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2021 has been bullish so far for ETH and tokens that live in the Ethereum ecosystem. With virtually all token prices performing well, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking ourselves genius investors.
Categorizing and comparing tokens provides a better sense for their relative performance. Inspired by this spreadsheet tracking token returns, we categorized more than 75 of Ethereum’s top tokens by market cap and compared how they performed in January 2021:
The best performing category by a clear margin was Asset Management, with a 361% gain in one month. Gaming came in second, followed by Exchange (further split into centralized ie CEX and decentralized ie DEX), L2/Sidechain and Derivative tokens.
Zooming into the tokens that make up this category, we see that the largest gains were made by ALPHA (Alpha), up a whopping 11x. ROOK (KeeperDAO) and INDEX (Index Coop) had returns of 300+% while the ‘old heads’ of YFI (Yearn) and MLN (Enzyme) lagged behind ETH with 41% and 38% respectively.
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Each gaming token beat the ETH benchmark. FUN (FunFair) topped the score with a 473% return while ENJ (Enjin) and MANA (Decentraland) gained 157% and 99% respectively.
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While CEX beat out their close cousins DEX, this was heavily influenced by VGX (Voyager) outstripping every other token with a return of 18x! Of the rest, only FTT (FTX exchange) beat ETH’s benchmark while other large cap CEX tokens NEXO (Nexo), CRO (Crypto.com), HT (Huobi), LEO (Bitfinex) and OKB (OKEx) underperformed.
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The biggest winner within the DEX category was DODO, up 8x in January. The performance of other tokens were more distributed than in CEX, with Automated Market Makers (AMM) and aggregators leading the pack. LON (Tokenlon), UNI (Uniswap), CRV (Curve), 1INCH, SUSHI (SushiSwap), LRC (Loopring), and BAL (Balancer) all outperformed the ETH benchmark. On the flip side, the original AMM, BNT (Bancor) performed the worst in the entire category. Of the other DEX, SRM (Serum) and AST (Airswap) did better than ETH while ZRX (0x) and KNC (Kyber) lagged behind.
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Layer 2 and sidechains are projects that can help alleviate congestion on Ethereum by processing transactions on a separate chain. FTM (Fantom) is the clear winner here with a 693% return (after announcing FTMscan on Jan 19th). Other sidechains QNT (Quant), MATIC and STAKE (xDAI) each did better than ETH. For L2, LRC (Loopring) rose early and kept up a 175% return while OMG (Omisego) is the only token to perform worse than ETH.
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Following the trend of other top performing categories, Derivatives had one clear leader in PERP (Perpetual) with a return of 477%. Only UMA underperformed ETH, while the remaining HEGIC, MIR (Mirror), SNX (Synthetix), DDX (DerivaDAO) and FTT all performed better.
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The worst performing category in January 2021 was DAO, though it still returned a positive 11.8%. BTC-backed tokens were the next lowest as BTC underperformed Ethereum & top ERC20 tokens, followed by Prediction, Browser and Wrapper tokens.
Tokens included in the DAO category are only those whose projects are platforms for building DAOs — yield farming DAOs are excluded. Here we see ANT (Aragon) at 31% and GEN (DAOstack) at -8%.
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As all tokens here are backed by BTC, their performance reflects BTC’s, lagging about 4x behind ETH. Returns between the tokens have been understandably close, with the largest gap on January 8 at 4.7%. BTC tokens listed are HBTC (Huobi), tBTC (Keep Network), wBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin), RENBTC (REN Protocol) and imBTC (imToken).
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Tokens in the prediction market category are older ICO-era tokens. Each of these underperformed ETH, with GNO (Gnosis), NMR (Numeraire) and REP (Augur) at 48%, 14% and 11% respectively.
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Browser tokens similarly are from ICO-era and underperformed ETH, with SNT (Status) returning 63% and BAT (Brave) returning 55%.
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In line with the performance of their underlying BTC backed tokens, both KEEP (Keep Network) and REN also underperformed ETH, though REN did so by only a slight margin.
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Of the other top tokens in Ethereum, we look at 5 other categories: Insurance, Lending, Middleware, Eth2 Depositors (tokens that incentivized staking on Eth2) and Yearn Family (YFI and tokens that have recently announced partnerships with Yearn).
Both LDO (Lido) and CREAM provided incentives for their users to deposit and stake ETH on Eth2. While CREAM performed admirably, LDO did not do as well.
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DeFi lending protocols, making up a huge component of the DeFi space, each had returns exceeding 100%. Aave topped the charts with both AAVE and LEND (old Aave token) having returns around 280%, followed by CREAM, MKR (MakerDAO) and COMP (Compound) respectively. In contrast, the only centralized lending platform, CEL (Celsius) had a negative return of -14%.
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Following a string of merger and partnership announcements by Yearn recently, the collective tokens involved with Yearn is an interesting category to look at. We see a diversity of returns, loosely grouped into 4:
The insurance category provides the most interesting chart in this article. It shows NXM (Nexus Mutual) closely tracking the price of ETH throughout January, ending the month 1% above ETH at 83%. The two other tokens ARMOR (Armor) and COVER were released partway through the month and had returns of 12% of -17% respectively.
Live dashboard
Of the projects providing services to other protocols in the ecosystem, API3 was the best performing token returning 182%. The other API service in this category, GRT (Graph) returned 70%. LINK (Chainlink) led the way for oracles with a 109% return, followed by BAND at 75% and KP3R at 35%. GLM (Golem), a provider of computing power, had a less-than-powerful return of 7%.
Live dashboard
As the charts show, January has been bullish for Ethereum! Since it may be a tad too early to check on 2021 returns and you may want to compare between your own tokens, bookmark this live Comparison Dashboard! It will keep updating over 2021 and you can compare up to 5 tokens of your choosing.
$100 dropped into each of these tokens on Jan 1 would net you $5,322 by Feb 1!
Do remember: token prices do not necessarily reflect the real value provided by each team above and we should strive to stay grounded & focused on building even through this bull season.
