Leading crypto price and data-tracking platform, CoinMarketCap, has announced the winners of the first-ever CMC Crypto Awards event hosted in 2024.

According to a release seen by CryptoPotato, the award categories include Crypto of the Year, Bridge Builder of the Year, Memecoin of the Year, Social Influencer to Watch, Crypto Leader Of The Year, and Most Innovative Decentralized Finance (DeFi) projects.

CMC Unveils Winners of 2024 Awards Event

The CMC Crypto Awards 2024 honors extraordinary contributors, including products and projects, that have shaped the crypto and Web3 space in the last 12 months. The event will be live-streamed on March 6, and the awards will be minted as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain, marking an immutable record of the awardees’ successes.

CoinMarketCap said the winners were selected after ten days of online voting, intense data analysis, and discussions with an expert committee.

Solana’s native token SOL won Crypto of the Year, while the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, emerged as the Bridge Builder of the Year. The value of SOL has risen by triple digits yearly, and BlackRock issued the largest spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).

CoinMarketCap awarded Meme Coin of the Year to Bonk, a Solana-based asset that has gained over 5,800% in the past 12 months. The platform also recognized on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, who has flagged most exploits and suspicious activities on several blockchains, as the Social Influencer to Watch.

Five Nominees Win Crypto Leader Award

Furthermore, the Most Innovative Layer1/Layer2/Cross-Chain Project was awarded to Celestia, a modular data availability network that makes it easy for anyone to deploy their blockchain.

The winner of the Most Innovative NFT & Gaming Project was Pudgy Penguins, a line of digital collectibles that helps users unleash the inner child, while Uniswap, one of the largest decentralized exchanges, emerged as the Most Innovative DeFi Project.

For the Crypto Leader of the Year category, CoinMarketCap expressed difficulty in selecting one winner as the five nominees were found to have contributed a lot in different ways to the crypto sector. The winners are Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, Messari founder and CEO Ryan Selkis, and Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission CEO Julia Leung.

“We’re excited to make the CMC Crypto Awards even bigger, and with the market looking so bullish, it’s thrilling to imagine the stories we’ll be celebrating next year,” said CoinMarketCap CMO Jonathan Isaac.