In a sample of over 150 top altcoins, only 4% had a positive BTC return over the past year. Other than BNB, none of this 4% were even in the top 100 alts a year ago.

Bitcoin Has Been Hard To Beat

In the sample of 167 leading altcoins chosen by crypto analyst Ceteris Paribus, only 6 performed better than Bitcoin over the past 12 months. The combined BTC market cap of all 167 has dropped by a whopping 69%, from ₿23.4 million to ₿7.2 million.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Binance Coin aside, the top performers didn’t even register in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap a year ago.

Another similarity is that all of these coins see the majority of their volume traded on the Binance exchange, showing the importance of liquidity.

So who were the past year’s big winners?…

1. Chainlink (LINK)

If you really wanted to maximise your returns this year you had to be holding Chainlink. Chainlink is a decentralised oracle service to connect smart contracts to data from the outside world. Smart contracts cannot access data outside of their blockchain, so oracles act as a data feed to trigger them from external events (e.g. temperature).

But who cares about all that, when LINK token is up 637% in BTC terms over the past year. A year in which bitcoin itself saw an overall 50% gain. However it should be noted that Chainlink is also suffering during bitcoin’s current price correction.

2. Holochain (HOT)

Holochain is a decentralised applications (DApp) platform, using peer-to-peer networking to reduce unnecessary synchronisation and increase DApp scalability.

It listed on Binance almost a year ago, and is up 97% against bitcoin in the past 12 months. In fact, it was one of Bitcoinist’s top picks to outperform BTC back in November.

It’s a far cry from Chainlink’s 637%, but still mightily respectable.

3. Ravencoin (RVN)

Ravencoin is another altcoin that we’ve been keeping an eye on, here at Bitcoinist. The open-source blockchain project allows the creation and peer-to-peer transfer of any real-world or digital assets.

Over the past year it is up 91% in BTC terms. So anybody crazy enough to put all of their BTC holdings into RVN tokens a year ago could now exchange them back for almost twice as much bitcoin.

Obviously, you would never have done that, but if you did…

4. Binance Coin (BNB)

Binance Coin needs no introduction. It’s march from ‘interesting’ exchange token to serious player has been well documented. The past twelve months have seen it gain 31% against BTC. That may seem like a trifle compared to the top three performers, but compounded with bitcoin’s own 50% overall gain, that’s still a very healthy return.

5. Ren (REN)

Ren is an open protocol to enable the permissionless and private transfer of value between blockchains. It has seen a 28% increase in BTC value in the past year, making it almost as good an investment as BNB.

6. Enjin Coin (ENJ)

Enjin coin supports the gaming industry and community. The final token in the sample to outperform BTC, it saw just a 1% gain in comparison.

Still, while many are waiting for altseason, it’s good to know that some alts wait for no man.

Have you backed any of these top performing alts in your portfolio this year? Let us know in the comment section below!

Images via Shutterstock, Messari.io

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