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Top Crypto Narratives Record -21% to +2,940% Returns in 2024

4.3
| by
Yuqian Lim
-

Which Crypto Narratives Have the Highest Returns?

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 makes the AI and memecoin narratives more than twice as profitable as other popular crypto narratives.

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. However, 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. This was 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 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).

Modest Gains for Layer 1, DePIN & DeFi Narratives

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, holding just Bitcoin would have enabled conservative investors to capture profits that are on par with at least three major crypto narratives this year.

Gaming & Layer 2 Narratives Underperform

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.

Most Profitable Crypto Narratives

Crypto narratives’ performance in 2024, ranked by the average annual price returns across their 10 largest tokens:

Rank Crypto Narrative Average Returns
1 AI 2939.82%
2 Memecoin 2185.11%
3 RWA 819.54%
4 Layer 1 142.46%
5 DePIN 135.37%
6 DeFi 101.44%
7 Gaming 14.65%
8 Layer 2 -20.70%

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. 

This study is for illustrative and informational purposes only, and is not financial advice. Always do your own research and be careful when putting your money into any crypto or financial asset.


If you cite these insights, we would appreciate a link credit to this article on CoinGecko, which allows us to keep supplying you with useful data-led content.

Curious to find out more about our previous research studies & statistics? Check out this one we did on the performance of Bitcoin versus traditional assets.

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Yuqian Lim
Yuqian Lim
Yuqian is a crypto research analyst at CoinGecko, covering a range of topics from NFTs to ETFs, crypto adoption and interest, and beyond. She's especially fascinated by the philosophical and socioeconomic aspects of crypto. She holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences with Honors from the National University of Singapore. Follow the author on Twitter @solosbrqt

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