Viewed through the lens of U.S. dollar price per token, the crypto market in early 2022 looked very different from a standard market-cap ranking. According to the source material, the four most expensive digital assets at the time included three bitcoin-linked instruments: bitcoin (BTC), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), and Huobi BTC (HBTC). Since WBTC and HBTC are tokenized forms of bitcoin, their per-unit prices were broadly aligned with BTC.
Top positions were dominated by bitcoin-linked assets
The report said BTC was trading at around $38,000 per coin, placing BTC, WBTC, and HBTC at the top of the ranking. The fourth-most expensive asset was yearn finance (YFI), priced at roughly $28,425 per unit. That made YFI one of the few crypto assets still trading in the five-digit range in U.S. dollar terms.
After YFI, the price ladder dropped sharply. Ethereum (ETH) and tokenized ether asset lido staked ether (STETH) came next, with both trading at similar levels. The source noted that ETH changed hands at about $2,700 per coin, placing it in the four-digit range. It was followed by Maker (MKR), which traded at around $1,800 per unit.
The rest of the top 10 traded in the hundreds of dollars
The final three positions in the top 10 were occupied by assets priced in the triple-digit range: Binance Coin (BNB) at about $417, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at roughly $337, and Kusama (KSM) at around $228. Together, these assets completed the list of the ten most expensive crypto assets by unit price.
The article also noted that another ten coins below KSM were still trading above $100 per unit, including Aave, Monero, Elrond, Compound, Quant, Litecoin, Solana, Dash, Zcash, and Bitcoin SV (BSV). Every coin below BSV, however, was priced at under $100 per coin.
Unit price is not the same as market value
Importantly, this ranking measures the dollar price of a single token rather than total market capitalization, adoption, or network size. Assets with relatively small supplies can show a very high per-unit price even if their overall market value is lower than that of more widely circulating cryptocurrencies. As a result, the list offers an interesting pricing perspective on the crypto economy, but it should not be treated as a standalone measure of a project’s overall significance.