Cryptocurrency prices have rallied in 2024, leaving some investors with notable gains. But crypto is a notoriously risky investment and prices are known to fluctuate quite a bit.

Keeping an eye out for the top performers every now and then can give you important context on how the market is performing.

Here are the top eight best-performing cryptocurrencies year-to-date.

With the cryptocurrency markets still in an uncertain position, many crypto investors are wondering if it’s time to sell in order to secure their profits, or continue to hold, or even accumulate, to benefit from a potential price rally that could be in the store in the short to medium term.

Even though the crypto markets have always recovered from their bearish periods so far, every bear market has its “casualties” that never make a strong recovery.

Therefore, it’s important to choose quality crypto projects that have a good chance of surviving the bear market and thriving in the future.

Sui:

The top-performing cryptocurrency in 2024, with an impressive 306.4% growth year-to-date.

Dogecoin:

A strong contender, achieving a 256.7% increase, driven by community enthusiasm.

Shiba Inu:

Secured significant gains, growing by 164.3%, fueled by its meme-coin appeal.

Toncoin:

Rose by 133%, demonstrating steady progress in its market presence.

Solana:

Marked a 115% growth, reflecting its strong adoption and performance.

Why Solana?

Solana is within striking distance of setting new all-time highs, as SOL has displayed a 46.3% rally in the last 30 days that has brought the price just 6% below its historical peak.

This year’s meme coin frenzy has significantly benefited the Solana ecosystem, and Solana-based decentralized applications are collecting highly impressive amounts in revenues and fees. According to data from DeFi Llama, Solana-based decentralized exchange Raydium has generated $4.7 million in revenue in the last 7 days, with users spending a whopping $75.3 million on fees to use the protocol.

During the same time period, the Jito liquid staking protocol on Solana generated $3.2 million in revenue, and was “responsible” for $81 million in fees. Token launch platform Pump.fun and on-chain trading solution Photon were also among the top 10 DApps based on fees.

Bitcoin:

Maintains relevance with a solid 104.6% growth, reaffirming its dominance.

BNB:

Recorded a 103.8% increase, benefiting from Binance’s ecosystem expansion.

The token is also used as the native asset of the BNB Chain blockchain. BNB Chain is a variant of Ethereum that offers significantly lower transaction fees to users, and it allows developers to easily deploy EVM-compatible decentralized applications. Previously known as Binance Coin, BNB has now gone through an extensive rebranding.

Bitcoin Cash:

Grew by 72%, showing modest but consistent performance.

Best crypto to buy for beginners

If you’re a new entrant in the cryptocurrency space, it’s probably best to stick to cryptocurrencies that have been around for a longer period of time and have a well-developed ecosystem of resources for users. This will make it easier for you to set up your wallet and find answers if you encounter any problems along the way.

Here are a few examples of cryptocurrencies that are worth considering for beginner investors in crypto. These coins have a lot of liquidity, well-developed ecosystems and a lot of educational resources and tools that will help beginners get up to speed.

• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Litecoin
• Polygon
• Solana

Please note that cryptocurrencies are risky investments and typically display a lot of price volatility. This is true even for established cryptocurrencies with multi-billion dollar market capitalizations. Never invest more than you are willing to lose.

Best crypto to buy for long-term investors

Many crypto investors prefer to passively hold their cryptocurrencies over the long term instead of actively trading them. Frankly, this is a good decision if you don’t want to put a lot of time and effort into following everything that’s happening in the crypto and blockchain space.

How we chose the best cryptocurrencies to buy

With thousands of different cryptocurrencies on the market, it can be challenging to narrow down the list to only about a dozen coins. When creating this list, we aimed to showcase a variety of cryptocurrency projects, ranging from well-established projects to more speculative projects that could potentially have a lot of upside.

Here are the factors we considered when deciding which cryptocurrencies to feature.

Availability

It’s important for a cryptocurrency to be easily available across a variety of cryptocurrency exchanges, including both centralized and decentralized options.

We also considered whether the cryptocurrency can be traded directly against fiat currencies, which makes the process of buying and selling much more straightforward.

Market capitalization

The coins featured on our list of the best cryptocurrencies to buy in 2023 are all among the 100 largest crypto assets by market capitalization. By itself, a large market capitalization doesn’t mean that the project is of high quality.

However, it is a good indication that there’s a lot of community interest in the project, and coins with a larger market cap are more resilient to market manipulation attempts, as moving the market requires large amounts of capital.

Sector leadership

The cryptocurrency market can be divided into several sectors. For example, we have Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies, which represent two of the main approaches towards achieving decentralized consensus.

We can further identify other sectors such as decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, layer 2 projects, meme coins and others.

We attempted to highlight projects that are leaders in their respective sectors in order to showcase the variety that can be found in the crypto and blockchain space.

Working products

It’s important that the cryptocurrency we’re featuring has a working product already and isn’t simply based on future promises. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, we generally avoid highlighting coins that don’t have a working mainnet yet.

When it comes to tokens, we try to focus on tokens that are used as utility tokens in a working product or as governance tokens in an actively used decentralized protocol.