Thinking about investing in crypto? Take a look at our ranking of the best performing cryptocurrencies in 2021.
Cryptocurrencies have gained the interest of more and more investors.
Crypto enables two types of investment. The first is capital gains through long term increase in value. Secondly, trading digital currencies also allows you to make gains, thanks to short-term speculation. The latter strategy is due to the volatility of crypto-assets.
Currently, there are over 10,000 cryptocurrencies. However, not all of them are destined to last. To make your life easier, we have compiled a list of the cryptos that achieved the best returns in 2021 (October 2021)
Bitcoin is the king of cryptocurrencies and is also the first to be created.
It was officially announced in January 2009 by a group of anonymous developers, who took the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Known by the acronym BTC, it is the digital currency that currently enjoys the largest market capitalization established at nearly 1,120 billion USD. This represents nearly 48% of the market capitalization of cryptos.
The creation of a BTC "coin" necessarily involves mining. Currently, the reward for miners is 6.25 BTC, following the halving of May 11, 2020. This is an event that takes place about every 4 years when 210,000 new blocks have been created. It is characterized by the division of the mining rewards by two.
This means that the creation of new coins tends to slow down over time. However, the number of Bitcoin that can be created was initially limited to 21,000,000 BTC. At the time of writing, September 2021, the number of coins in circulation is 18,847,837 BTC. Due to the increasing demand, the value of BTC is also showing an increase.
The value of Bitcoin has evolved significantly since its inception, when 1 BTC was worth only $0.001. Its price, for example, went from €10 to €200 between the beginning of 2013 until April of the same year, and then reached €831 on November 30, 2013. It was in 2017 that this rise was the most meteoric. Indeed, that year it went from €1,000 to €17,000. However, 2018 then presented a strong correction in the price of BTC, which dropped to €3,360 on December 31, 2018. However, it rose again to €6,500 at the end of 2019.
In 2020, BTC was heavily impacted by the Covid-19 crisis which caused a stock price collapse in March.
In particular, the falling price of Bitcoin was halved around mid-March to €4,120. However, a rapid price recovery surprised the market and was accentuated by the latest halving. And at the end of 2020, the price of BTC thus reached an all-time high of €24,000. This growth didn’t stop there, as BTC continued its momentum and reached €34,000 in January 2021. The price of BTC is currently over € 53,000. A gain of more than 120% over 2021, which makes it a year of exceptional growth
BTC thus remains very promising for 2022 and the years to come. Some experts predict that it will exceed €63,000 by February 2022.
However, due to its scarcity and the sharp rise in its price, it seems to be switching from being a currency to a safe haven. Nevertheless, many people and several large companies, including Microsoft, have already adopted it as a means of payment and fund transfer. It has a high level of liquidity, which is favorable to investment.
The Ethereum network and its cryptocurrency Ether (ETH) were created in July 2015 by a Russian developer named Vitalik Buterin. Its launch took advantage of an ICO during which 73 million ETH raised 12 million USD. The creation of this cryptocurrency was mainly aimed at solving the problems of latency, transparency and anonymity associated with the Bitcoin blockchain.
The project also aims to offer a programmable blockchain, so that decentralized applications called dApps can be created and supported. Currently, these applications have become more powerful, thanks to the arrival of smart contracts. These can be executed automatically according to predefined conditions.
They allow to carry out totally transparent transactions on many types of assets (including financial assets and real estate) without the need of an intermediary. Indeed, they can replace lawyers, notaries, and banks. The Ethereum network also offers a higher speed of transaction processing and can create contracts in a few seconds. It is characterized by the existence of a native token ERC-20. This token is used to pay nodes and developers for validating transactions and creating contracts.
In June 2016, a hack of the Ethereum network required a hard fork to be performed in order to recover 3 million misappropriated ETH. This event spawned the birth of an ETC (classic Ethereum) blockchain. In 2017, Ethereum also benefited from the crypto boom. In January 2018, its price reached an all-time high of $1,435, but nevertheless fell back for the next two years. The price of ETH even dropped below $100 during this period.
In 2020, Ethereum integrated decentralized finance innovations (DeFi) and was updated to ETH 2.0, where the validation protocol is based on a proof of stake. This allows everyone to access new applications and more decentralized services.
As of October 2021, Ethereum is the leading competitor to Bitcoin. Its market capitalization is around €360 billion, with 117,965,000 ETH in circulation.
The current price of the ETH varies around €3,300. Ethereum has therefore exploded in 2021, with its value increasing sixfold over the year
Experts predict a forthcoming 30% increase in the ETH price, or a rise towards the €4,350 threshold However, the issuance of ETH tokens has no limit. In addition, the ERC-20 token has a capitalization of €216,772,578 and a price of €0.017.
XRP is the other big winner of 2021. From €0.18 on January 1, 2021, it's worth nearly a euro today.
XRP or Ripple is the only cryptocurrency that has had the support of mainstream banking institutions since its launch. Indeed, it is a project to allow instant international money transfers. However, it has the disadvantage of being centralized and governed solely by the company Ripple Labs, which has the largest number of tokens.
XRP is attracting interest from investors as it has the strong backing of major banks such as UBS, Santander and the Abu Dhabi National Bank. In addition, it also allows the transfer and exchange of cash, air miles, minutes and any other unit of value. In addition, transaction fees on its network are virtually free.
Ripple was originally developed as the Ripplepay project by Rayan Fugger in 2004. In 2013, he established linking protocols via the Bitcoin bridge. This currently offers a unique currency bridge functionality and thus a true instant exchange office between monetary and digital currencies.
XRP went public in 2012 at a value of €0.092. Its price fluctuated sharply in January 2018 to go from €0.18 to €3.35. However, in 2019 its price fell to €0.40 and this continued with a long downward trend until it reached €0.17 at the end of the year. In March 2020, XRP dropped again to €0.13 due to the coronavirus crisis. However, like all cryptocurrencies, it started to rise rapidly from November 2020 and returned to €0.50.
In October 2021, 1 XRP was worth almost €1 and almost 47 million tokens were already in circulation. Ripple has a market capitalization of over €96 billion.
This crypto performed extraordinarily well in 2021, and saw a 9-fold increase in value during the year.
TRX was officially announced in 2017. It features a three-layer network:
Tron is thus a competitor to Ethereum that supports smart contracts and decentralized applications. It benefits from a strong community and is among the 10 cryptocurrencies with the largest market capitalizations in 2019.
Tron focuses on improving the remuneration of entertainment professionals, thanks to its decentralized platform. Its processing speed reaches 2000 transactions per second. In 2017, its initial price was $0.001984, but reached a record high of $0.23 in 2018. The 2018 stock market crash brought this value down to between $0.01 and $0.004. At the beginning of 2020 TRX rebounded, but was held back by the covid-19 crisis. In early 2021, it benefited from the rise of Bitcoin and returned to around $0.05.
Currently, TRX price is worth around €0.10. It has a market capitalization of €8.7 billion. More than 71.7 billion TRX tokens are already in circulation and testify to its attractive network and high liquidity. This makes it one of the most profitable investment cryptocurrencies for years to come.
If you bought a dogecoin in early 2021, congratulations! As of mid-October 2021, you have multiplied your initial stake by 50!
Created in 2013 by Milly Markus, Oregon and Jackson Palmer, Dogecoin was born from a fork with Litecoin. Initially created as a joke, its market capitalization reached $60 million in January 2014. However, it did not begin to gain notoriety until 2021. At the beginning of the year, its price was only estimated at $0.005, but rose to $0.1445 by mid-April. This increase represents a whopping 3000% return. However, this cryptocurrency continued its upward trend and quickly reached a price of $0.26.
Dogecoin enjoys high liquidity due to its rapid production. As of 2015, 100 billion Dogecoins are already in circulation and each year, nearly 5.25 billion more tokens are issued. The maximum number of Dogecoin is not defined. Currently, its price varies around €0.21, with a market capitalization of almost €28 billion. The number of DOGE in circulation is now nearly 131.7 billion coins.
These are the biggest gains in a very profitable year for cryptos. Download the Arya app to follow the advice of our expert crypto traders and jump on the opportunity to buy the cryptos that are going to blow up this coming year!
