The top three cryptocurrency gainers in 2021; you could have made $43 million from only $100

Whether you love or hate crypto, there is no denying that 2021 was a breakout year for the space. The market cap hit an all-time high of over US$3 trillion, the IRCI, arguably one of the best indicators of the public’s attitude toward crypto, said that crypto has “hit the mainstream”, and even the CIA admitted to dabbling in crypto projects.

So, which asset was the best investment in 2021? There were many coins that made over 20,000 per cent gains, so let’s focus on the top 10 by market cap at the time of writing, and the three biggest percentage gainers from there.

Terra $LUNA

Year-to-date return: 12,893 per cent increase.

$100 invested at the start of 2021 would be worth $12,993

$1,000 invested at the start of 2021 would be worth $129,930

Dubbed one of the “Ethereum killers”, the Terra blockchain, developed by Terraform Labs, includes an ecosystem of stablecoins, a money market, savings protocol, mirrored non-digital assets, and much more.

$LUNA is used to manage supply and prevent price fluctuations of the Terra stablecoin, $UST. To maintain the price of $UST, the $LUNA supply pool adds to or subtracts from $USTs supply. Users stake $LUNA to become a validator and mine transaction blocks and receive a percentage yield.

Solana $SOL

Year-to-date return: 11,249 per cent increase.

$100 invested at the start of 2021 would be worth $11,349

$1,000 invested at the start of 2021 would be worth $113,490

Another from the list of “Ethereum killers”, Solana is a blockchain network that promotes itself as being more scalable, with faster transaction times, and lower fees, with $SOL being the native token of the blockchain.

$SOL has a number of use-cases within the Solana network, namely staking, decentralised application building, and buying NFTs amongst other usages.

Binance Coin $BNB

Year-to-date return: 1,286 per cent increase.

$100 invested at the start of 2021 would be worth $1,386

$1,000 invested at the start of 2021 would be worth $13,860

Binance Coin is a token created and issued by the largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, Binance. It is their native coin, used both as an exchange token to reward holders of $BNB who use Binance exchange, and as the native cryptocurrency of the Binance Chain, Binance’s blockchain.

It is now the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and the Binance Chain hosts many applications and tokens, much similar to how Ethereum has the ERC20 token standard, Binance Chain has a token standard called BEP2.

BONUS: Shiba Inu $SHIB

Year-to-date return: 43,662,200 per cent increase

$100 invested at the start of 2021 would be worth $43,662,200

$1,000 invested at the start of 2021 would be worth $436,623,000

Yes, you read that right. With a $1,000 investment at the start of 2021, you could have netted close to half a billion dollars if you sold it on New Year’s Eve. If you were lucky enough to sell your investment at the all-time high in October 2021, it would’ve been a payday of over $1.12 billion.

Shiba Inu is called a scam by many, but there’s no denying $SHIB had a ridiculous ROI and was the biggest percentage gainer across all cryptocurrencies last year, for that, it wins the best investment for 2021 by far.