I asked Claude for a tier list of altcoins that have a chance to beat Bitcoin. The results are surprising

At the top of the altcoin tier list prepared for me by Claude, there is neither Ethereum nor Solana. The highest rating went to Hyperliquid (HYPE), a decentralized derivatives exchange that allocates nearly all its revenue to buy back and burn its own token. Even more interesting are the hard data: out of 13 major altcoins we checked, only four have outperformed Bitcoin in the last 12 months.

Who really beat Bitcoin in the last year

First, it was necessary to establish what exactly it means to "beat Bitcoin." Claude immediately dismissed surpassing it in market capitalization, known as the flippening. Bitcoin is currently worth about $1.63 trillion, while Ethereum is around $295 billion, meaning the second-largest cryptocurrency would have to gain more than five times compared to the first. Therefore, the criterion became the rate of return. The tier list assesses the chance that a given token will yield more than BTC in the next 12 to 24 months.

The starting point was the prices from the last year. On October 13, 2025, Bitcoin closed the day at $115,200, a week after setting an all-time high of about $126,200. On Tuesday morning, it was priced at about $81,100, which is a decrease of 29.6%. In this context, only four out of the 13 studied altcoins performed better. Zcash (ZEC) gained 356%, Hyperliquid 88%, Monero (XMR) 68%, and Tron (TRX) just under 2%.

The rest lost, and significantly. Ethereum lost 43%, BNB 44%, XRP nearly half its value, and Solana 51%. Avalanche, Dogecoin, and Sui dropped by 59-67%, while Cardano, the weakest in the ranking, fell by 69%. Bitcoin's share of the total market capitalization, known as dominance, ranges from 55% to nearly 59% according to various services. Thus, a broad altcoin season is still not in sight.

Tier S and A: an exchange that buys back its own token, and two candidates with issues

The only altcoin in the highest category is HYPE. Claude justified this briefly: it is the only large project backed by a steady and measurable cash flow. According to Hyperliquid's documentation, transaction fees go, among other things, to the so-called Assistance Fund, and the tokens repurchased by it are permanently burned. CoinShares analysts estimate that about 99% of the fees flow to the fund. In the spring, the buyback accounted for 5.5-7% of HYPE's market capitalization over the year, and since October 3, the fund has a second source of money: interest from USDC stablecoin reserves deposited on the exchange. According to CoinShares, this amounts to another $140-160 million annually.

HYPE is priced at about $80, nearly 20% less than its record of $97.90 from September 23. Bitcoin has lost nearly 36% from its peak. Since May, ETF funds for HYPE from Bitwise, 21Shares, and Grayscale have been listed in the USA. There are two risks. On the sixth day of each month, the exchange's creators can take up to 9.92 million HYPE, or about 1% of the supply, and this schedule will last until 2027. So far, they have taken significantly less than the limit allowed, but that is their choice, not a stipulation in the code. The second risk is the buyback itself, which validators can change through voting.

In category A, Claude placed two cryptocurrencies that have little in common. Ethereum has clearly been underperforming against Bitcoin over the past year, and the ETH/BTC ratio has dropped to about 0.03. Nevertheless, no other altcoin has such broad access to institutional money. ETF funds are operational, and BitMine Immersion Technologies had over 6 million ETH as of September 27, which is about 4.9% of the total supply. On October 6, the Glamsterdam update launched on the Sepolia test network, which aims to increase Ethereum's throughput. There is no date for deployment on the main network. Claude set one condition here: funds must return to buying ETH, but for now, they have been withdrawing money for several sessions.

The second candidate is Zcash, the biggest surprise of the year. ZEC costs about 1130 USD and with a market capitalization of 18.5 billion dollars, it ranks among the top ten cryptocurrencies in the world. The increases were driven, among other things, by the Grayscale ETF fund, which has been listed since August 25, and the growing number of coins in private addresses. According to Delphi Digital, their share in the supply has grown from about 11 to 30 percent over the year. Zcash also has, like Bitcoin, a limit of 21 million coins.

Zcash did not reach the highest tier for three reasons. After a rise of over 350 percent, the price easily gives back gains; just in the last day, ZEC lost over 10 percent. In May, a researcher from Shielded Labs found a bug in the cryptographic code of the private Orchard pool. However, the most serious problem is coming from Brussels. From July 10, 2027, the EU regulation on anti-money laundering (AMLR) will be applied. Its Article 79 prohibits crypto-asset service providers from maintaining accounts that allow for anonymization, including through so-called privacy-enhancing cryptocurrencies. The mere possession of such coins will not be prohibited, but European exchanges may be forced to remove them from their offerings.

Middle and Bottom of the Table: Monero, Tron, and Disappointments from the Top

Monero landed in category B despite a 68 percent increase. In January, XMR cost a record approximately 797 USD, today it is about 35 percent cheaper. It faces the same regulatory troubles as Zcash, only greater, because privacy is default in Monero, not optional. Many exchanges have already delisted it, and thinking about an ETF fund is difficult.

Tron beat Bitcoin in an unusual way: it almost stood still. Bitcoin was losing, so the relative result came out positive. The beta coefficient of TRX, which measures sensitivity to movements in the entire market, is 0.23, while Ethereum's is nearly 1.4. The network mainly lives off transfers of the stablecoin USDT, not speculation. In a bear market, this is an advantage; in a bull market, Tron usually lags behind.

Binance's token, BNB, costs about 724 USD, 47 percent less than exactly a year ago when it set a record of around 1371 USD on October 13, 2025. Its fate depends on the condition of one exchange, which Claude considered both a strength and a risk.

In category C are Solana, XRP, and Chainlink. Solana and XRP have had ETF funds in the USA since last autumn, yet they have both lost about 50 percent. Solana is waiting for the Alpenglow update, which is supposed to shorten the final confirmation time of transactions from about 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds. For now, it only works on the test network, and weekly inflows to SOL funds dropped at the beginning of October to 2.4 million USD from 188 million the week before. Chainlink lost 38 percent and performed the best among the losers, but its price is still 77 percent lower than in the record month of May 2021.

At the bottom of the table are projects that have been losing to Bitcoin for a long time, namely Sui, Avalanche, Cardano, and Dogecoin, the only representative of category F. Claude pointed out the lack of own revenues, continuous issuance of new tokens, and that in this cycle, money is going to projects with hard data, while memes have been left on the margins.

Where Artificial Intelligence Might Be Wrong

The tier list is not an investment recommendation, and Claude himself pointed out its weak points. Three of the four winners of the last year profited from a strong trend, and the leaders of one year often give back gains in the next. Zcash has already experienced this after its debut in 2016. The ranking also assumes that Bitcoin's dominance will begin to decline. If capital continues to flow mainly to BTC funds, even categories S and A may lose.

The model's knowledge has a cutoff date, which is why we checked all the prices in the text against exchange data from October 13, 2025, and 2026. The assessment of projects remains an opinion, albeit one based on numbers.

Among the altcoins that outperformed Bitcoin in the past year, only Hyperliquid has revenues that can be counted. Zcash and Monero benefited from the trend towards privacy, while Tron remained stagnant as the market declined.

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