Decentraland the fastest growing crypto
Important takeaways
- Decentraland has added more holders than any token since last year, increasing 469% according to eToro
- Top 3 movers include MANA (metaverse), SHIBA (meme) and ENJ (gaming)
- Bitcoin is the most popular crypto, pushing last year’s leader Cardano down to second place
- Shiba the biggest riser, jumping from 16th most popular to 6th among eToro investors
Prices in the crypto markets have only gone one way this year – down.
But despite the carnage, when you zoom out and consider the number of investors that have poured into the space in recent years, adoption has increased tremendously.
By reviewing eToro data, we assessed which coins have grown the most in popularity with crypto investors this year.
Decentraland the fastest growing crypto
Looking at the growth in investors compared to the same time last year, there is a wide range of coin types in the top 10.
King of the hill is metaverse token Decentraland, with a staggering 437% increase in holders on eToro compared to Q3 last year.
The Metaverse token has had a rollercoaster ride in the same time frame. Trading this time last year at $0.78, it rocketed upwards to $5.48 before falling back to earth to trade at $0.70 – lower than a year ago.
The growth in holders will be welcome news as Decentraland looks to continue building its virtual reality blockchain world. It also came wrapped in a story of how low users were last month, but the report appeared to be misleading.
Still trading within the top 50 cryptos at a market cap north of $1 billion, but with more and more rivals in this space, Decentraland will be interesting to watch going forward.
To the surprise of almost no one, SHIBA is in second place with a whopping 269% growth in holders compared to this time last year. The Dogecoin alternative took the crypto world by storm this year, making absolutely outrageous gains.
Breaking a market cap of $41 billion at its peak, SHIBA is now 87% of that brand. With 269% more users having the dog tag compared to last year, it is tempting to wonder how many of these latecomers are in the red.
Enjin completes the top 3, the blockchain gaming token. Perhaps nothing sums up the far-reaching reach of crypto more than the top three movements of the past year that occupied the contrasting spaces of a metaverse token, a meme, and a gaming token.
Shiba the largest riser
If we look at the cryptocurrencies by total number of users, Bitcoin is unsurprisingly at the top. The original crypto was actually number two on eToro last year, behind Cardano, which boasts a notoriously fervent community.
Ethereum comes in third, but it’s really the jump to Shiba that is the most jarring compared to last year. The meme token was in sixteenth place in Q3 of 2021, but is now in sixth place, just one place behind the famous Dogecoin. Imagine predicting that last year.
Final thoughts
It’s obviously been a torrid year for crypto. The macro environment is the worst it has been in the short life of crypto – remember that Satoshi launched Bitcoin only in 2009.
The numbers above help show that when you zoom out and look at the underlying fundamentals, the long-term trajectory of crypto is still up. Sure, there are plenty of tokens collapsing towards zero, but there are also projects with thousands of investors that barely existed last year.
