The crypto market in 2021 was truly fascinating. I took a look back at the performance of the best cryptocurrencies that year and found several interesting phenomena worth discussing.

That year, the market skyrocketed from under $800 billion to $2.2 trillion. While Bitcoin and Ethereum's gains were relatively moderate (BTC up 66% annually, ETH up 418%), the performance of other assets was downright crazy. I noticed three clear profit themes at the time: the Metaverse, Layer 1 blockchain competitors, and meme coins.

The Metaverse wave was the most intense. The Sandbox's SAND surged 162 times from start to end of the year, Axie Infinity's AXS increased 161 times, and Decentraland's MANA also rose nearly 40 times. At that time, Facebook rebranded to Meta, and the entire community was thinking about the future of virtual worlds. Axie Infinity was especially interesting; it became hugely popular in the Philippines and Venezuela, where many unemployed people earned crypto by playing the game.

Then there was the so-called "Ethereum killer." Ethereum's gas fees were insanely high, and everyone was looking for cheaper alternatives. Polygon, as an Ethereum sidechain, surged 14,500%, Terra's LUNA increased 140 times (when UST stablecoin just broke the $10 billion market cap), and Fantom, Solana, Avalanche also entered the top 10. These Layer 1 projects attracted a large number of DeFi and NFT users that year.

The meme coin story was even more outrageous. Dogecoin, boosted by Elon Musk's tweets, soared to $0.74, up 3,000% for the year. Later, SHIB took over, rising 1,600%. While the community debated technical details, some people were betting on which dog coin could skyrocket next.

Looking back at the 2021 best crypto rankings, it’s a bit ironic. The projects that shined then now perform very differently—SAND down 70%, LUNA down 65%, FTM even down 90%. That’s crypto markets for you: hot topics rotate quickly. The winners of that year weren’t necessarily long-term winners, but the market narratives during that period were definitely interesting. If you want to see what happened in 2021, Gate has complete historical data you can check.