Five crypto winners of 2022
Bitcoin and Ethereum are not among the five best cryptos for 2022. Overall, the Cryptoindex.com 100 (CIX100), an index that tracks the top 100 performing cryptos, is down nearly 68% year to date, implying that most top coins will underperform in 2022. Stablecoins are naturally excluded from the following list. Coins tracking the value of gold and other mainstream assets have also been overlooked.
Decentralized currencies, smart contract tokens, exchange tokens, and other coins are instead mentioned below.
GMX
GMX is the best-performing digital asset among the top 100 coins. It serves as a utility and governance token within the GMX decentralized exchange (DEX) ecosystem.
GMX’s price rise was largely influenced by the collapse of FTX, a centralized exchange, and its listing on popular trading platforms such as Binance and Huobi Global in 2022. Furthermore, the token rose dramatically in late November after its platform briefly outperformed its top DEX rival, Uniwap, in daily trading fees.
TWT
Within the Trust Wallet ecosystem, the Trust Wallet Token (TWT) functions as a utility and a governance token.
According to Cointelegraph, the FTX’s demise increased investor distrust of centralized exchanges, prompting some to transfer funds to self-custody wallets like Trust Wallet. The speculation could have played a significant role in increasing TWT’s valuation.
LEO
One reason LEO outperformed most top-tier assets could be iFinex’s pledge. Notably, at the time of LEO’s private sale in 2018, the company stated that it would use 27% of its revenue to buy back the tokens until the entire supply of 985.24 million units was removed from circulation.
IFinex also stated that the funds it lost during the Bitfinex hack in August 2016 would be used to purchase LEO tokens. That explains why LEO increased by more than 100% at the start of the year, given that the uptrend occurred after the US Department of Justice recovered 94,000 BTC from Bitfinex hackers.
OKB
OKB is the OKX exchange’s native token. It offers users trading fee discounts, access to OKX’s initial exchange offering (IEO) platform, and voting rights for tokens listed on the exchange.
In 2022, OKB trended in lockstep with the broader crypto market, including a 150% recovery after bottoming out at around $9.50 in June. The bullish retracement of the token occurred despite the absence of a major market-moving event, indicating that it was mostly speculative.
TON
The Telegram founders Nikolai Durov and Pavel Durov created the Open Network, a layer-1 blockchain ecosystem. Its native token, TON, fell in line with other top crypto assets for the majority of 2022 but recovered impressively before the year’s end.
