When historians of finance someday look back upon the mid-2020s, they’ll have no choice but to acknowledge that 2024 was truly a special year for digital assets. In the face of a hesitant Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and asset-price volatility, the cryptocurrency community made significant strides toward legitimacy and credibility.
Along the way, some forward-looking early adopters generated substantial wealth through cryptocurrency investments, both direct and indirect. While past performance certainly doesn’t guarantee future returns, there’s no denying 2024’s assumption-shattering progress in the crypto space.
Making Room for Meme Coins
Just a few years ago, meme coins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu weren’t taken seriously except by a relatively small number of devotees. The popularity of meme coins extends to high levels, with even the President of the United States, Donald Trump, having his own meme coin. This coin, OFFICIAL TRUMP, is traded on Binance and has a substantial daily trading volume of $2.38 billion as of January 30, 2024.
Last year was pivotal in the ongoing growth story of these once dismissed meme tokens. They can’t be dismissed so easily nowadays, as meme coins collectively blossomed into a $130 billion industry by the end of 2024.
President Trump’s token didn’t exist yet, but other popular meme coins generated plenty of wealth for well-timed investors last year. Check price charts on Binance and you’ll discover that Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and Pepe Coin all provided multi-bagger returns for buyers who held them throughout 2024.
To a certain extent, these meme tokens all followed the granddaddy of all cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin. Since the Bitcoin price doubled in 2024, and since meme coins tend to be low-priced and their moves are magnified, it makes sense that they offered leveraged gains when Bitcoin rallied.
At the same time, one shouldn’t overlook the features that make meme coins so attractive: their underdog status, and most importantly, the communities surrounding the tokens. As Brett ambassador Momin Saqib put it, “Memecoins capture the spirit of the internet—playful, inclusive, and dynamic while their communities provide a rare sense of belonging in a day and age where loneliness is an epidemic in modern society.”
Maybe loneliness was a prevalent issue in 2024 – or maybe, meme coins finally started to garner a measure of respectability among cryptocurrency investors. Either way, regular folks could enjoy a moment of crypto superstardom as they rapidly grew their accounts with meme coins.
Opening Doors with Crypto ETFs
While ordinary people booked extraordinary returns through meme coin trades, financial “whales” (large-scale institutional investors) took the crypto-sphere to the next level in 2024. Among those whales was BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and an early mover in the cryptocurrency industry.
After the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved spot Bitcoin ETFs on January 10, 2024, BlackRock joined Fidelity, Grayscale, ARK Invest, and other financial whales as they launched Bitcoin-tracking funds. The doors of accessibility were now flung wide open as investors could get indirect portfolio exposure to Bitcoin, even in restricted accounts such as certain retirement accounts.
Moreover, the ripple effects of the new ETF approvals didn’t only reach small-scale traders. More financial whales wanted to follow the lead of BlackRock and others; Solv Protocol CEO Ryan Chow explains, “The approval of bitcoin ETFs has legitimized the asset class as an institutional grade investment. Besides the incoming liquidity and positive price activity, bitcoin ETFs have increased BTC’s popularity.”
It’s difficult to precisely quantify the impact that these new spot Bitcoin funds had on the prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in 2024. Surely it’s not mere coincidence, though, that the Bitcoin ETF approval occurred in January and, to reiterate, the Bitcoin price doubled that year.
In July of last year, the SEC gave its approval to spot Ethereum ETFs; more recently, fund founders are busy applying for potential ETFs for Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies. Many crypto ETFs are likely to get regulatory approval in 2025, especially since a new, cryptocurrency-friendly SEC chairman took over in January.
Thus, with the rapid rise of meme coins and the start of spot cryptocurrency ETF approvals, 2024 was a truly exhilarating year for blockchain enthusiasts. It was also a highly profitable year for those who dared to invest in the right coins at the right time – and the potential to generate outsized crypto-market returns could persist in the months to come.
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