As good as 2017 was to bitcoin investors, it was really all about cryptocurrencies not named "bitcoin" last year. Excluding bitcoin, the aggregate market cap of every other cryptocurrency in the world grew from $2.24 billion at the beginning of the year to $374 billion by year's end. In other words, it would appear that investors were so motivated to "buy the next bitcoin" that they chose not to buy the actual bitcoin.
The result is that there were plenty of cryptocurrencies that simply ran circles around bitcoin in 2017. Here are 20 of them that absolutely left bitcoin eating their dust, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com:
Verge: up 1,171,479%
PIVX: up 141,880%
Einsteinium: up 71,082%
Reddcoin: up 67,818%
NEO: up 52,372%
Ripple: up 35,564%
NEM: up 27,920%
DigiByte: up 27,713%
ZCoin: up 23,395%
Stratis: up 19,270%
Ardor: up 16,847%
BitShares: up 16,382%
Stellar: up 14,511%
Lisk: up 14,033%
Bytecoin: up 11,945%
Nxt: up 11,783%
Ethereum: up 9,383%
Dash: up 9,282%
Litecoin: up 5,260%
Waves: up 4,922%
These were truly monumental moves. For example, $1 invested in Verge at the beginning of 2017 was worth nearly $12,000 by the end of the year.
What trends really stood out?
You might be under the impression that you could simply have thrown a dart and made a fortune in cryptocurrencies, but it wasn't exactly that easy. Certain trends definitely stood out.
Privacy coins were a huge winner
Among the 20 outperformers listed above, three (Verge, PIVX, and Dash) are players in the privacy-coin space. Privacy coins take the anonymity and privacy that's perceived to be in place with cryptocurrencies and beefs it up.