Taking Stock: the Top 10 Cryptocurrencies One Year Into the Bear Market

February 14, 2019 by William Peaster

 

This month, bitcoin entered its longest bear market to date. The top 10 cryptocurrencies today look a lot different now, in several senses, than they did last February. It’s a good time to take stock one year into the downturn. 

Also read: WikiLeaks Takes to Twitter, Labeling Craig Wright a ‘Serial Fabricator’

 

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Surprise, Surprise: BTC, ETH, XRP Still Holding Down the Top

Last Valentine’s Day, bitcoin took a run from $8,599 USD to over $9,500 in a matter of hours. One year later, the genesis cryptocurrency is hovering above $3,500 per CoinBillboard after finding support at that price in recent days.

The bitcoin price is obviously far different now, but the fundamentals around the Bitcoin protocol are also changed. The Lightning Network’s fledgling growth has led to new rumblings that the Bitcoin blocksize should be decreased yet.

 

Ether and XRP have swapped places a few times amid the downturn in the market cap rat race, but they’ve continued to round out the top three behind BTC.

Ethereum continues to churn along toward its scaling triumvirate of sharding, Casper, and Plasma, though its community is grappling with how best to actualize the blockchain’s major Serenity update. And as for XRP, its ecosystem has seen RippleNet reach 200 institutional customers, but the competition is mounting as competitors gain ground in the global settlements arena.

LTC, EOS, BCH Top Mid-Cap Cryptos

Litecoin recently advanced in the top 10 upon talks the blockchain’s developers would move to implement the privacy protocol MimbleWimble. EOS, which raised more than $4 billion in its ICO, now has a market cap of $2.5 billion, though its dapp usage has grown courtesy of a gambling migration.

 

The bitcoin cash (BCH) price was gouged after the contentious Bitcoin SV fork last fall, but on the technical side, there’s an interesting swell in the community to embrace the Avalanche consensus mechanism. And Tether has managed to stay the cryptoeconomy’s top stablecoin even after losing its peg last year, while Tron (TRX) has weathered controversy and enjoyed a gambling dapp surge of its own.

Rounding out the present top 10 is stellar lumens and Cardano’s ADA. The Stellar ecosystem has seen some recent adoption traction, while Cardano has seen considerable technical advancements and is arguably the most underrated of the top 10 cryptocurrencies.

Zooming out, the bitcoin dominance rate is currently over 52 percent, with no flippenings in sight. And one year ago, the OG crypto’s market cap was $160 billion — nearly $40 billion above the entire cryptoeconomy’s $121 billion market cap today.

Where the bitcoin dominance rate and the BTC market cap will sit one year from now remains an open question going forward, though it wouldn’t be surprising to see BTC, ETH, and XRP holding the top three again at this point in 2020.

What’s your take? What will the top 10 cryptocurrencies look like at this point next year? Let us know in the comments section below. 

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Images via CoinBillboard, Pixabay