Multi-Year Total Return (3-Year and 5-Year)

These two windows compare today's composite price with the price three and five years ago, and are shown as cumulative percentage changes rather than annualized rates. They are the longest windows most digital assets can support at all. Like every return figure here, they exclude staking rewards, airdrops, and fork distributions.

How it is computed

(price now / price 3 years ago - 1) x 100, and (price now / price 5 years ago - 1) x 100

Where it misleads

Most tokens in this market do not have three or five years of price history, so any table sorted on these columns silently displays only the subset that survived long enough to be measured; assets that failed outright, such as Terra's UST and LUNA in May 2022, or tokens stranded on venues that stopped operating, drop out of the sample instead of appearing with a large negative figure. Even among survivors, provider histories usually begin at first listing rather than first trade, and long series are stitched across venues of very different liquidity, with silent restatements when coverage changes. Windows this long also span changes to the asset itself, including Ethereum's 2022 transition to proof-of-stake, so the issuance and security model at the start of the window is not the one at the end. The figures are price-only and take no account of the venue insolvencies, bridge exploits, and custody failures that determined actual outcomes for many participants over the same period.

The equity comparison, and why it fails

Three- and five-year total returns in fund reporting; regulated fund performance is presented under rules that require survivorship-bias disclosure and standardized annualization, neither of which governs a token price series.

Reading a high or a low value

A positive figure means the price is above its level three or five years ago and a negative one means below. Read them together with how many assets in the comparison group have any history at all over the same window.