7 Best Staking Crypto Coins In 2022 & Our Crazy Prediction

The once obscure crypto staking industry has become a global powerhouse worth more than $250B in just a few short years, with prominent figures in the staking industry saying that it could shoot up to $450B once Ethereum completes its transition to Proof-Of-Stake (expected this year).

It’s no longer a question of whether to stake. It’s a question of what is the best staking crypto.

Which crypto should you stake? Where would you get the best APY and asset appreciation, but that will also be a safe investment?

After all, who cares about double digit returns, if the token loses 90% of its value, right?

This is why we set out to find the best staking crypto for 2022 and beyond.

Our Criteria For Choosing The 7 Best Staking Crypto Assets

When we sat down to consider what would be THE coins to stake this year, we knew that simply chasing what we think would produce the best returns wouldn’t be enough.

Hey, if we only cared about the APY % then we would go do some yield farming and call it a day.

But no, we wanted to best our decision on a combination of several factors, which are all just as important as net profits.

We ended up deciding on 4 metrics in order to choose what we consider the best staking crypto assets.

We made our choices for the best staking crypto coins based on: Asset Score, Search Trends, Total Value Locked and Staking Rewards

In addition, we decided to only focus on “Blue-Chip” staking assets, or maybe “Bluer-Chip” would be more accurate, because in crypto, a strong newcomer can’t really be considered a “Blue Chip” so fast.

But in general, we didn’t consider Moonshots, even though there are some very interesting projects in that space. We’ll have a separate article for that. If you have any suggestions, comment below 👇

Here’s the criteria we used.

SIMETRI Asset Score

We decided to look at the SIMETRI Scoring System for all the coins that we reviewed. The SIMETRI system scores crypto assets in a range between F and A+. It takes into account some of the most important factors in a crypto asset, such as market opportunity, underlying tech, ecosystem, core team, tokenomics, and roadmap.

When it comes to choosing the best staking crypto, these metrics become super important in making a smart decision.

Currently, the only crypto that ever got a ranking of A is Bitcoin. In the staking space, the best we’ve seen is B+, so keep that in mind when looking over the scoring.

Search Trends

Determining the level of retail interest in a crypto coin correlates pretty well with what can be expected from it in terms of price appreciation and overall performance. That’s why we decided to look at the Google Trends level of interest in each one of the coins that we’ve examined for this article.

Total Value Locked

Looking at an asset’s TVL helps us determine not only the level of interest in the asset, but also how stable it is, the level of confidence that investors have in it, and its long term stability. The more investors decide to commit a stake in an asset, the more likely it is to live long and prosper. We used DefiLlama to help us find out the exact numbers.

Staking Rewards

And finally, last but not least – the staking rewards. We obviously want to know how much we can profit in 2022 from staking crypto. That’s why we’re here reading this article, right? Choosing the best staking crypto coin, at the end of the day, is about profits.

7 Best Staking Crypto Assets For 2022

Choosing only 7 crypto staking assets for this article has been far from easy, there’s just so many great projects out there, and we really wanted to put some more of them on the list.

However, rules are rules, and 7 has been chosen as the magic number.

These are the best staking cryptos of the year. If you think we totally missed on your favourite project, hit us up in the comments below.

Driven by a wave of institutional investors, Polkadot is here to stay

Polkadot is an open-source sharded multichain protocol. It’s considered to be one of the first next-generation blockchains. It was originally designed in 2016 by Dr. Gavin Wood, the former CTO and Co-Founder of Ethereum, and the creator of the Solidity programming language.

When looking at the project’s long-term outlook and roadmap, it’s clear that it is one of the more ambitious Proof-Of-Stake blockchains on the market.

Polkadot and its native token, $DOT, continue to be one of the most stable assets in the staking industry, despite trending somewhat shaky in terms of retail interest.

With $1.3B in TVL, Polkadot is ranked #11 on the list of crypto assets by Total Value Staked.

Polkadot seems like one of those “under the radar” projects, which sounds like a crazy thing to say about a crypto with a market cap of $20B, but other crypto projects have stolen some of the spotlight from Polkadot (Solana, Cardano, Terra). That means one thing if you’re a $DOT believer – opportunity.

With a market cap that still has tons of room to grow, staking rewards sitting at a sweet 14%, and a SIMETRI Grade of B there’s no doubt that Polkadot is one of the best staking crypto assets to choose this year. It’s stable, has a lot of institutional investors, and has a strong future outlook.

Riding on Ethereum’s success, but creating a path of its own

Polygon is another exciting project that’s super promising and full of potential.

In case you’re not familiar with India-based Polygon and its inspiring success story, It’s essentially a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks.

If you love Ethereum, Polygon is not the “Ethereum Killer”, they’re a friend.

The native token, $MATIC, has seen an absolutely massive year, and interest continues to trend positively despite a shaky market.

With staking rewards riding high at a whopping 23% annualized, and Ethereum having such positive future prospects, $MATIC has some massive potential in 2022. A SIMETRI Grade of a solid B- also shows solid confidence in the project’s tech, roadmap and tokenomics.

Blazingly fast and taking the crypto staking industry by storm

Coming from a team of researchers in Cornell University, Avalanche is one of the most inspiring success stories to emerge during the crypto bull run of 2020.

Starting off as a protocol for solving consensus in a network of unreliable machines, Avalanche has grown to be one of the most technologically advanced, yet stable blockchains on the market.

While interest in it has somewhat dwindled during recent market slumps, it remains one of the top contenders to have a strong year due to its impressive roadmap, backed by an even more impressive team.

Currently sitting just shy of the Top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, with a SIMETRI Grade B and 9% in staking rewards, the outlook for $AVAX staking is extremely positive, especially if we have a bull market on our hands. If Avalanche continues its growth trajectory, we fully expect it to place higher on the list for best staking crypto asset next year.

If Smart Contracts prove to be a success, Cardano is primed for an amazing year

The recent Alonzo upgrade that finally brought Smart Contracts to Cardano is proving to be a mixed bag for now. There have only been about 1,000 to 2,000 contracts deployed on the system since September 2021 (compared to Ethereum, which has had almost 1,000,000 during that timeframe).

The interest in Cardano has seem to be on a slight decline over recent months, likely due to other blockchains like Solana and Avalanche stealing some of the spotlight.

For the reasons above, in combination with only 5% in staking rewards, we feel that Cardano deserves to drop a few spots on the best staking crypto list, in case you were expecting it to be higher.

However, as we all know, things happen very fast in this space.

If Cardano is able to prove a successful implementation over time, and deliver faster speeds, easier dev work, and much lower fees, while avoiding any network disruption – The token will have an absolutely stellar year and might re-take its place as Ethereum’s 2nd for the best staking crypto asset.

Crypto’s newest sweetheart is making waves that can’t be ignored

It looks like no matter where you look in crypto, there’s someone mentioning Terra, the blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK. With great utility, and popular projects like the Anchor protocol that pays for UST Staking (the Terra stablecoin), Terra has quickly risen to be a dominant force in the staking space.

Retail agrees, with Terra trending upwards.

With Staking Rewards sitting just below 9% but with no existing SIMETRI Score, Terra has been one of our top contenders for taking the 2nd spot on the list. It got edged out just slightly by our next contender, but it is still one of the best choices for staking this year, whether you stake the native $LUNA token or lock some UST on anchor – Terra is looking good these days.

The rising star of next-generation blockchains is hoping to ride the NFT wave to stardom

Solana has had a rough couple of months, with the blockchain going offline multiple times in the span of 3 months, which is not something you want to see from a truly decentralized blockchain.

At the same time, $SOL still remains one of the best staking crypto coins out there.

One of the reasons for that is the meteoric rise of NFTs, and Solana’s role in building NFT platforms with fast speeds and lower fees, such as Solsea, when compared to Ethereum’s stratospheric fees. Who wants to buy a cool pixelated monkey picture for $200 when the fees for the transaction are $150? (Just kidding, pixelated monkey pictures are going for at least $1.3M these days). Solana can do it much cheaper. At least when its online.

The interest level in the blockchain is also on the rise, which is a positive indicator.

In addition to its use-cases in the NFT space, with staking rewards sitting just below a solid 6% and a SIMETRI B Score, Solana has all the prospects of being one of the best staking crypto choices on the market today.

It is still being outshined by the one true king of crypto staking though.

The undisputed king of crypto staking is set to have its best year yet with the upcoming merge

In the same way when you’re reading a “Top 10” article about basketball, fully aware you’ll see MJ in the first spot, did you really expect anyone to dethrone Ethereum as the best crypto to stake and hold?

Not this year, and especially not when we’re expecting “The Merge” to happen sometimes in Q3 or Q4. And once that happens, expect search trends to shoot way way up.

True, the current 4.5% staking rewards are not really too exciting, but worry not. A substantial Ethereum Staking Rewards Increase is inevitable, with Ethereum researcher Justin Drake proving the number is going to double at the very least.

And with those kind of numbers, the best track record in the staking space, nearly 60% (!) of all the total value locked in ALL of the crypto industry, the highest number of new developers joining the ecosystem, could there be a better coin to stake than ETH?

Our Crazy Prediction For Crypto Staking In 2022

Our prediction is that the crypto staking space is due to explode, and that the catalyst for that is going to be Ethereum fully moving to Proof-Of-Stake some time this year. Hopefully.

Once that happens, institutional interest in crypto staking, followed by mainstream media interest, is going to go way up.

That will lead to significant buying pressure for the ETH token, which will then trickle down to the smaller cap projects.

In the same way that Bitcoin moves the entire crypto market and serve as somewhat of an index to crypto sentiment, we will see Ethereum becoming a similar market mover, possibly closing the gap on Bitcoin in terms of market cap.

Well, maybe it’s not THAT crazy of a prediction.

What do you think? Are we in for DeFi Summer 3.0? Year Of The Stake? Tell us in the comments below 👇

(Oh, and if you scrolled this far for a moonshot prediction, we’ll go with: Chainlink Staking once that goes live some time this year).