We‘re already entering the second month of 2022, but most of us would like to forget the first month. Cryptocurrencies were amongst the worst performing assets in January, yet it‘s still interesting to look at which cryptocurrencies performed relatively well and which of them underperformed. That‘s why we summed up Coinmerce‘s best and worst performing cryptocurrencies in January here, so you don‘t have to look any further.

Bitcoin price

First, we always take a look at the Bitcoin (BTC) price, because when Bitcoin goes down, the whole crypto market usually goes down. That‘s exactly what we‘ve witnessed in January. Bitcoin was at €42,200 in early January and took a steep dive to €29,750 in the second half of January, which made up for a decline of almost 30%!

However, in the past few days, Bitcoin managed to recover a bit. It‘s already touched €34,600 again and it seems to be in a small uptrend. But despite that, it‘s still in a downtrend on a larger time frame.

Ethereum price

Ethereum‘s (ETH) price action has been roughly the same as Bitcoin‘s in January. The #2 cryptocurrency in terms of market cap has reached a low of €1,950 earlier this month and now stands at €2,430. In times like these, we see that Bitcoin is still king because it can drag all cryptocurrencies down if it wants to.

Best performing cryptocurrencies of January

It‘s hard to find cryptocurrencies that perform well when the majority of the market goes down, but there are some. In this article, we‘re only looking at the top 500 coins that are listed on Coinmerce.

The best performer of January was Kyber Network (KNC), a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX). This project has made a lot of great developments in the past year but hadn‘t seen any big gains. However, the amount of users and the traded volume on this exchange keeps rising and it seems like the public is picking up on that. Kyber Network has seen a 38% gain in January.

The next best performer was FTX Token (FTT) with a 9% gain. It‘s the token belonging to the crypto derivatives trading platform FTX and holding it comes with some privileges on the platform.

These are the only two cryptocurrencies on Coinmerce which have gained in value in January. It will be interesting to see how these tokens perform when the market hopefully goes uphill soon again.

Worst performing cryptocurrencies in January
January was a bloodbath for crypto, but some performed even worse than others. This could mean lower prices for you to invest some into those projects, but it may also mean a painful hit to your portfolio. Anyway, the worst performer of January 2022 is Loopring (LRC).

Loopring is a layer-two blockchain built on Ethereum. Its purpose is to decongest the Ethereum blockchain and move transactions to another chain. Loopring is essentially a very cheap and fast alternative for Ethereum. However, when Ethereum 2.0 (a big upgrade to the Ethereum network) has been rolled out completely, there‘s less need for Loopring, because Ethereum will be able to handle a lot more transactions quicker and cheaper.

Loopring declined by 51% in January.

In second place comes Kadena (KDA) with a 50% decline and shortly after comes Quant (QNT) with a 46% decline. These are huge declines, but they don‘t stand out a lot compared to the other cryptocurrencies. After all, most cryptocurrencies have declined by more than 30-40%. Let‘s hope for a better February.