The most profitable crypto narratives in 2024 are AI, which “recorded the highest average price gains of 2,939.8% year to date (YTD), followed by memecoins which saw returns of 2,185.1% YTD.” This, according to a report from CoinGecko.
This makes the AI and memecoin narratives “more than twice as profitable as other popular crypto narratives,” the CoinGecko report noted.
As mentioned in the latest research study, the memecoin narrative had initially started to “outperform other narratives in March, when its returns skyrocketed from 96.6% to 1,713.1% in a single month.”
Memecoins then continued to achieve the highest returns and “led as the most profitable narrative for most of 2024, despite high volatility.”
But after reaching a record high return of 3,211.4% on December 9, the memecoin narrative saw a “pullback in prices as interest in memecoins slowed down.”
In contrast, the AI narrative enjoyed a strong year-end rally “with its returns almost doubling from 1,598.1% to 2,939.8% in December.”
According to the CoinGecko repot, this was said to be largely driven by the surging “popularity of AI agent launchpad Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL), which is also the top crypto gainer for the year.”
As a result, the report from CoinGecko pointed out that AI narrative ultimately “overtook the memecoin narrative in late December.”
Meanwhile, RWA ranked as the “third most profitable crypto narrative at 819.5% in average returns YTD.”
The RWA narrative started the year with steadily increasing returns “that reached 365.3% by April 12, but ranged sideways for the next six months.”
The RWA narrative subsequently “resumed its rally in November, led by a spike in the price of MANTRA (OM).”
As noted in the CoinGecko report, the Layer 1, DePIN and DeFi narratives performed similarly in 2024, recording modest returns of 142.5%, 135.4% and 101.4% respectively.
This means that the Layer 1 and DePIN narratives only slightly “outperformed Bitcoin itself, which gained 125.5% during the same period, whereas the DeFi narrative turned out to be less profitable than Bitcoin.”
In other words, the report revealed that holding just Bitcoin would have enabled “conservative investors to capture profits that are on par with at least three major crypto narratives this year.”
The GameFi and Layer 2 narratives emerged as the “least profitable narratives in 2024, underperforming even in comparison to Ethereum’s 49.0% returns.”
Specifically, the GameFi narrative saw just “14.7% in returns YTD, with six out of the 10 largest gaming tokens experiencing losses between 3.1% to 32.9%.”
On the other hand, Layer 2 was the only loss-making narrative this year, with a “negative return of 20.7%.”
Seven out of the 10 largest Layer 2 tokens recorded price “decreases ranging from 6.3% to 75.3%, amid a growing trend of projects seeking to launch their own Layer 2s.”
Methodology
The study examined the most popular crypto narratives’ performance from January 1 to December 29, 2024, based on CoinGecko data for “each narrative’s 10 biggest tokens’ average daily price returns compared to the start of the year, or the first day of available price data for tokens that were launched during the year.”
The representative tokens in each narrative were “selected by their market capitalization ranking on the last day of the period.”
For the purposes of this study, crypto narratives that are “chain-specific, had a limited number of large market capitalization tokens or had high overlap with other narratives were excluded.”