The 2021 Top 100 Crypto, Five Years Later
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Five years ago, the crypto market looked nothing like it does today. We mapped all 100 of the largest cryptocurrencies from July 2021 onto where they stand now. The findings reveal that only 41 are still in the top 100. Meanwhile, 46 tokens have dropped out but are still trading, and 13 are delisted or dead.
The 13 Crypto Projects That Died Since 2021
Thirteen projects that were part of the Top 100 in 2021 are no longer active today. But they didn't die the same way. Four of them collapsed in a seven-month chain of events in 2022, which began with Terra in May and finished with FTX in November. All four had been inside the 2021 top 40. One stablecoin, BUSD, was closed by regulators rather than by the market, which led to its gradual suspension. Two other stablecoins lost their pegs.
|
Project (Ticker) |
What happened |
|---|---|
|
Terra (LUNA) |
Algorithmic-stablecoin death spiral took down the whole Terra ecosystem (May 2022) |
|
TerraUSD (UST) |
Lost its dollar peg alongside LUNA (May 2022) |
|
Celsius (CEL) |
Lender froze withdrawals, then filed for bankruptcy (2022) |
|
FTX Token (FTT) |
Collapsed together with the FTX exchange (Nov 2022) |
|
Binance USD (BUSD) |
Regulators ordered issuer Paxos to stop minting; support wound down (2023) |
|
HUSD (HUSD) |
Depegged after Huobi delisted it. |
The 46 Crypto Projects That Fell Out of the Top 100
Beyond the 13 that died, another 46 of the 2021 top 100 are still trading but have dropped out of the top 100. Their median market-cap drop from July 2021 to today is about 93%. Below are the ten with the largest capitalization:
|
Project (Ticker) |
Market Cap 2021 |
Now |
Change |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Theta Network (THETA) |
$6.35B |
$136M |
−97.9% |
|
EOS → Vaulta (EOS) |
$3.88B |
$108M |
−97.2% |
|
Bitcoin SV (BSV) |
$2.80B |
$274M |
−90.2% |
|
Neo (NEO) |
$2.64B |
$138M |
−94.8% |
|
Tezos (XTZ) |
$2.59B |
$239M |
−90.8% |
|
Klaytn → Kaia (KAIA) |
$2.56B |
$169M |
−93.4% |
|
Compound (COMP) |
$2.37B |
$171M |
−92.8% |
|
IOTA (IOTA) |
$2.35B |
$158M |
−93.3% |
|
The Graph (GRT) |
$2.09B |
$173M |
−91.7% |
|
Theta Fuel (TFUEL) |
$1.99B |
$58M |
−97.1% |
Almost two-thirds of the projects that fell out, roughly 65%, belong to a single bucket: Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchains. These were among the most hyped names of the 2021 cycle, and many were positioned back then as "Ethereum killers" – Tezos, EOS, Neo, Zilliqa, Qtum, Harmony, Klaytn, Fantom – alt-L1s competing to become the chain developers would build on. Five years later, most of that competition was absorbed by a newer generation of Layer-1s, and the 2021 flagships slid out of the top 100.
The 41 That Remained in the Top
The survivors have less in common with 2021's narratives than with crypto's plumbing. The list is dominated by base-layer chains (ETH, SOL, TRX), stablecoins, and exchange tokens. DeFi blue chips, such as Uniswap, Aave, and Maker, also held their positions. So did the two largest early memecoins, DOGE and SHIB.
What mostly didn't survive were the sector bets: metaverse tokens, GameFi and NFT platforms, and the wave of alternative layer-1s that launched into the 2021 top 100.
The Bottom Line: A New Top 100
The new half of the market presents a completely different landscape compared to what we saw 5 years ago. The biggest shift is stablecoins: back in 2021, there were only 8 stablecoins in the top, and now there are 16.. The trend on stablecoin is obvious now, as on-chain settlement became one of the crypto's core use cases.
The standout single arrival is Hyperliquid, a perpetuals exchange that entered straight at #9. The rest of the newcomers lean toward a newer generation of blockchains (Sui, Aptos, Ton) and categories that didn not exist in the 2021 top 100 at all, like AI tokens and tokenized real-world assets.
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