3 Privacy Coins Rank in Top 10 Gainers, Amid Late 2025 Revival

What Are the Top Crypto Gainers of 2025?

MYX Finance (MYX) is by far the top crypto gainer in 2025, achieving the highest year-to-date (YTD) price returns of 3,358.15% among the largest market capitalization crypto assets. The BNB Chain-native derivatives protocol launched its token at around $0.097 on May 6 this year. Subsequently, $MYX enjoyed strong price gains on the back of its airdrop programme, as well as the popularity of the perpetuals narrative and BNB Chain ecosystem. 

However, MYX Finance also faced severe criticisms about its token airdrop recipients and allegations of insider trading when $MYX spiked to an all-time high price of $19.03 on September 11. While the low float token has since corrected below $3.00 at the time of the study, it is still up significantly compared to its launch price. Nevertheless, market participants are likely watching to see if the derivatives DEX’s fundamentals will be able to match up to its price outperformance.

Zcash (ZEC) has emerged as the second highest crypto gainer in 2025, after securing 573.72% in price returns YTD. $ZEC started to rally in late September amid renewed interest in the privacy narrative, and reached $120.62 on October 2, reclaiming price levels last seen in May 2022. In contrast to the gradual decline of the total crypto market capitalization during that period, the $ZEC breakout enjoyed strong momentum that peaked at $698.87 on November 17. 

Similarly, other major privacy-focused projects have benefited from this comeback and managed to rank among the top 10 gainers: Monero (XMR) which has been on an uptrend since mid-August and recorded returns of 115.96% YTD to rank 6th, and Midnight Network (NIGHT) which recently launched its token on December 9 and is up by 58.39% since. 

Meme Coin Mania Finally Exhausted?

While the top crypto gainers ranking was dominated by meme coins in 2024, none made it in this year. 

Instead, the top gainers ranking has seen a more diversified representation from numerous narratives: Prediction market Rain Protocol (RAIN) which recorded the third highest gains of 184.83%; payments and RWA platform Zebec Network (ZBCN) followed close behind with returns of 164.08%; SocialFi layer 2 Zora (ZORA) which is up 138.13%; centralized exchange OKX’s OKB which gained 115.21% as investors sought similar plays after BNB’s rally. It remains to be seen if this will finally mark the crypto market’s shift away from purely speculative tokens, to projects with fundamentals.

The only meme coin-adjacent top gainer in 2025 is Alchemist AI (ACH), which launched on and graduated from Pump.fun but has since established itself as an AI crypto application. In line with the AI narrative gaining mindshare and maintaining its position as the second most popular crypto narrative this year, $ACH has gained 89.21% YTD after recovering twice from price corrections.

Bitcoin & Ethereum End on Pullbacks After New ATHs

Unlike the top gainers among large capitalization crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to be ending with YTD losses, despite reaching new all-time highs this year. 

Bitcoin (BTC) is sitting at -7.96% YTD, with price having dropped to $86,065 as of December 18, after starting the year at $93,508. Meanwhile, Ethereum (ETH) is seeing twice as large a loss of 15.25% YTD, with price having decreased from $3,337 to $2,828 over the same period.

Unless $BTC and $ETH manage to recover in the next two weeks, this will end the previous two-year streak in which the largest cryptocurrencies have posted gains YTD.

In 2025, the top 20 most profitable crypto on a year-to-date basis, as well as Bitcoin and Ethereum, ranked by percentage price gains are:

Top Crypto 2024

In 2024, the top 20 most profitable crypto, as well as Bitcoin and Ethereum, ranked by price gains are:

Top Crypto 2023

In 2023, price returns for the top 10 crypto gainers, Bitcoin and Ethereum were as follows:

Methodology

The study examined price returns of the 300 biggest crypto assets by market capitalization on CoinGecko on December 18, 2025 compared to January 1, 2025 or the earliest date with available data. Previous years’ rankings were determined by examining the 150 biggest crypto assets on December 25, 2024 compared to January 1, 2024 or the earliest date with available data; the 100 biggest crypto assets on December 23, 2023 compared to January 1, 2023. For the purpose of the study, stablecoins, wrapped, pegged, staked, restaked, tokenized and low organic activity assets 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.

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Curious to find out more about our previous research studies & statistics? Check out this one we did on the DEX to CEX ratio for both spot and perpetuals trading volumes.