Year-end top coins: Hard Collateral RWA, Powerful L1/L2, Privacy Controls, Enterprise Rails, AIxCrypto

Looking at the year-end top coins: hard-collateral RWA, high-performance L1/L2, privacy-focused settlements, enterprise rails, and AI as the focus for the sector this year. In particular, we saw strong interest in tokens with infrastructure relevance and applied use cases, with significant liquidity flowing into tokens on high-performance L1/L2 networks, enterprise rails for financial markets, and the integration of AIxCrypto with decentralized compute and agent capabilities. By year’s end, the most well-established and resilient themes were hard-collateral RWA, ecosystem tokens from leading crypto platforms, and a sharp rise in privacy-focused settlement tokens at the protocol level.

Among the annual leaders we see ZEC +728.1%, XMR +130.2%, WBT +127.8%, followed by OKB, XAUT, PAXG, BCH, BNB, WBNB and JLP.

Among the weekly leaders we see CC +40.05%, ZEC +17.75%, PIPPIN +14.33%, followed by DASH, TON, XTZ, XDC, TEL, ZZ and LDO.

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Top coins of the week: Enterprise Rails, Privacy Settlements, Base L1, Staking

Enterprise class settlement rails for companies. The market confirms the demand for infrastructure for B2B use cases and integrations with traditional systems. Canton (CC) and XDC Network (XDC).

Protocol-level privacy controls. Confidential payments remain a self-contained demand loop with resilient liquidity. Zcash (ZEC) and Dash (DASH).

Basic L1s as the execution layer. Interest in general-purpose networks with predictable execution continues. Toncoin (TON) and Tezos (XTZ).

Deploying infrastructure and returns. Liquid staking has established itself as a mandatory layer for PoS ecosystems, confirmed by Lido DAO (LDO).

Retail and micro-cap stories. Retail payment rails and speculative low-cap pulses periodically capture the flow, as we see with Telcoin (TEL), pippin (PIPPIN), and DoubleZero (ZZ).

• CC +40.05%, price $0.1249, volume $54,852,053
• ZEC +17.75%, price $523.80, volume $706,441,362
• PIPPIN +14.33%, price $0.4192, volume $25,268,028
• DASH +12.81%, price $43.44, volume $122,439,056
• TON +11.77%, price $1.64, volume $100,772,761
• XTZ +11.76%, price $0.5018, volume $23,598,890
• XDC +11.01%, price $0.05203, volume $25,625,211
• TEL +10.63%, price $0.004235, volume $1,562,753
• ZZ +10.37%, price $0.1202, volume $27,104,215
• LDO +8.91%, price $0.5991, volume $41,567,113

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Top Coins of the Year: Privacy Settlements, Hard Collateral RWA, Exchange Ecosystems, Payment L1, Perp Liquidity, AIxCrypto

We saw fairly resilient growth across many blockchain solutions and cryptocurrencies this year, most of which had infrastructure relevance and the potential to combine several key technologies. Particularly effective L1s and L2s focused on the public sector and enterprise segment, and AI integrations in blockchain and crypto often stayed at the top for weeks, but only a few remained by year’s end.

Protocol-level privacy controls. The market has established a clear on-chain payment rail with privacy priority and L1 finality. Wallets and P2P transfers use this rail without external overlays, making usage simple and repeatable, as reflected in the growth of Zcash and Monero.

Hard collateral RWA. Participants used on-chain gold as a store of value reserve and as collateral in credit cycles and in stablecoin pairs. During the volatile periods we have seen this year, this simple model reduces uncertainty and has become a fairly obvious attempt to hedge risk, as reflected in the growth of XAUt and PAXG.

Exchange ecosystem and platform tokens. Fee discounts, access to product programs, and fee capture mechanisms that create daily, observable token usage allowed WBT, OKB, BNB, and WBNB to achieve strong results by the end of the year.

Payment L1s. Infrastructure and deployed networks focused on transfers and predictable finality acted as a settlement layer for the retail sector, but by the end of the year only BCH managed to maintain positive growth.

Perpetual liquidity on Solana. The Solana ecosystem performed particularly well this year, with liquidity providers like JLP showing this most clearly.

• Zcash (ZEC) +728.1% 1 year, price $518.15, volume $737,204,264
• Monero (XMR) +130.2% 1 year, price $451.29, volume $87,882,760
• WhiteBIT Coin (WBT) +127.8% 1 year, price $56.38, volume $27,699,363
• OKB (OKB) +105.7% 1 year, price $107.89, volume $20,280,798
• Tether Gold (XAUT) +70.3% 1 year, price $4,471.35, volume $336,118,532
• PAX Gold (PAXG) +68.8% 1 year, price $4,473.96, volume $239,574,623
• Bitcoin Cash (BCH) +35.7% 1 year, price $611.73, volume $450,233,149
• BNB (BNB) +19.2% 1 year, price $851.68, volume $1,621,020,706
• Wrapped BNB (WBNB) +19.0% 1 year, price $850.69, volume $268,354,348
• Jupiter Perpetuals LP Token (JLP) +8.0% 1 year, price $4.56, volume $33,385,525

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Out of favor this year: some L1/L2, RWA ex Gold, decentralized storage

Wide version L1 and L2. Not all fundamental platforms were able to maintain demand, and annual results were not favorable for APT, ARB, POL, DOT and TON, for example.

Synthetic returns and yield-bearing stablecoins. Imbedding returns directly into the monetary instrument attracted great interest, but also failed to establish itself in the market. For example, ENA has not become a universal collateral and does not demonstrate resilient use.

Meme assets. Liquidity boosts periodically generated extremely high turnover, but they did not turn into a long trajectory with repeatable token usage. This is most noticeable with PEPE.

RWA outside gold. Despite the focus on the sector, demand for the use of settlements and posting of collateral, as opposed to hard collateral, was not stable across all RWA-linked projects, as evidenced by the notable decline at ONDO.

Decentralized data storage. While we have seen several waves of major attention and even catalysts, such as the failure of centralized providers, the value of the infrastructure did not translate into resilient use. FIL, which was highly relevant in these scenarios, felt this most strongly at the end of the year.

• Aptos (APT) −81.2% 1 year, price $1.73, volume $197,028,721
• POL (ex-MATIC) −78.1% 1 year, price $0.1069, volume $49,727,231
• Pepe (PEPE) −77.8% 1 year, price $0.054153, volume $222,068,671
• Ethena (ENA) −77.6% 1 year, price $0.2126, volume $146,184,377
• Worldcoin (WLD) −77.2% 1 year, price $0.5084, volume $80,424,235
• Arbitrum (ARB) −75.2% 1 year, price $0.1934, volume $74,642,915
• Filecoin (FIL) −74.4% 1 year, price $1.33, volume $131,378,177
• Polkadot (DOT) −73.9% 1 year, price $1.86, volume $143,095,418
• Ondo (ONDO) −73.5% 1 year, price $0.3868, volume $42,476,497
• Toncoin (TON) −71.7% 1 year, price $1.64, volume $103,229,787

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