Best-Performing Cryptocurrencies of the Past 12 Months 2026

What this chart shows. The twelve coins among the hundred largest whose dollar price rose most in the twelve months to 20 September 2026. Akedo leads at 3,703.6 per cent and Zcash follows at 2,922.0 per cent, the only coin in the market's top ten worth more than it was a year earlier. Eight of the hundred are too new to have a twelve-month record; of the other 92, just 18 are higher than a year ago and 35 have lost more than half their value.

How the data is collected. The figure is the change in CoinGecko's aggregated dollar price between two points twelve months apart, so it compares the same kind of number at both ends and ignores the path between them: a coin that tripled and then halved appears here as a gain of 50 per cent. It describes price only, and says nothing about how many tokens existed on either date.

Background. Two of CoinGecko's own groupings shape this list. Its Privacy Coins category, worth 36.95 billion dollars and led by Zcash, Monero and Decred, supplies the second and ninth entries; its Exchange-based Tokens category, worth 169.49 billion and led by BNB, Hyperliquid and WhiteBIT, supplies the eighth and tenth. For scale, the Meme category, headed by Dogecoin, MemeCore and Shiba Inu, was worth 34.82 billion at the same moment, slightly less than privacy coins.

Limits. Eight of the twelve trade on Binance, Kraken or Gate, and a daily close from twelve months earlier reproduces CoinGecko's percentage closely: 2,829 per cent against 2,922 for Zcash, 150.3 against 147.3 for Dash, and 1,074.9 against 1,037.4 for Venice Token. The widest gap is Morpho, at 30.4 against 35.7. The other four, Akedo, Rain, Blockchain Capital and WhiteBIT Coin, have no major-exchange history to check against. Exchange closes are taken at midnight UTC while CoinGecko measures from the same time of day as the reading, which explains part of the remaining difference.