Update: This article has been translated into Russian thanks to Softdroid.

I thought it would be fun and (potentially) informative to crunch some numbers to see what the best performing cryptocurrencies are now that five full months of 2017 are in the books. While Monero took the crown in 2016 with growth of 2,760%, 2017 has seen even more explosive – crazy? insane? bubbly? – growth of the cryptocurrency market. I’ll leave word choice and analysis up to others for now.

A few notes about the data:

The list of coins and prices were pulled from the CryptoCompare API. A big thanks to them for exposing their data to the public!

The start price is from December 31, 2016 at 23:59:59 UTC, which is considered the closing price for that day.

The end price is from May 31, 2017 at 23:59:59 UTC, which is also considered the closing price for that day.

Coins without a start and/or end price were excluded. Out of the 1,211 coins that CryptoCompare tracks, this left 301. I realize this excludes coins launched in 2017, but I didn't think it relevant to compute growth from 0.

For coins that don’t trade directly into USD, BTC was used for the intermediate conversion.

Feel free to grab the complete dataset in CSV format (or the sorted version) and wrangle the numbers in your own way. The source code is also free and open source.

With that said, I present the results…

Best Performing Within the Entire Market

Symbol Name Start Price ($) End Price ($) % Change WOP WorldPay 0.0000289 0.0041 14,087% SHIFT Shift 0.009152 0.8329 9,001% SPHR Sphere Coin 0.01391 1.14 8,096% STRAT Stratis 0.07096 5.21 7,242% SFE Safecoin 3.2e-7 0.00002303 7,097% DGB DigiByte 0.0002505 0.01792 7,054% BITB BitBean 0.00001927 0.001336 6,833% ROUND RoundCoin 0.001609 0.09925 6,068% CRW Crown Coin 0.009509 0.5728 5,924% BTA Bata 0.007004 0.4082 5,728% TX Transfer 0.004692 0.266 5,569% XEM NEM 0.00369 0.1992 5,298% MUE MonetaryUnit 0.0007996 0.04217 5,174% RDD ReddCoin 0.00002206 0.00106 4,705% MEME Pepe 0.001513 0.07136 4,616% XBC BitcoinPlus 1.41 66.06 4,585% DCR Decred 0.474 21.98 4,537% XVG Verge 0.00001927 0.0008753 4,442% BCN ByteCoin 0.00004817 0.002165 4,394% XRP Ripple 0.006511 0.2475 3,701%

Best Performing Within the Top 20 Market Cap