Another roller coaster year for cryptocurrencies, 2024 brought monumental wins for Bitcoin holders, cryptocurrency ETF issuers, and memecoin creators. Especially since Bitcoin soared past the $100,000 milestone in December.
But not everything was rosy. This year, scams and hacks cost victims $2.2 billion, and a failed celebrity memecoin venture drew the ire of disgruntled investors and class action lawyers.
Here are the biggest winners and losers in the cryptocurrency industry in 2024.
Winner — Bitcoin holder
Bitcoin crossed the $100,000 psychological milestone on December 5. It is driven by hundreds of cryptocurrency supporters who want to take seats in Congress and have the most cryptocurrency-friendly US government in history. Bitcoin continued to rise after peaking at $108,000 on December 17, but then fell towards the end of the year.
As of December 27, CryptoQuant data shows that 87% of Bitcoin holders are still making a profit at a price of around $96,000.
Currently, most of the Bitcoin supply is profitable. source: CryptoQuant
Michael Saylor’s software company MicroStrategy is one of the high-profile groups making significant profits from its holdings. According to the Saylor tracker, the company’s Bitcoin (BTC) holdings as of December 27 were worth $42 billion.
In 2021, El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as its fiat currency and purchased approximately 200 coins. The country has since increased its holdings to 5,942 bitcoins, worth $576 million at current prices.
Several other companies have followed MicroStrategy’s lead and adopted Bitcoin as part of their assets.
On December 23, Japanese investment firm Metaplanet acquired an additional 620 Bitcoins, bringing its holdings to 1,762 (worth approximately $169 million). The stock soared 5% following the announcement, according to Google Finance.
Meanwhile, on November 25, YouTube alternative Rumble confirmed plans to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet, and its stock price soon surged 12.63% to $7.31, according to Google Finance.
US Cryptocurrency ETF Issuer
On January 10, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the asset manager’s 19b-4 application for a U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).
Bitcoin ETFs surpassed gold funds for the first time on December 16, surpassing $129 billion in assets under management (AUM), according to K33 Research.
source: battlelund
This figure includes spot Bitcoin ETFs and ETFs that track Bitcoin’s performance using financial derivatives such as futures.
Meme Coin
Memecoins saw another significant rise in 2024 and was the best performer of the year.
Memecoin market cap is currently $104 billion, with Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) leading the pack at $45 billion and $12 billion, CoinGecko data shows. Year to date, the Solana-based Dogwifhat (WIF) meme token is up over 879%. PEPE also rose 1,205%.
Solana memecoin launchpad Pump.fun has been churning out huge amounts of memecoins all year. According to Dune, despite 98.6% of memecoins not being released, the platform’s total revenue is over $325 million.
cryptocurrency lawyer
Like previous years, 2024 will be marred by cryptocurrency lawsuits and ongoing bankruptcies.
The SEC has been at the center of hundreds of lawsuits against cryptocurrency companies, and its annual report on November 22 revealed that it had provided $8.2 billion in financial relief in the fiscal year ending September 30. The number of lawsuits was 583, a 26% decrease from the previous year.
Regardless of the outcome, cryptocurrency lawyers always come out on top. An August report from Bloomberg Law found that law firms handling Chapter 11 cryptocurrency bankruptcies alone requested and received fees totaling $751 million.
In particular, there were 10 law firms that made a decent coin defending cryptocurrency companies this year. Source: Bloomberg Legal
By 2023, lawyers, accountants, consultants, analysts and other experts have raised at least $700 million from the bankruptcies of major cryptocurrency companies.
Losers — Victims of fraud, hacking and abuse
Scammers were active throughout 2024. In a Dec. 19 blog, blockchain analytics firm Chainalytic said total losses from fraud, hacking and abuse across 303 incidents this year reached $2.2 billion.
This is a 21% increase compared to 2023, when 282 accidents resulted in $1.8 billion in losses. Combined, $825 million was stolen this year alone in three of the most notable incidents.
In May, malicious actors suspected by the FBI to be linked to North Korea stole more than $300 million from Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DMM through social engineering targeting company employees, making it the largest theft of 2024.
A few months ago, decentralized finance (DeFi) and gaming platform PlayDapp had $290 million of its PLA tokens stolen by hackers and later ignored a $1 million bounty to return them.
Rounding out the three is WazirX, one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which had $235 million looted from its coffers in June.
Celebrities jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon
In past cycles, some celebrities have created hype by promoting cryptocurrency projects or launching collections of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and this cycle was no different, with some celebrities suggesting a class action lawsuit over this year’s controversial token launches. I also did it.
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One of the most recent examples, Haliey Welch, aka the Hawk Tuah girl, launched the memecoin Hawk Tuah (HAWK) on December 4th. The token briefly jumped to a peak market cap of $490 million before falling sharply to $41.7 million. Allegations of snipers and insider wallet sales have persisted ever since.
Investors filed a lawsuit on December 19 against several entities involved in the coin launch, accusing them of promoting and selling unregistered securities products.
After weeks of silence, Welch said in a Dec. 20 post that he was “fully cooperating” with his lawyers.
Bitcoin Paper Hand and NoCoiner
While there were die-hard hodlers, there were also those who sold too early or didn’t jump in at all.
Since July 12, Germany has sold about 50,000 bitcoins seized from movie piracy website movie2k, generating about $2.8 billion in revenue when the price of bitcoin reached $57,000. This has already caused a lot of head shaking from Bitcoin users.
According to CoinGecko, 50,000 Bitcoins in Germany would be worth about $4.7 billion at current prices.
The United States also drew criticism from cryptocurrency industry executives and observers after sending 19,800 bitcoins (worth $1.9 billion) to cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase on December 2, which it had stashed away while shutting down the online Silk Road black market in 2013.
There is still a significant amount of cryptocurrency stored at known addresses of the U.S. government. source: spot on chain
According to Spot on Chain, the U.S. government still holds about 183,850 bitcoins worth about $17.7 billion across various known addresses.
Cryptocurrency criminals
On March 28, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven felonies and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Many hackers have also faced the brunt of the law, such as hacker Ilya Lichtenstein, who stole Bitcoin from cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016.
U.S. regulators have also received more than $19 billion in lawsuit settlements from cryptocurrency companies in 2024. This is a 78% increase compared to 2023, when only $10.87 billion was paid.
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