Cryptocurrency is among the most volatile asset classes that investors can pursue. For some, the thrilling highs and terrifying lows can be too stomach-churning a ride for their hard-earned dollars. However, that extreme volatility has worked in the favor of many investors who jumped on the crypto bandwagon early and never got off.

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Here’s a look at how a relatively modest investment of $1,000 in some of the most popular digital tokens could have lost you a few hundred bucks — or made you a millionaire many, many times over.

• December 2013: $0.000513

• April 21, 2025: $0.16

• Current worth of a $1,000 investment at launch: $3,125,000

According to CNBC, Elon Musk first publicly expressed interest in dogecoin when he began tweeting about it in 2019. However, back then, Musk’s name and brand represented something completely different than it does now that he leads the controversial governmental agency that adopted the meme coin’s name as its acronym: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Had you invested $1,000 when dogecoin launched, you wouldn’t be as rich as Musk today — but you would be a millionaire three times over.

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• July 2010: $0.0008

• April 21, 2025: $86,882

• Current worth of a $1,000 investment at launch: $108,602,500,000

Bitcoin started the crypto revolution, and it remains the biggest, most widely used and best-known digital coin in the world. It launched in 2009, but early pricing data is cloudy, because there were no modern exchanges in bitcoin’s infancy.

What is known is that the price began at $0.0008 per coin when it first launched on exchanges in 2010, but never topped $0.40 per coin that year — one user famously spent 10,000 BTC to buy a Papa John’s pizza that year, before the original cryptocurrency began its volatile but upward march toward six figures.

Ethereum is the biggest altcoin and the No. 2 biggest cryptocurrency, behind only bitcoin. One of the most utilitarian coins on the market, it’s used for smart contract functionality and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.

Solana is similar to ethereum in that it supports Layer 1 blockchains in NFT, DeFi and tokenized real-world asset applications. However, it’s newer, smaller and still evolving, so its early investors would not have gained much to date. Still, it’s a formidable cryptocurrency with practical applications and a seemingly bright future.