Author: Lim Yu Qian, Coingecko; Compiler: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
The most profitable cryptocurrency narrative in 2024 is AI, which has the highest average price increase from the beginning of the year to the end of the year (YTD) at 2,939.8%, followed by meme with a year-to-year return of 2,185.1%. This makes the profitability of AI and memecoin narratives more than twice that of other popular cryptocurrency narratives. The meme coin narrative initially began to outperform other narratives in March, when its returns soared from 96.6% to 1,713.1% in one month. Despite high volatility, meme coins subsequently continued to achieve the highest returns and became the most profitable narrative for most of 2024. However, after hitting an all-time high return of 3,211.4% on December 9, meme coin narrative prices retreated as interest in meme coins waned.
In contrast, AI narrative rebounded strongly at the end of the year, with its returns nearly doubling from 1,598.1% to 2,939.8% in December. This was mainly driven by the surge in popularity of AI agent launchpad Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL), which also saw the biggest gain among cryptocurrencies this year. As a result, AI narrative eventually surpassed meme narrative in late December.
Meanwhile, RWA is the third most profitable cryptocurrency with an average return of 819.5% year-to-date. RWA’s returns rose steadily at the beginning of the year, reaching 365.3% by April 12, but then traded sideways for the next six months. Subsequently, in November, RWA’s returns resumed their upward trend, with the price of MANTRA (OM) surging.
Layer 1, DePIN, and DeFi Narratives performed similarly in 2024, recording modest returns of 142.5%, 135.4%, and 101.4%, respectively. This means that the Layer 1 and DePIN narratives have only slightly outperformed Bitcoin itself, which is up 125.5% over the same period, while the DeFi narrative has not been as profitable as Bitcoin.
In other words, simply holding Bitcoin would allow conservative investors to earn profits comparable to at least three of the major crypto narratives this year.
The GameFi and Layer 2 narratives emerged as the least profitable narratives in 2024, underperforming even compared to Ethereum’s 49.0% return.
Specifically, the GameFi narrative has returned just 14.7% year-to-date, with six of the top ten gaming tokens losing between 3.1% and 32.9%.
On the other hand, Layer 2 is the only narrative that has lost money this year, with a negative return of 20.7%. Amid the trend of more and more projects seeking to launch their own Layer 2, seven of the ten largest Layer 2 tokens have seen price declines, ranging from 6.3% to 75.3%.
The performance of cryptocurrency narratives in 2024, ranked by the average annual investment returns of their 10 largest market capitalization tokens:
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