Top Crypto Assets of Q1 2025: Grayscale Reveals the Best Altcoins

This article is also available in Spanish.

Grayscale Investments has published its quarterly review, revealing its top 20 crypto assets for Q1 2025. Each quarter, the Grayscale Research team examines “hundreds of digital assets” to guide the rebalancing of the FTSE/Grayscale Crypto index family Sectors.

In the words of the research note, “Our approach covers many factors, including network growth/acquisition, future incentives, sustainability of fundamentals, token valuation, token supply inflation, and potential risks.” The newest addition to the top 20 list is driven by three market themes that Greyscale believes will change in the coming months: the US election and potential regulatory implications, rapid advances in distributed AI, and the expansion of the Solana ecosystem.

Table of Contents

The best (new) Crypto assets of Q1 2025

Hyperliquid (HYPE): A Layer 1 blockchain aimed at on-chain transactions, Hyperliquid’s flagship product is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for infinite futures. Built around a fully on-chain order book, HYPE seeks to capture the growing demand for advanced derivatives trading in a decentralized environment. Notably, HYPE has seen a meteoric rise in recent weeks, already claiming the #19 position in the list of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Athena (ENA): The Athena protocol launched a novel stablecoin, USDE, backed by hedged positions in Bitcoin and Ether. As Grayscale explains, “Specifically, the protocol has long positions in Bitcoin and Ether and short positions in permanent futures contracts on the same assets.” The fixed version of the token maximizes the price difference between the spot and futures markets, potentially offering a unique yield profile to participants.

Virtual Protocol (VIRTUAL): Running on Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network, the Virtual Protocol enables the creation of AI agents designed to operate automatically. “These AI agents are designed to perform tasks automatically, mimicking human decisions,” Greyscale notes. The platform also allows for the co-ownership of these agents through tokens, combining AI capabilities with blockchain infrastructure.

Related Reading

Jupiter (JUP): Jupiter emerged as Solana’s leading DEX aggregator, recording the highest total locked value (TVL) of all Solana applications. With Solana’s user base expanding and speculation growing around memecoins and AI agent tokens, “we believe Jupiter is well positioned to capitalize on this growing market activity,” the report said.

Jito (JTO): Jito is a liquid staking protocol on Solana that has shown strong adoption over the past year. Notably, Grayscale highlights the huge earnings of the project: “Jito experienced a huge growth in adoption last year and offers one of the best financial profiles of all crypto, generating more than $550mn in revenue by 2024.”

GRASS: Grass rewards users for sharing unused Internet bandwidth with a Chrome extension. “This bandwidth is used to scrape data from the Internet, which is then sold to AI companies and developers for training machine learning models,” according to Greyscale. This project monetizes web scraping by redistributing rewards to users who donate their idle bandwidth.

Grayscale Research Top 20 for Q1 2025 | Source: Grayscale

In addition, Grayscale notes that it continues to be “excited about themes from previous areas such as Ethereum scaling solutions, tokens, and peer-to-peer infrastructure (DePIN).” Examples of these established themes include Optimism, Chainlink, and Helium, which remained in the Top 20 due to their alignment with scaling, tokenization, and DePIN use cases, respectively.

Notably, six assets—NEAR, Stacks, Maker CELO, UMA, and TON—rotated out of the top 20 list this quarter. “Greyscale Research continues to see value in each of these projects, and they remain an important part of the crypto ecosystem. However, we believe that the updated list of the Top 20 may provide attractive risk-adjusted returns in the coming quarter,” noted Greyscale.

At press time, HYPE traded at $29.45.