Tracking 2025 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies – Month Five

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Happy HODLING!  

Month Five – Down -13%

The 2025 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Portfolio is BTC, ETH, XRP, BNB, SOL, DOGE, USDC, ADA, Tron, AVAX.

May highlights for the 2025 Top Ten Portfolio:

• Similar to April, lots of green
• ETH pops
• Only two cryptos are in positive territory YTD: BTC and Tron (how many guessed this correctly on January 1st?).

May Ranking

Here’s a look at the movement in the ranks one month into the 2025 Top Ten Index Fund Experiment:

Five months into 2025, not much movement: only AVAX has dropped out of the Top Ten.  

May Winners and Losers

May Winners – For the first time in a long time, ETH (+36%) has a very good month. BTC, Tron, and BNB were each up about 10% as well.

May Losers – AVAX lost ground compared to its peers this month, down -6% in May. 

Overall Update: BTC maintains the lead, portfolio under water, most cryptos in negative territory, AVAX in last

Year to date BTC (+12%) maintains the lead with Tron (+5%) in second.  The rest are either flat or in the red and AVAX is the worst performer (-42%) YTD.

After a fairly good start (the portfolio was +7% in January), the 2025 Top Ten Portfolio is down -13%.

The initial $100 invested in first place BTC five months ago is worth $112 today.

Overall return on $1,000 investment since January 1st, 2025:

The 2025 Top Ten Portfolio gained $45 in May, about the same it gained in April. The initial $1000 investment on New Year’s Day 2025 is now worth $867, still underwater for 2025, but moving in the right direction.

Here’s a visual summary of year one of the 2025 Top Ten portfolio:

2025 Top Ten Portfolio vs. Coinbase’s COIN50

The first Top Ten Crypto Experiment was started on 1 January 2018 in an attempt to capture the gains of the entire market. Much has changed over the last 7.5 years, including the introduction of index products designed to capture the entire crypto market (instead of manually buying coins and tokens like I do for my Experiments).

This year’s friendly competition is between The 2025 Top Ten Portfolio and the Coinbase 50 Index (COIN50).  COIN50 tracks the performance of the 50 largest digital assets by market cap, rebalanced quarterly.

On 1 January 2025, COIN50 was valued at $450.54.  Here’s the snapshot, five months later: 

May Performances:

• The 2025 Top Ten Portfolio: +5% 
• COIN50: +12%

The May monthly victory goes to: COIN50 (its second monthly victory)

Overall since January 1st, 2025: 

• The 2025 Top Ten Portfolio: -13%
• COIN50: -10%

Overall lead:  COIN50

For the more visual, here’s the table I’ll be using to track the friendly Top Ten vs. COIN50 competition this year:

Combining the 2018 – 2025 Top Ten Crypto Portfolios 

The 2025 Top Ten is one of eight concurrent experimental portfolios.  So, where do we stand if we combine eight years of the Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiments?

• 2018 Top Ten Experiment: up +50% (total value $1,500)
• 2019 Top Ten Experiment: up +671% (total value $7,705)
• 2020 Top Ten Experiment: up +890% (total value $9,898) (best performing portfolio)
• 2021 Top Ten Experiment: up +315% (total value $4,153)
• 2022 Top Ten Experiment: down -15% (total value $851) (worst performing portfolio)
• 2023 Top Ten Experiment: up +168% (total value $2,676)
• 2024 Top Ten Experiment: up +54% (total value $1,535)
• 2025 Top Ten Experiment: down -13% (total value $867)

Taking the eight portfolios together:

After a $8,000 total investment in the 2018 – 2025 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, the combined portfolios are worth $29,186.

That’s up +265% on the combined portfolio. The peak for the combined Top Ten Index Fund Experiment Portfolios was November 2021’s all time high of +533%.  

Here’s the combined monthly ROI since I started tracking the metric in January 2020:

In summary: That’s a +265% gain by investing $1k on whichever cryptos happened to be in the Top Ten on January 1st (including stablecoins) for eight straight years.

Comparison to S&P 500

I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of my Experiment to have a comparison point to traditional markets.

The S&P 500 is down -5% so far in 2025, so the initial $1k investment into crypto on New Year’s Day would be worth $953 had it been redirected to the S&P.

Taking the same invest-$1,000-on-January-1st-of-each-year approach with the S&P 500 that I’ve been documenting through the Top Ten Crypto Experiments, the yields are the following:

• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2018 = $2,212 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2019 = $2,359 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2020 = $1,830 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2021 = $1,574 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2022 = $1,240 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2023 = $1,540 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2024 = $1,239 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2025 = $1,005 today

Taken together, the results for a similar approach with the S&P: 

After eight $1,000 annual investments on January 1st into an S&P 500 index fund from 2018 to 2025 my portfolio would be worth $13,000.

That is up +63% since January 2018 compared to a +265% gain of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios.  

The visual below shows a comparison on ROI between a Top Ten Crypto approach and the S&P as per the rules of the Top Ten Experiments:  

Conclusion:

To the long time followers of the Top Ten Experiments, thank you for sticking around so long. For those just getting into crypto, I hope these reports will help prepare you for the highs and lows that await on your crypto adventures.  Buckle up, go with the flow, think long term, and truly don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.  Most importantly, take care of your family, yourselves, and try to enjoy the ride. 

A reporting note: I’ll focus on 2025 Top Ten Portfolio reports + one other portfolio on a rotating basis this year, so expect two reports per month.  May’s extended report is on the 2022 Top Ten Portfolio.  For more data, you can check out the latest 2018-2024 Top Ten reports as well.

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