Digital asset management company Grayscale Investments has added HYPE, ENA, VIRTUAL, JUP, JTO, and GRASS to its updated list of the Top 20 cryptocurrencies for Q1 2025.
Each quarter the Grayscale research team analyzes digital assets universe to produce a diversified set of top assets across cryptocurrency sectors. The approach incorporates a range of factors, including network growth/adoption, upcoming catalysts, sustainability of fundamentals, token valuation, token supply inflation, and potential tail risks.
This quarter the Grayscale research team emphasizes the importance of the three following points: (1) the U.S. election and its potential implications for industry regulation, particularly in areas like decentralized finance (DeFi), and staking; (2) continued breakthroughs in decentralized AI technologies and the use of blockchains by AI agents; and (3) growth in the Solana ecosystem.
Taking into account these three points, the following new cryptocurrencies were added to the Top 20 list for Q1 2025:
- Hyperliquid (HYPE): Hyperliquid is a Layer 1 blockchain designed to support on-chain financial applications. Its primary application is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for perpetual futures, featuring a fully on-chain order book.
- Ethena (ENA): Ethena protocol has developed as novel stablecoin, USDe, which is backed primarily by hedged positions in Bitcoin and Ether collateral.[5] Specifically, the protocol holds long positions in Bitcoin and Ether and short positions in perpetual futures contracts on the same assets. A staked version of the token offers from the difference between spot and futures prices.
- Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL): Virtuals Protocol is a platform for creating AI agents on Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 network. These AI agents are designed to perform tasks autonomously, mimicking human decision-making. The platform allows for the creation and co-ownership of tokenized AI agents, which can interact with their environment and other users.
- Jupiter (JUP): Jupiter is the premier DEX aggregator on Solana, boasting the highest TVL among all applications on the network. As retail traders increasingly enter the crypto market through Solana and speculation intensifies around Solana-based memecoins and AI agent tokens, we believe Jupiter is well positioned to capitalize on this growing market activity.
- Jito (JTO): Jito is a liquid taking protocol on Solana. Jito has experienced substantial growth in adoption over the past year and offers one of the best financial profiles in all of crypto, generating over $550mn in 2024 fee revenue.
- Grass (GRASS): Grass is a decentralized data network that rewards users for sharing their unused internet bandwidth through a Chrome extension. This bandwidth is used to scrape online data, which is then sold to AI companies and developers for training machine learning models, effectively conducting web scraping for data while compensating users.
All cryptocurrencies included into Top 20 list are presented in the table below.
