This year has typically been characterized by announcements related to bankruptcies and collapses of cryptocurrency firms within the industry. With the fundamentals weakening, asset prices found it difficult to stay afloat. As a result, 2022 almost entirely belonged to the bears.
With less than a fortnight left for this year to wrap up, let’s analyze the top coins so far in 2022. LunarCrush, a social intelligence platform for cryptocurrency assets, released a list of the top-10 coins over the past year, based on their Galaxy Score.
The said score measured the coin’s past performance against itself. A higher rank indicated that a particular asset is performing well from different perspectives like the social volume, market volume, price moving average, and more. Looking at the yearly frame of this metric will put things into perspective for 2022.
Ethereum Leads The Show
Per the list, Ethereum bagged the first position. This ranking goes without surprise because of the ecosystem’s much-anticipated event, The Merge, took place this year. Right from talking about the nuances of the upgrade to discussing the pros and cons of the same, including the impact on the price of the native asset, Ethereum was the talk of the crypto town.
ETH went on to attain its 2022 peak of $3900 on Jan 4. Post that, as the severity of the bear market intensified, the asset’s price kept dropping, and most recoveries attempted thereafter proved to be futile. At press time, ETH was trading below all its three EMAs on the daily at a discounted price of $1213.89.
XRP & Bitcoin Follow
XRP ranked second on LunarCrush’s list. The ongoing lawsuit that blockchain company, Ripple, and its former and current executives are fighting against the SEC to determine the nature of XRP, managed to keep the asset relevant throughout the year. Several important filings were made, and judgments were passed. XRP’s price was quite receptive to them.
Like Ethereum, XRP also claimed its 2022 highs in Q1 itself. On March 28, it was trading at its yearly peak of $0.93. On Tuesday, the asset was trading around 63% lower at $0.3447.
With correlations between top crypto assets remaining high, the market seemed to be quite closely knit this year. Most coin price movements replicated Bitcoin’s trend. Whenever the king coin initiated a recovery, the pack followed suit, and vice versa.
With the accumulation still going on strong despite being in a bear market, Bitcoin managed to stay above $15k for the entire year. At press time, it was trading at $16.8k, way down from its 2022 peak of $48.48k, registered towards the end of March.
Also Read: Bitcoin: Are Affordability & Accumulation Going Hand In Hand?
Leaving aside the top three cryptocurrencies, Litecoin, Binance Coin, Cardano, Cosmos, Tezos, Dogecoin, and Vechain went on to occupy ranks 4-10, respectively.