Bitcoin had a big 2019, with a 101% jump in price from $3,742 to $7,537 at time of publishing, according to CoinMarketCap.
But despite its blockbuster performance, Bitcoin is not the number one crypto asset of the year, in terms of performance.
That honor goes to Binance Coin (BNB), which surged from $6.16 at the start of the year to its current price of $15.69 – a 154% increase.
Out of the top 10 coins by market cap, only two are ending the year in the red: XRP and Stellar Lumens.
XRP began the year at $0.3557 and is currently at $0.2294, a loss of 35%. Stellar Lumens began the year at 0.1123 and is currently at .0554, a loss of 50%.
Bloomberg just released a visualization showing how the top 10 coins by market cap have performed year-to-date, with Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash also having standout years.
Binance Coin surged early this year thanks to the early success of the company’s initial exchange offerings.
The coin can be used for discounted trading fees on Binance.com and is routinely burned.
Here’s a look at how the coin burn works, according to the company’s whitepaper:
“Every quarter, we will use 20% of our profits to buy back BNB and destroy them, until we buy 50% of all the BNB (100MM) back. All buy-back transactions will be announced on the blockchain. We eventually will destroy 100MM BNB, leaving 100MM BNB remaining.”
Binance initially created 200 million BNB and promised no more coins would ever be generated. The structure is designed to help make the coin an attractive investment due to its inherently deflationary nature.
In addition to rolling out a number of trading platforms around the world that offer fiat-to-crypto on-ramps, the company is pushing for real-world adoption of BNB. It has invested $2.5 million in the Australian startup TravelbyBit to integrate crypto as a payment method for travelers making purchases at international airports.
Binance also recently acquired DappReview, a company that tracks the performance of blockchain-based decentralized applications.