Since the start of 2024, the cryptocurrency market has seen a significant upward, with the overall market capitalization surpassing $2 trillion for the first time in a very long time.
Numerous analysts and industry insiders are predicting even better times to come, pointing out that previous significant bull runs have typically coincided with the forthcoming Bitcoin halving in April.
They choose to examine the top 5 cryptocurrencies (by market capitalization), which are the closest to surpassing their all-time high values, in light of this. Let’s examine this.
Bitcoin (BTC)
Bitcoin has had an incredible year, with the final quarter of 2023 also showing exceptional gains. The price is currently trading above $52,000, up a whopping 17% in the past week alone.
Over the past 30 days, BTC is up over 22%, for a significant yearly gain of 136%. The reasons are probably various. First, in early January, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the listing of the Spot Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). This is something many companies have been trying to achieve for over seven years.
Apart from that, the coveted Bitcoin halving will also take place in April of 2024. This would effectively reduce the supply of Bitcoin that miners can sell by 50%, halving inflation. Halvings have always been a precursor of a bull market.
These two reasons also seem to be the reason why the price of Bitcoin has increased significantly in recent days.
According to CoinGoLive data, BTC needs to rise by his 32.10% to reach the previous high set on November 10, 2021.
Bittensor (TAO)
TAO is the next cryptocurrency particularly close to all-time highs, trading at lows of less than $2.5 at the time of writing.
The TAO token is based on the Bittensor protocol, which aims to enhance machine-learning platform development. Decentralized the procedure and establishing a P2P market for ML applications are the goals.
Either way, with TAO trading at $622, it is currently 1.23% behind its peak.
Stacks (STX)
Then there is the veteran second layer of Bitcoin: the stack. This native cryptocurrency is called STX and is currently trading at $2.71.
The all-time high was $3.39, with about 25% left.
STX has been performing well in recent months. This is primarily due to the influx of activity into the Bitcoin network due to features enabled with the Taproot upgrade and gaining traction recently.
Optimism (OP)
Optimism is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution and its native token is called OP. It is currently trading at $3.91 and has an ATH of $4.23. This brings the gap to him to just over 8%.
ETH has been an outstanding performer in his 2024, and it’s no wonder that its broader ecosystem is also doing well. This rise appears to have been driven by increased re-staking activity and expectations for the approval of the Spot ETH exchange-traded fund.
Kaspa (KAS)
Proof-of-work, the well-known consensus technique behind Bitcoin, is combined with blockDAG architecture in the Kaspa network. For Directed Acyclic Graph, use DAG. The objective is to minimize confirmation times and speed up block processing, without going into too much detail.
KAS, its native token, is currently trading between 0.14% and 8.8%, far from its all-time high of just over $0.15 hit on November 19, 2023.