The top 10 list on CMC has seen some unusual and crazy stuff come and go over the past decade. As CMC turns 10, let's take a quick look at the evolution of crypto!
It’s throwback time!
We at CoinMarketCap are celebrating our 10th anniversary. Yes, CMC has been around for ten years now! Ten years of bringing you the latest data on coins and tokens, come hell or high water.
Yep, we’ve seen some crazy stuff come and go…
And by stuff, we mean cryptocurrencies that made the top 10 on CoinMarketCap.
Time for a walk down memory lane to see what kind of hilarious, unusual and, sometimes, respectable cryptocurrencies have made the CoinMarketCap top 10 over the years.
2013
Some bangers in CoinMarketCap’s first year. One can’t help but wonder how PPCoin was pronounced correctly. Feathercoin seemed to have had a particularly bad day when the screenshot was taken.
But there are also some familiar logos. The top 3 have stayed remarkably resilient, and we’ll, of course, see Bitcoin at the top spot in every single year to come (in this list).
2014
The early days of crypto were not known for creative coin names. [Name]coin was the name of the game back then. The guys behind Mastercoin and Namecoin didn’t try very hard. A potentially politically-incorrect name was BlackCoin, but that’s water under the bridge now.
2014 also featured another familiar face, with Dogecoin making its first appearance in the top 10.
2015
Still no changes at the top spots, but you do have to give it to MaidSafeCoin, which ranked 8th in 2015. That is some true trailblazer work when it comes to coins with meme-able names. On the other hand, Dash was another coin that hung around the top 10 for quite a while at that time.
2016
2016 was the year when the number two spot would be occupied once and for all by Ethereum. But behind that, there are the first signs of DAO cryptocurrencies, like DigixDAO. MaidSafeCoin, impressively enough, was still hanging in there.
2017
2017 will always be remembered as the year of the first big, mainstream bull run. And accordingly, the top 10 coins look sort of serious, with almost no obvious scams in sight. Ripple and Litecoin were still standing strong, Ethereum Classic was (unsuccessfully) trying to spar with its bigger brother, and Monero was the choice of privacy connoisseurs.
But crypto wouldn’t be crypto if there wasn’t a coin rushing its way up in the top 10 all of a sudden, only to be found nowhere in the top 100 later on. That was probably Golem’s role, ranked 10th…
2018
The first big, brutal bear market made all the unusual coins go poof. There are a lot of familiar faces in the crowd: Cardano, which, incredibly, still hangs around the top 10 these days. Justin Sun’s Tron (still securing the 9th rank at the time of writing).
2019
2019 features completely new kids on the block. Tether was the first of its kind, and obviously not the last. So was Binance Coin, being the first exchange coin to make it into the top 10. A new era of crypto was dawning…
2020
Not much had changed one year later, besides one more Bitcoin fork making its way into the market. Tether was already close to the top, although it was far less stable than nowadays, as evidenced by that bumpy graph. The days of unusual coin names were long gone it seemed…
2021
…and then came 2021 and crypto showed us, once again, to expect the unexpected (hinting at Internet Computer). Not much change in the list, as cryptocurrencies already became entrenched.
2022
The second mainstream bear market, and by now, you are probably familiar with all of the coins. There are some OG coins leading the pack, some stables to keep your powder dry, some functioning and not-so-much-functioning alternative layer-1 chains, and Dogecoin. It all looks very familiar.
2023
This brings us to 2023 and the current top 10 by market cap. The list has basically remained unchanged. Will the future of crypto bring back unusual names in the top 10?
It looks unlikely, but crypto has shown us before: expect the unexpected.
But what we can say with certainty is that you can count on CoinMarketCap to provide you with the latest data on the crypto revolution. Here’s to another 10 years!
To wrap things up, Here’s a nifty chart that shows the top performing Large-Cap coins from the last 10-Years.
Between 2013 and 2023, the total crypto market capitalization increased from $1.649 billion to over $1.22 trillion, representing a staggering 73,882% increase. The number of coins listed on CoinMarketCap rose from just 10 in 2013 to 26,192 at present. We examined the coins that have consistently maintained a position in the top 100 market cap and evaluated their performance over the last decade. This chart summarizes the top 20 coins based on these criteria.
According to data, out of all the large-cap coins, Shiba Inu emerged as the best-performing asset. In fact, memecoins like DOGE and SHIB secure positions among the top five crypto assets that have generated the highest returns. BNB, introduced by the crypto exchange Binance, secured the second-place position, largely due to Binance's exponential growth. On the other hand, Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency, secured sixth place, despite the fact that its returns since inception would position it at the top.
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