Monero and Hyperliquid Tipped to Outperform Bitcoin (BTC) Into Year-End

A year-end ranking circulating Sunday tips Monero (XMR), Hyperliquid and Tron to outperform Bitcoin (BTC) on 12-month returns, with NEAR Protocol and Quant named as further candidates to beat the largest coin into the close of 2026. The review, published without a named analyst, lands while the Bitcoin (BTC) price trades near $80,500, down 27.6% over the past year and 36.2% below its all-time high of $126,080. The data shows a slow bleed rather than a collapse: the price lost 4.5% over the past 30 days and 1.3% over the past week, while Bitcoin dominance still holds 59.5% of total digital-asset market capitalization. The ranking treats that dominance reading as the main brake on any broad altcoin rally, since capital has to leave the largest asset before smaller ones can run.

Only three major coins rose over the past week: privacy-focused Monero (XMR) gained 7.2%, BNB added 1.4% and Bitcoin Cash 0.7%, while Ethereum (ETH), the second-largest asset, fell 3.0%. Monero's 12-month gain of 80.2% stands far above Bitcoin's drawdown, with the token near $593, still 25.7% below its record of $798. Liquidity is the burden the ranking flags first: Monero's 24-hour volume of $108.9 million is a fraction of Bitcoin's $22.1 billion, thin enough that a single crypto whale can move the price quickly. Its privacy design, which conceals sender and receiver identities instead of relying on zero-knowledge proofs, has also drawn exchange restrictions: Kraken has moved to halt Monero trading for customers in the United Arab Emirates and stopped it for Canadian clients on compliance grounds. The wider tape reads the same way: total digital-asset market cap shed 4.2% in 24 hours, volume dropped 10.8%, and the fear and greed index printed 46, a neutral score. The ranking's core condition is explicit: for smaller assets to turn, money has to rotate out of the largest one first, and that rotation has not started.

Spot Bitcoin ETF Outflows Return

Flows into United States spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs sharpen the caution. Wednesday, Oct. 21, brought $528.4 million of net inflows; Thursday, Oct. 22, reversed course with $635.6 million of net outflows, the largest single-day withdrawal since June. That Thursday figure pushed October's cumulative spot Bitcoin ETF flow back into net-outflow territory. Ethereum's ETF record is weaker still: about $110 million left those funds on Oct. 22, and combined net assets have fallen from $17.8 billion on Sep. 25 to $14.6 billion. Ethereum has dropped 40.3% over the past year, a worse 12-month run than Bitcoin's. Stress also shows in derivatives: our earlier coverage of the 24-hour tape recorded leveraged longs absorbing 86.36% of $452.9 million in crypto liquidations. Hyperliquid, a decentralized-trading blockchain, tops the ranking's 12-month table with a 90.2% gain, though HYPE has lost 17.1% over the past month and trades near $75, 23.1% below its $98 record. Supply is the flagged risk: 222.4 million of a maximum 1 billion HYPE tokens circulate, and full dilution at current prices would lift market cap toward $75.4 billion against roughly $16.8 billion today. About 14.2 million HYPE unlock on Oct. 29, near $1.1 billion at current prices or 2.6% of market cap, per the token-unlock tracker Tokenomics.com. Tron gained 6.4% over 12 months with TRX near $0.33, 23.5% below its $0.43 peak; the review credits its narrow trading range for defense during Bitcoin's slide, while noting it may lag a sharp rebound. NEAR Protocol is up 206.3% this year at about $4.50 but fell 9.5% in the 24 hours to Oct. 24 and sits 78.1% below its $20 record. NEAR said on Oct. 23 that all Chain Signatures operations now run inside trusted execution environments, with 17 independent operators securing its MPC network. Quant rose 98.8% over 30 days to about $178 before an 8.3% weekly pullback; last month it joined The Clearing House's On-Chain Money Initiative, a tokenized-deposit settlement network targeted for the first half of 2027. The review also cites a recent Pomp Podcast note that Bitcoin (BTC) ranged between $83,000 and $87,000; the price has since slipped below, and reclaiming $83,000 is framed as the rebound gauge.

Dominance at 59.5% Caps Rotation

Our reading is that the year-end call rests on two conditions that have not been met yet. Dominance at 59.5% and Thursday's $635.6 million ETF outflow, the largest since June, both describe a market still concentrated in Bitcoin, not rotating out of it, and the ranking itself concedes a single day of flows cannot confirm a trend. Price memory adds context: the cost basis that held through Trump's Iran strike threat sits just below spot, and our Bitcoin technical analysis keeps the $83,000 reclaim as the rebound gauge. Until spot Bitcoin ETFs string together inflow days and dominance breaks below 59.5%, the ranking reads as a relative-strength note, and its own closing condition stands: if outflows persist, altcoins will not escape the drawdown.