2022 was not a good year for the crypto market at all, but there were some projects that performed better than average: here are the ones in which investment should have been made.
However, we need to distinguish between crypto projects that performed well in 2022 and projects that simply lost less than others.
The best crypto projects in which one should have invested in early 2022
Among the first, the most emblematic case is Trust Wallet.
Trust Wallet Token (TWT)
TWT is the token of Trust Wallet.
Trust Wallet is by far one of the most widely used non-custodial software wallets in the world. For some time now, Trust Wallet has been behind Binance, which is the world’s largest crypto exchange.
Although Trust Wallet has been around for a long time, its token only debuted in the crypto markets in 2020, at a price of about $0.01.
Thanks to the bull run of 2021, the price had first skyrocketed to $1, and then even briefly exceeded $1.5.
By early 2022 the price had fallen, following the general trend of crypto markets, to around $0.5, but by the end of February, it had begun a strong rebound.
By early November the price was back above $1, but after the collapse of FTX and the sudden boom in withdrawals of funds from custodial wallets of centralized exchanges, it spiked up to $2.7 on 11 December.
Although it later returned to $1.3, it is still a curious positive performance of more than +100% since the beginning of the year, since the price was $0.7 in early January.
Among the first and second-tier cryptocurrencies, this is the best-ever performance for 2022.
GMX
However, there are also those who did better.
In the top 100, only GMX did better than TWT, and these are the only two cryptocurrencies with largely positive results in 2022. To find other cases one has to go beyond the 200th place.
It is worth mentioning, though, that the case of GMX is peculiar.
In fact, it only debuted in the crypto markets in September 2021 at a price of $15. However, it closed the year at $21, with a peak in November of nearly $43.
In January 2022, the price jumped to over $57, then plunged near its lows in June, when it fell to $13.
However, in July it rose again to a new annual high on 13 December at $58.
Actually, the all-time high is even $217, touched in November last year, but it was the result of a single very short spike that should be considered a mere anomaly.
So the GMX case is very different from that of TWT, because it is a very young token that is still in a very volatile phase.
However, at this point we also need to highlight which cryptocurrencies have performed the least worse among the major ones.
Binance Coin (BNB)
Among the top 10, excluding stablecoins, Binance Coin (BNB) had the best performance.
Although it has lost a little bit of its luster recently, due to doubts about Binance’s resilience, its price performance in 2022 is -53%. It is enough to consider that Bitcoin is -64% and ETH -67%.
Even taking the loss from absolute highs as a reference, BTC is at -76%, ETH at -75%, and BNB at -64%.
In fact, it has performed very similarly to the other major cryptocurrencies, but with a slightly smaller loss.
Then again, Binance remains the undisputed leader in the crypto market, and its position actually strengthened even further after the closure of FTX.
It can come as no surprise, therefore, that BNB is among the major cryptocurrencies performing the least worse in this bear market.
Tron (TRX)
Among the second-tier cryptocurrencies, Tron (TRX) stands out.
In fact, although it is -82% from the highs, its performance in 2022 stops at a very moderate -29%.
In fact, it is worth mentioning that in 2021 TRX failed to make new highs, hence the -82% takes as a reference point the $0.3 of 5 January 2018. If one instead calculates the loss from 2021 high, namely the $0.15 touched in April, the current price loses 67%.
It is worth noting, however, that in November 2020, i.e., before the last big bull run began, TRX’s price was only $0.03, i.e., well below the current $0.05. So 2022 is not a particularly bad year for Tron at all, except that it still lost a bit from last year’s peaks.
What is special about TRX is that it is being used for paying transaction fees on Tron.
The fact is that for some time now most transactions in USDT have been happening on the Tron network, and not on Ethereum. In fact, on Tron they are faster, and more importantly they cost very little, so more and more Tether users are choosing Tron as the blockchain on which to transact. This leads to greater use of TRX, which then loses less value than other cryptocurrencies.
Toncoin (TON)
One of the most interesting cases is Toncoin (TON).
This is the cryptocurrency of the former Telegram Open Network (TON), now renamed The Open Network.
So far in 2022 TON has lost only 45%, and 64% from last year’s highs, but it is in recent weeks in particular that it has performed well.
TON is actually a young cryptocurrency, because it only debuted in the crypto markets in August last year at $0.5.
It peaked in November of that year at over $5.8, then dropped to $1.8 and back to $4.3 at the end of the year. Thus the level at the end of December 2021 was not much lower than the all-time high in November.
During 2022, the price plummeted to $0.8 in June, but starting in August it began to rise again.
After returning to $1.8 in September, and then dropping back to $1.2, it first returned to 1.8 and then by 11 December had skyrocketed to $2.7 in just a few days.
It is therefore still a young and volatile cryptocurrency, but the interesting thing is that the rise in the very last few months is due to more and more usage thanks to the new features provided by Telegram‘s official crypto wallet.
That is, as with TRX, the rise is related to increased usage, which is perhaps why it is performing not as badly as the others from a market price perspective.
Monero (XMR)
Among the top 25, it is also worth mentioning Monero (XMR).
In 2022 XMR now stands at -41%, which jumps to -72% if the all-time high of May 2021 is taken as a reference.
What is surprising about Monero is that, apart from highs due to real spikes, its value seems to be much less volatile than that of other cryptocurrencies.
The fact is that XMR is still to this day by far the most widely used high-privacy cryptocurrency in the world.
It has existed in the crypto markets since as far back as 2014, and its current value of around $150 is not that far off from $131 in August 2017.
Since it is used precisely as a cryptocurrency for crypto transactions, it tends to have relatively constant usage over time, and thus also a less volatile market value than others.
The current price is also in line with that of July 2018, December 2020, and January 2021, for example.
Monero has shown exceptional resilience, although at times its price can go up a lot, or down a lot, even very quickly. Despite being a crypto project that is now several years old, it does not seem to be losing its luster.
