Year-End Top Coins: Hard-Collateral RWA, High-Performance L1/L2, Privacy Settlements, Enterprise Rails, AIxCrypto

Watching the year-end top coins: Hard-collateral RWA, high-performance L1/L2, privacy-focused settlements, enterprise rails, and AI as an industry focus this year. In particular, we saw strong interest throughout 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-end, the most clearly established and resilient themes were hard-collateral RWA, ecosystem tokens of leading crypto platforms, and a sharp surge in protocol-level privacy-focused settlement tokens.

Among the yearly 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 Business. The market confirms demand for infrastructure for B2B use cases and integrations with traditional systems. Canton (CC) and XDC Network (XDC).

Protocol-Level Privacy Settlements. Confidential payments remain a standalone demand loop with resilient liquidity. Zcash (ZEC) and Dash (DASH).

Base L1s as the Execution Layer. Interest in general-purpose networks with predictable execution persists. Toncoin (TON) and Tezos (XTZ).

Staking Infrastructure and Yield. Liquid staking has established itself as a mandatory layer for PoS ecosystems, confirmed by Lido DAO (LDO).

Retail and Micro-Cap Narratives. Payment rails for retail users and speculative low-cap impulses periodically capture flow, as we see by 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 crypto coins this year, and most of them had infrastructure relevance and the potential to combine several key technologies. In particular, effective L1s and L2s aimed at the public sector and enterprise segment, and AI integrations in blockchain and crypto often stayed near the top for weeks, but year-end left only some.

Protocol-Level Privacy Settlements. The market established a distinct on-chain payment rail with privacy priority and L1 finality. Wallets and P2P transfers use this rail without external overlays, which makes usage straightforward 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 observed 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 lock in strong results by year-end.

Payment L1s. Infrastructure and applied networks focused on transfers and predictable finality acted as a settlement layer for retail, but by year-end, only BCH managed to hold on to positive growth.

Perpetual Liquidity on Solana. The Solana ecosystem performed particularly well this year, and liquidity providers like JLP reflected this most clearly.

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

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Out of Favor This Year: Some L1/L2, RWA ex Gold, Decentralized Storage

Broad Execution L1 and L2. Not all foundational platforms maintained resilient demand, and, for example, the year-end results were not favorable for APT, ARB, POL, DOT, and TON.

Synthetic Yield and Yield-Bearing Stablecoins. Embedding yield directly into the monetary instrument drew strong interest, but it also did not establish itself in the market. For example, ENA did not become a universal collateral and did not show resilient usage.

Meme Assets. Liquidity impulses periodically drove extremely high turnover, but they did not turn into a long trajectory with repeatable token usage. This is most noticeable in PEPE.

RWA Outside Gold. Despite the industry focus, unlike hard collateral, demand for settlement use and collateralization was not stable across all RWA-linked projects, as indicated by the notable drawdown in ONDO.

Decentralized Data Storage. Although we saw several waves of major attention and even catalysts such as failures of centralized providers, the infrastructure value did not translate into resilient usage. FIL, which was highly relevant in those scenarios, felt this most strongly by year-end.

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

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