A quick overview of Forbes' "Top Ten Tokens" for the first half of 2024

Author: 1912212.eth, Foresight News

After the official approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs for trading at the beginning of this year, the crypto market experienced a significant surge, with some MEME coins performing exceptionally well alongside Bitcoin. Although the market began to decline after April this year, some tokens still showed impressive market performance overall.

Recently, Forbes announced the top ten best-performing cryptocurrencies with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion in the first half of 2024, including WIF, PEPE, ASI, FLOKI, JASMY, AR, CORE, TON, BGB, and BONK. Notably, MEME coins accounted for 4 of the listings, with 3 of them belonging to the Solana ecosystem.

WIF

A MEME coin from the Solana ecosystem, with a total supply of approximately 998 million tokens. Its logo features a Shiba Inu wearing a knitted beanie, and it has the highest return rate among about 70 tokens with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion, with an increase of approximately 1,300%.

WIF first opened at a price of $0.00016 on November 20, 2023. On January 11, 2024, the price reached about $0.17, and a whale lost 77,247 SOL (worth about $7.7 million at the time) in a massive WIF transaction, causing its price to briefly surge to $3.99. This whale had purchased 17.22 million WIF, valued at over $30 million.

About a week later, Binance launched WIF perpetual contracts. By March 3, WIF's total market capitalization (approximately $1.685 billion) surpassed BONK (approximately $1.591 billion), ranking 66th in the cryptocurrency market capitalization list. Just two days later, on March 5, Binance officially launched WIF spot trading pairs. On March 18, its total market capitalization surpassed PEPE, and on March 31, it reached an all-time high of $4.86.

PEPE

PEPE was born in April 2023, with trading officially starting on April 15. The initial price was approximately $0.000000001, with a total supply of 420.69 trillion. In just one month, PEPE's market capitalization exceeded $400 million, entering the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. The creation of PEPE was a rebellion against the complex token economic models of the "dog series" MEME. It avoided complex operations such as presales, burning, and taxes in its tokenomics. Additionally, its frog image is favored in Western pop culture.

On October 24, 2023, 6.9 trillion PEPE tokens were burned. On February 28, 2024, PEPE's total market capitalization first broke the $1 billion mark. On March 13, after Musk posted PEPE-related images, the price rose above $0.000009, completing its first token price drop to 0 the next day. On May 22, its total market capitalization surpassed $5 billion and peaked at over $7 billion a week later.

ASI

In March this year, SingularityNET (AGIX), Fetch.ai (FET), and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) announced the merger of their tokens to create a decentralized AI alliance. The alliance aims to provide a decentralized alternative to projects currently controlled by large tech companies. The merged token was renamed ASI (representing "Artificial Super Intelligence"). The merger voting began in April and was approved, officially completing on July 15.

Before the merger, the three AI project tokens had already shown significant returns. With the overall market and the AI wave, OCEAN rose from $0.5 at the beginning of the year to a peak of over $1.4. FET increased from $0.7 to a peak of over $3.2, while AGIX rose from $0.3 to around $1.4.

FLOKI

FLOKI is a token named after the Shiba Inu of the world's richest man, Elon Musk. At the end of October last year, Floki launched its cryptocurrency and asset tokenization platform TokenFi, allocating 56% of the TOKEN distribution to Floki stakers. Since its launch, TOKEN has risen from $0.01 to a peak of over $0.2, an increase of more than 20 times.

At the beginning of this year, benefiting from the overall market uptrend, FLOKI surged from $0.00003 to $0.000313, an increase of nearly 10 times, but did not reach a new historical high during the last bull market cycle. On May 27, Floki developers launched a Telegram-based trading bot for FLOKI holders on the BNB Chain network, charging a 1% fee on each transaction, with 50% of the fees used to buy FLOKI on the open market. This positive news once pushed FLOKI's price up over 23%, soaring from $0.00022 to a peak of $0.00029.

On June 4, DWF Labs purchased $12 million worth of FLOKI tokens to support the FLOKI ecosystem. Following this positive news, FLOKI reached an all-time high of $0.000349 amid the MEME surge the next day, but the upward trend soon came to a halt and began to decline.

JASMY

This project may not be well-known to most investors; it is one of the few tokens listed on Binance and Coinbase that is a Japanese DePIN project. It provides data security, storage, and interaction services for IoT environments based on blockchain technology and other foundational services. It matches service providers with data users, allowing service providers to collect user-owned data from various sources, package it, and sell it to data users.

In the second half of 2023, Jasmy also developed an Ethereum Layer 2 solution—Jasmy Chain—to enhance scalability and provide a more transparent, secure, and personalized data interaction experience. After this, its token price, stimulated by the overall market and positive project news, rose from the bottom range, reaching around $0.006 at the beginning of the year, and soared to over $0.027 during the market surge in February and March.

After several months of consolidation, Jasmy rose to $0.04469 on June 7, marking a new high since April 2022. However, it still has a long way to go to reach its historical high of $4.29.

AR

Arweave is a decentralized permanent storage project, which was a star in the storage track alongside Filecoin during the last cycle.

On February 27 of this year, it announced the development of the AO supercomputer testnet, designed to provide a computing layer for social media and AI design. This news triggered a 17.35% increase on the same day, followed by a further surge of 50.67% the next day, with the price skyrocketing from $15.6 to $29.6 in just two days. Subsequently, it resonated with the overall market, rising to a peak of $47.5 in March, achieving five consecutive weekly gains. Finally, it reached $49.55 at the end of May, marking a new high since March 2022.

On June 6, Arweave acquired the decentralized video sharing platform Odysee, built on the LBRY protocol, to create a social media platform free from government censors and content moderators. This news did not significantly boost the price, which continued to decline due to negative market influences.

CORE

Core DAO is responsible for developing the Satoshi + ecosystem. Core is a Layer-1 blockchain that combines the decentralization and security of Bitcoin with the scalability and usability of Ethereum.

At the end of March this year, it launched a six-month Core Ignition airdrop incentive program to reward users and developers for their contributions to network growth. Following the announcement of this program, the CORE token steadily rose from a bottom price of $0.6 to a high of $4.45 on April 2.

Just one month later, on April 18, Core DAO launched a $200 million ecosystem fund aimed at accelerating the development of decentralized applications and protocols based on the Core Layer 1 blockchain. Interestingly, this positive news did not boost the price; instead, on April 15, it saw a single-day increase of 83%, with the price rising from $1.43 to $2.8866.

Earlier this year, Core DAO released a vision document stating plans to launch non-custodial Bitcoin staking and the Core native wrapped Bitcoin, coreBTC.

TON

TON has a technical logic centered on high-speed applications: transactions are directly on-chain based on messages, supporting peer-to-peer interactions. TON's dynamic sharding architecture also facilitates the scalability of its applications. Dan Morehead, founder of Pantera Capital, stated that he made the largest investment in the fund's history in TON. In June this year, Bitget partnered with Foresight Ventures to establish a $20 million TON ecosystem fund to support ecosystem development.

Recently, The Open Network (TON) team announced that it will soon launch its own Layer 2 network based on Polygon technology. The new protocol, named TON Applications Chain (TAC), will utilize Polygon's Chain Development Kit (CDK), allowing developers to create their own Layer 2 blockchains based on Polygon's zero-knowledge technology.

At the beginning of this year, during the market's upward trend, TON did not show any remarkable performance; instead, it began to rise steadily from March as the overall market started to decline. In April, it experienced a significant surge.

On April 9, its total market capitalization surpassed ADA, and on April 15, it reached $18.9 billion, surpassing Dogecoin. At this time, TON's price fluctuated around $6. On April 19, Tether expanded USDT to the TON network. On April 23, TON announced that users could now purchase USDt-TON through Wallet in Telegram, but the price did not improve significantly until May 3, when the on-chain USDT issuance on TON exceeded 100 million tokens. On that day, TON rose over 10% and began a continuous upward trend. By June 15, the authorized issuance of USDT on the TON chain had increased to approximately $580 million, making it the sixth-largest blockchain for USDT issuance, following Tron, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Omni. On that day, TON reached its all-time high of $8.288.

BGB

BGB is the platform token of the exchange Bitget. In the first half of 2024, centralized exchanges experienced significant growth, with total spot trading volume reaching $10.6 trillion, a 145% increase compared to the second half of 2023, with Bitget's market share growing the most, reaching 38.4%. Additionally, in the first half of 2024, Bitget's market share increased by 38.4% compared to the second half of 2023, with the derivatives market seeing the highest increase in open interest, growing by 39.2%.

Bitget continuously empowers BGB through user participation in trading fee discounts and new token launches, having launched high-quality projects such as ENA, ZKJ, and ZETA in just the first half of the year. Furthermore, Bitget has been aggressive in launching new tokens, attracting many new users.

Against the backdrop of increasing user numbers and market share, BGB rose from around $0.6 at the beginning of the year and reached an all-time high of $1.486 on May 27, with a single-day increase of over 20%.

BONK

BONK is a dog-themed MEME coin from the Solana ecosystem, launched in 2022, initially distributed as an airdrop to compensate FTX victims. A total of 100 trillion BONK tokens were issued, with 50% airdropped to the Solana community.

In 2023, BONK ranked first in returns among the top 100 cryptocurrencies, with a 73-fold increase. On December 15 of that year, Binance officially listed BONK, causing its price to briefly rise to $0.00004. However, this was short-lived, and it soon began to decline, even falling below $0.00001 in mid-January. It wasn't until early March, driven by a hot market, that it reached its historical high of $0.000048. Since then, BONK has remained in the range of $0.00002 to $0.00003.