- Grayscale added new tokens to its top 20 list.
- It cited potential US election impact, AI, and Solana's growth as catalysts for the change.
- The tokens include major DeFi players like Ethena and Hyperliquid.
Crypto won’t just be about Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2025.
That’s one of the takeaways from digital asset manager Grayscale’s latest quarterly roundup of high-upside tokens. The list features 20 digital assets that are primed to break out in the first quarter of next year.
Six of those — Ethena, Hyperliquid, Jupiter, Jito, Virtuals, and Grass — are new to the list, and look set to benefit from several factors that are seen to be bullish for the crypto industry, according to the digital currency asset management firm.
Grayscale said it chose the new tokens due to the potential impact Republicans’ success in the US election might have on decentralised finance and staking, as well as the growing use of artificial intelligence “agents” and the Solana blockchain.
AI agents are software endowed with the ability to post on social media platforms and, in some cases, use crypto wallets.
Grayscale’s list
Grayscale is one of the largest issuers of crypto exchange-traded funds, managing more than $24 billion in Bitcoin and Ether, the two largest cryptocurrencies.
Its list of 20 tokens to watch include Bitcoin and Ether as well as DeFi stalwarts Uniswap, Aave and Lido.
Some of the tokens added to the list could see outsize benefit from the red sweep in the US election that saw Republicans secure control of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, Grayscale wrote.
The party has overwhelmingly taken a pro-crypto stance, which industry watchers expect will lead to more industry-friendly regulations over the next four years.
The entire crypto market has surged over 40% since the election to be worth almost $3.4 trillion as of today.
Solana has been one of the comeback winners from the bull market. Its value collapsed in the aftermath of the FTX scandal. Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire propped up the value of Solana before its collapse.
Solana’s token plunged from its previous all-time high of $259 to less than $10 after FTX imploded in 2022.
But a wave of new DeFi protocols, as well as the boom in memecoins and AI agents, brought it to a new all-time high in November and helped it leapfrog Tron as the blockchain with the second-largest DeFi ecosystem this year.
Its two largest DeFi protocols — Jupiter, an aggregator of decentralised exchanges, and Jito, a liquid staking protocol — are two of the six new additions to Grayscale’s list.
Jupiter is well-positioned to capitalise on Solana’s status as the home of AI agents and memecoin trading, according to Grayscale. Meanwhile, Jito is one of the most profitable protocols in DeFi, collecting more than $500 million in fees in 2024.
AI revolution
The intersection of AI and crypto has created a lot of buzz in 2024, and for good reason.
Investors have injected hundreds of millions into crypto-AI projects, and researchers estimate that the combo will add another $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
Grayscale’s list reflects the hype. Two of the new tokens on the list operate at the intersection of AI and crypto: Virtuals, which simplifies the creation of AI agents on the Base blockchain, and Grass, which lets users rent their unused internet bandwidth to AI companies that need it to scrape the web for data to train AI models.
Grayscale also listed a pair of protocols that have surged to the top of DeFi: stablecoin issuer Ethena, and Hyperliquid, a blockchain with a focus on trading.
Hyperliquid’s November airdrop minted dozens of new millionaires, and prompted speculation about a DeFi resurgence.
Ethena, meanwhile, launched early this year and its stablecoin, USDe, has already surpassed Sky’s DAI as the third-largest, according to DefiLlama data.
Grayscale removed six tokens from its top 20 list: TON, Near, Stacks, Sky, UMA Protocol, and Celo.
“Grayscale Research continues to see value in each of these projects,” it said. “However, we believe the revised Top 20 list may offer more compelling risk-adjusted returns for the coming quarter.”
Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi Correspondent. Got a tip? Email at aleks@dlnews.com.
