December's Hottest Crypto Token Movers

The year is winding down, and everyone is making lists. But while most folks are rushing to catalog their New Year’s resolutions, the Bankless analyst team is busy scouring the crypto markets for top token plays.

Whether you’re hunting the next moonshot or dodging the next rug, these five spotlight-stealing tokens will no doubt be worth paying attention to during the month ahead. Today, we’re diving into December’s most notable altcoin stories.

Pro tip: view bull/bear analyst ratings for these tokens in the Bankless Token Hub!

🏦 Ondo Finance

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30-Day Change: -25%
Ticker: ONDO

Ondo Finance is one of the largest crypto-native tokenization platforms, custodying over $2B in value that is used to reserve its tokenized RWA offerings.

While Ondo’s roots rest in tokenized OUSG and USDY “yieldcoins,” the platform recently expanded its scope with the launch of Ondo Global Markets, a bespoke tokenization service that enables non-U.S. investors to easily access onchain exposure to public securities, like stocks, bonds, and ETFs.

The Ondo Global Markets platform limits tokenized asset creations and redemptions to non-U.S. onboarded investors, but it does allow for token transferability on secondary markets, helping preserve DeFi composability.

Token Catalysts:

• New Product Lines: Ondo launched its “Global Markets” in September and saw $300M of deposits within the first month. While growth has since plateaued just above $400M, Ondo’s tokenization product is slated for deployment to Solana in early 2026.
• Stiff Competition: While Ondo ranks among the largest crypto-native tokenization platforms with its nearly $2B in AUM, compared to the DTCC – a clearinghouse lynchpin that surpassed $100T in assets under custody this summer and just announced its own tokenization ambitions – Ondo is a mere rounding error. As tokenization matures, Ondo risks finding itself outgunned by bigger players operating at bigger scales.

🩶 iShares Silver Trust (Ondo Tokenized)

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30-Day Change: +27%
Ticker: SLVon

SLVon is Ondo Finance's tokenized version of the iShares Silver Trust (SLV), the world's preeminent physically backed silver ETF managed by BlackRock. An ERC-20 token, SLVon provides onchain exposure to silver, continual trading, instant minting/redeeming, and global accessibility for non-U.S. investors who may face barriers to access traditional US ETFs.

Although the broader tokenized silver sector is significantly less mature than its tokenized gold counterpart, SLVon is issued through a bankruptcy-remote entity and publishes daily attestations. This structure guarantees asset security for token holders, even in the event of Ondo’s dissolution.

Token Catalysts:

• SoV Play: Amid continued global instability, store of value plays (including gold, silver, and BTC) display attractive attributes, as their supply is relatively fixed. Silver prices will likely increase as unknowns mount.
• Fastest Horse: Silver has surpassed gold as the top-performing store of value. Compared to gold, which appreciated 7% since the November 21 lows, silver has vastly outperformed, up 29% over the same period. For comparison, BTC (which is down 6% year-to-date) is up only 8% since the same November lows.

💜 Monad

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30-Day Change: -20%
Ticker: MON

Monad is attempting to advance the efficient frontier between decentralization and throughput with a fully EVM-compatible Layer 1 that upgrades Ethereum’s architecture with five major innovations: MonadBFT, RaptorCast, Asynchronous Execution, Parallel Execution, and MonadDb.

Together, these optimizations yield a “sufficiently decentralized” next-gen blockchain with Ethereum bytecode compatibility that can execute up to 10k transactions per second with 400 millisecond block times and 800 millisecond finality.

By reengineering the EVM with parallelism, low-latency consensus, and high-efficiency data handling, Monad chain aims to achieve immense blockchain scalability while retaining the user-experience benefits of a monolithic execution environment.

Token Catalysts:

• Recent Launch: The Monad blockchain deployed to mainnet in late November. Since launching, Monad has achieved $200M of TVL (the majority of which was accumulated within the first week), ranking it 27th among chains by TVL. Although MON doubled in price on day one, the token has failed to hold onto its gains, and is now trading below its initial public market price.
• Rich Valuation: Despite trailing Berachain, Linea, Optimism, and Starknet when it comes to TVL, Monad commands a fully diluted valuation of $2.2B, richer than all of these better known blockchains.
• Market Saturation: Other fresh blockchain token launches have performed poorly post-launch. Much-hyped stablecoin chains Plasma (XPL) and Stable (STABLE) are both trading around FDVs of $1.4B (below Monad) after suffering enormous double-digit percentage losses over the past month.

💸 Morpho

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30-Day Change: -40%
Ticker: MORPHO

Morpho circumvents the contentious protocol governance processes of traditional lending market protocols by delegating risk management responsibilities to individual market creators and lenders themselves.

This isolated design provides immense flexibility with respect to the assets that can be lent/borrowed and the leverage ratios that can be achieved. For example, Morpho offers lending markets on a variety of exotic collaterals, from Pendle principal tokens to Curve liquidity provider shares to tokenized crypto yield fund interests.

As risk management responsibilities fall on lenders and market creators, MORPHO holders play a limited role in protocol governance, but can vote to enable optional fees to collect up to 25% of the interest payments made in any market.

Token Catalysts:

• Stream Contagion: In early November, crypto yield fund Stream Finance declared insolvency. In the days that followed, multiple impacted Morpho lending vaults with exposure to Stream ran out of liquidity to process redemptions as borrower collateral became steeply impaired.
• Risky Model: Although Morpho’s lending model isolates insolvency risk to individual markets, it also promotes promiscuous lending behaviors. High-risk lending pools run a higher rate of default, and multiple simultaneous pool implosions could decimate Morpho’s fundamentals if market conditions continue to deteriorate.

🪙 Ethena

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30-Day Change: -20%
Ticker: ENA

Ethena is a “synthetic dollar” protocol that creates yield-native money from thin air. The protocol does this by holding spot crypto assets (like BTC and ETH) and shorting perpetual futures in amounts equal to the value of its holdings, stabilizing the “delta” and value of its portfolio while (typically) producing income from funding payments on the perpetual short position.

Delta neutral yield farming strategies – like those employed by Ethena – were chief among the casualties of crypto’s disastrous 10/10 liquidation crisis, in which supposedly “safe” portfolios with no apparent exposure to fluctuations in crypto market prices lost significant value when industry-wide auto deleveraging (ADL) nullified their profitable short positions.

Token Catalysts:

• AUM Implosion: Ethena user deposits peaked just shy of $15B in early October, but the protocol has lost more than half of its TVL since 10/10, with the asset drain continuing incessantly on a daily basis. Although Ethena was purported as having guarantees from exchanges that prevented its positions from being auto deleveraged on 10/10, such agreements offer limited protection in the event of a deeper failure, like an exchange bankruptcy.
• Yield Compression: The available returns on Ethena’s staked sUSDe synthetic dollar have fallen considerably in recent months. While Ethena was frequently earning above 4% APY prior to October 10, the increasing demand for short hedges has caused funding rates to fall, placing sUSDe at underperforming the risk free rate (short-term U.S. Treasury bills).