Which Cryptocurrencies Surpassed Their ATH in This Cycle

When choosing cryptocurrencies for my personal portfolio, I look at several criteria — and one of them is this:

If a cryptocurrency reaches an all-time high in one market cycle, and then surpasses that record in the next cycle, it means someone needed it badly, or believed in it strongly — twice. That’s a signal that there may be solid reasons behind such demand. And if those reasons worked before, they might work again.

By a “cycle” I mean a four-year period. For the current cycle, I count from November 2022 — the month when the collapse of FTX dealt the final blow to market confidence, prices bottomed out, and the slow recovery began — a process still ongoing today.

And here’s the thing: out of the many thousands of cryptocurrencies that have been on the market for more than four years, only a couple dozen have managed to break past their previous ATHs in this cycle. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Bitcoin

Previous peak ~$69,000 (November 10, 2021). New peak ~$123,000 (July 14, 2025).

Well, this one’s straightforward. There are people who perceive Bitcoin as a safe haven asset. Safe haven doesn’t necessarily mean protection from inflation. It could be protection from banks, for instance, which are implementing increasingly strict compliance procedures — making it harder each year to withdraw your own money. The more difficulties arise with banks, the more people choose an alternative. Hence the growing demand.

And yes, this demand increases even more due to inflation. Inflation existed in 2021 too, but after that, it grew very substantially worldwide.

The poorly thought-out financial policies of many governments also played a role in increasing Bitcoin demand — issuing more and more bonds, accumulating more and more debt, and thus threatening the stability of national currencies. Without this factor, residents of many countries fleeing from banks and inflation would choose stablecoins pegged to the US dollar — a simpler and more familiar solution. But uncertainty regarding the dollar also pushes people toward Bitcoin. Not just individuals, but large businesses too.

The further we go, the greater the demand becomes. And supply is limited. Hence the steady growth. On Bitcoin’s price chart, each peak is higher than the previous peak, and each bottom is higher than the previous bottom.

Source — Coingecko

Binance Coin

Previous peak ~$686 (May 10, 2021). New peak ~$858 (July 28, 2025).

This is also quite a predictable result. Binance Coin has a very clear use case. Paying with this coin allows you to get discounts on fees at Binance, the most popular cryptocurrency exchange. BNB also provides access to some of the exchange’s investment products (launchpools, launchpads, and others). As long as Binance exchange has active clients, there will remain a need for BNB coins, and therefore demand for them.

About 70% of the coins are concentrated with Changpeng Zhao, the exchange itself, and businesses close to it. As long as they don’t sell their share, supply won’t be sufficient to satisfy steady demand. Moreover, the exchange regularly uses part of its profits to buy BNB at market price and destroy the purchased coins. This further reduces supply.

Other Exchange Tokens

Tokens or coins that provide fee discounts or access to investment opportunities on other exchanges also showed good results in this cycle. The factors that influenced this are the same as for Binance Coin. Therefore, I won’t go into detail about such cryptocurrencies, but will simply list them.

• OKB (OKX exchange). Previous peak ~$44 (May 3, 2021). New peak ~$74 (March 14, 2024).
• GateToken (Gate exchange). Previous peak ~$12 (May 12, 2021). New peak ~$26 (January 24, 2025).
• Bitget Token (Bitget exchange). Previous peak ~$0.5 (February 21, 2022). New peak ~$8 (December 24, 2024).
• UNUS SED LEO (Bitfinex exchange). Previous peak ~$8 (February 8, 2022). New peak ~$10 (March 2, 2025).
• WhiteBIT Coin (WhiteBIT exchange). Previous peak ~$14.6 (October 28, 2022). New peak ~$52 (June 16, 2025).

A trend emerges: exchange tokens appear to be one of the most reliable classes of crypto assets. They have the most understandable use cases, within which such tokens possess real value. But to keep the price stable — let alone push it higher — they need at least to maintain, and ideally to increase, the activity of clients on the exchanges where these tokens can be used.

GMX

Previous peak ~$62 (January 16, 2022). New peak ~$91 (April 17, 2023).

GMX is the token of the decentralized perpetual swaps exchange of the same name. Fundamental demand for GMX comes from the share of exchange profits distributed to GMX stakers (70% of trading fees go to them) and from the broader shift toward decentralized trading in the months following the FTX collapse. Since November 2022, GMX has multiplied its trading volumes and revenues, which drove the token’s price higher. It established itself as a core “real yield” asset in DeFi, attracting long-term investors and making it one of the most fundamentally supported tokens of the current cycle.

However, trends in 2025 show that decentralized perpetuals trading is no longer in as high demand as it was right after FTX. The clear growth leader in this segment is now Hyperliquid — a centralized, operator-controlled exchange running on its own proprietary blockchain. What HYPE (Hyperliquid’s token) and GMX have in common is that token holders share in the exchange’s profits: for GMX, directly, and for HYPE, indirectly via buybacks from the market.

Hyperliquid’s user base is growing significantly faster than GMX’s. As a result, GMX’s price performance in 2025 has been lackluster, trending downward. Still, if interest in decentralized perpetuals trading returns on a large scale and Hyperliquid doesn’t decentralize its infrastructure, GMX could regain its growth momentum.

Solana

Previous peak ~$260 (November 6, 2021). New peak ~$293 (January 19, 2025).

The previous peak was driven by buyers’ belief that Solana would become a key currency in the NFT and DeFi sectors, offering a more efficient blockchain infrastructure with low fees and fast transactions. Many market participants also bought Solana by following the lead of well-known funds like Alameda, assuming these “smart money” investors knew what they were doing and where to allocate capital.

When it became clear that those funds weren’t as smart as many believed — Alameda collapsed along with FTX — Solana’s price fell sharply. Its new rally caught many observers off guard. The turnaround was fueled by a surge in token launches on the network (primarily meme coins, but not only them). Trading activity in those tokens drove transaction volumes higher, proving that Solana was indeed in demand — at least as gas for a rapidly expanding ecosystem.

The Proof-of-Stake consensus and the long vesting schedules for early investors locked up a large share of the Solana supply (either in staking or in the hands of early backers). This reduced available supply and couldn’t keep pace with growing demand, pushing the price higher.

However, if stakers decide to take advantage of the high price and unstake their coins to sell, demand could at least be balanced out. This makes the outlook for further price growth in Solana far from certain.

Toncoin

Previous peak ~$5.84 (November 12, 2021). New peak ~$8.25 (June 14, 2024).

The 2021 peak can be considered accidental. It came during the same period when Bitcoin hit its top in the previous cycle. In the wave of euphoria, virtually anything that looked like a cryptocurrency was rising. Around that time, TON Crystal rebranded to Toncoin — and that alone was enough to make the news and attract some spare capital from crypto investors. Liquidity was relatively low, which also helped push the price higher.

In the current cycle, there were far stronger reasons for demand — and for the price to rise:

• integration with Telegram,
• a large number of popular apps (notably the boom of “clicker” games that rewarded users with tokens on the TON blockchain),
• low fees and high transaction speeds in a network where TON is used to pay for gas.

Most coins remain locked in staking, held by the team, or in the hands of early investors, which keeps circulating supply limited.

All of these factors — except for the clicker-game hype — are still in place today. If another viral hit emerges in the TON ecosystem similar to the clickers, a repeat of Toncoin’s price surge is entirely possible.

Trust Wallet Token

Previous peak ~$1.55 (September 5, 2021). New peak ~$2.72 (December 10, 2022).

TWT is the utility token of the non-custodial Trust Wallet, owned by Binance. Its primary stated purpose is voting on proposals related to the wallet’s development. Does the average user really need to participate in such votes? I strongly doubt it. This positioning alone is unlikely to serve as a serious demand driver.

In both cases — early September 2021 and early December 2022 — the all-time highs were driven by speculative interest. In 2021, traders viewed the token as a kind of “bet” on the growth of the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem and the popularity of Trust Wallet. In 2022, it was seen as a “bet” on the rising interest in non-custodial wallets after the collapse of FTX. From a fundamental standpoint, neither narrative added real value to TWT — but the news cycle and effective marketing did the job.

For similar spikes to happen again, the token would need to catch another wave of crypto-market hype. Whether buyers will believe in it a third time, however, is hard to predict.

Kaspa

Previous peak ~$0.005 (September 26, 2022). New peak ~$0.207 (July 31, 2024).

Kaspa is a cryptocurrency designed for high-speed mining and is currently the fastest Proof-of-Work network. Its technological advantages, combined with Ethereum’s transition away from Proof-of-Work, led to a surge of miners joining the network after September 2022. This was soon followed by strong marketing efforts — and, in turn, an engaged community.

Kaspa positions itself as a “fast Bitcoin,” aiming to serve as both a unit of account and a store of value within its network. It reflects a revival of the technology-driven narrative that dominated the 2017–2018 era, when every new cryptocurrency promised to be faster and more efficient than the last.

It might seem that, in Kaspa’s case, this approach has delivered results. From November 2022 to July 2024, the price of KAS increased 70-fold. However, I see this more as a low-base effect. Kaspa was launched in the “bear” year of 2022, leaving it no chance to realize its growth potential before the start of the current cycle. That’s why the “previous all-time high” here is somewhat symbolic. We’ll only be able to judge Kaspa’s ability to break cycle-to-cycle price records in the next cycle. For now, Kaspa remains very much a dark horse.

Other Cryptocurrencies with Low Start Effect

In addition to Kaspa, there are two more cryptocurrencies launched in 2022 that technically meet the criteria I set at the start of this article. Their prices after November 2022 exceeded the highs recorded before that date:

• Optimism. Previous peak: ~$2.2 (August 4, 2022). New peak: ~$4.6 (March 6, 2024).
• Aptos. Previous peak: ~$10.3 (October 19, 2022). New peak: ~$19.9 (January 26, 2023).

However, their pre-FTX-collapse achievements can hardly be called “previous cycle” highs. They didn’t have time to realize their potential in the prior cycle because they were launched right at its very end.

It’s more accurate to say that the current cycle is effectively their first.

Tron

Previous peak ~$0.23 (January 5, 2018). New peak ~$0.44 (December 10, 2024).

Tron is an example of those 2017–2018-era cryptocurrencies that each promised the highest performance. At first, this generated interest, but over time, blockchain technological innovations became less valued in the crypto industry. In the previous four-year cycle, Tron’s price failed to surpass the level it reached at the very start of 2018.

It could easily have been written off — like many other projects of that era — but Tron benefited from the fact that more USDT tokens are issued on its blockchain than on any other. USDT TRC-20 has become the de facto standard stablecoin. Every time these tokens are moved from one address to another, the fee must be paid in Tron’s native coin, creating significant ongoing demand.

It’s worth noting that Tron is the only cryptocurrency mentioned in this review whose price over the past year has been slowly but steadily rising not just against the US dollar, but also against Bitcoin.

Source — Coingecko

However, if something unexpected happens to USDT, or if Tether migrates the bulk of its stablecoins to other blockchains, Tron will lose its foundation. The project depends far too heavily on a single function: transferring USDT.

XRP — A borderline case

This one largely comes down to methodology. CoinMarketCap records the historical peak as ~$3.84 on January 4, 2018. Trades at that price took place on South Korean exchanges where, due to regulatory specifics, cryptocurrencies have often been bought and sold at higher prices than on platforms in other countries. In the current cycle, that peak has not been surpassed. CoinGecko, on the other hand, treats the “Korean premium” of 2018 as not reflecting true market conditions and considers the July 2025 high of about ~$3.65 to be a new all-time high.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: breaking an all-time high in a cryptocurrency always requires a combination of strong news flow, sustained demand, and a structural shortage of supply. Without one of these factors, prices generally fail to exceed previous peaks — even when the overall market is in a bullish phase.

In the current cycle, not every cryptocurrency has managed to surpass the highs set in previous years. Nevertheless, there aren’t so few of them, and they’re all different in some way. There’s plenty to choose from.

And let me remind you — every single cryptocurrency mentioned in this review is available for exchange on rabbit.io: at the best rates, with no registration, and no limits.