, and interaction services in IoT environments. JASMY Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 solution developed by Jasmy, enhances scalability and offers a more transparent, secure, and personalized data interaction experience.
Following positive market trends and project news, JASMY’s price rose from $0.006 at the beginning of the year to over $0.027 in March. On June 7, it reached $0.04469, its highest since April 2022, but still far from its all-time high of $4.29.
AR
Arweave is a decentralized permanent storage project, a star in the storage track alongside Filecoin. On February 27, Arweave announced the development of the AO supercomputer testnet for social media and AI design computation, causing its price to surge from $15.6 to $29.6 in two days. By March, it reached a high of $47.5, and by the end of May, it peaked at $49.55.
On June 6, Arweave acquired the decentralized video-sharing platform Odysee to create a social media platform free from government censorship, but this did not significantly boost its price, which continued to decline amid negative market trends.
CORE
Core DAO develops the Satoshi Plus ecosystem, a Layer-1 blockchain combining Bitcoin’s decentralization and security with Ethereum’s scalability and utility.
In late March, Core launched the six-month Core Ignition airdrop incentive plan, rewarding users and developers for network growth contributions. This pushed CORE’s price from $0.6 to $4.45 by April 2.
On April 18, Core DAO announced a $200 million ecosystem fund to accelerate the development of decentralized applications on its Layer-1 blockchain, leading to an 83% price increase on April 15, from $1.43 to $2.8866.
Core DAO also plans to launch non-custodial Bitcoin staking and Core native wrapped Bitcoin (coreBTC).
TON
TON’s high-speed application-focused technical logic supports peer-to-peer transactions with direct on-chain messages and a dynamic multi-shard architecture for scalability. Pantera Capital founder Dan Morehead called TON his fund’s largest investment.
In June, Bitget and Foresight Ventures set up a $20 million TON ecosystem fund. TON announced the upcoming launch of its own Layer 2 network, TON Applications Chain (TAC), based on Polygon technology.
TON didn’t initially perform well but began to rise as the market declined. In April, TON’s market capitalization surpassed ADA and DOGE, reaching $189 billion. Tether expanded USDT to the TON network in April, and TON’s on-chain USDT issuance exceeded 100 million tokens by May, making it the sixth-largest blockchain for USDT issuance. TON reached an all-time high of $8.288 on June 15.
BGB
BGB is Bitget’s platform token. In the first half of 2024, centralized exchanges saw significant growth, with a total spot trading volume of $10.6 trillion, a 145% increase from the second half of 2023. Bitget’s market share grew the most, increasing by 38.4%.
Bitget empowered BGB through trading fee discounts and new token launches. With growing user numbers and market share, BGB rose from $0.6 at the beginning of the year to a high of $1.486 on May 27.
BONK
BONK is a dog-themed MEME coin in the Solana ecosystem, launched in 2022 with an initial supply of 100 trillion tokens, 50% of which were airdropped to the Solana community. In 2023, BONK had a 73x return, the highest among the top 100 market cap cryptocurrencies. Binance listed BONK in December 2023, causing its price to surge to $0.00004, but it soon declined.
In early March, due to a bullish market, BONK reached a new high of $0.000048. Since then, it has fluctuated between $0.00002 and $0.00003.