Recent years have witnessed a huge shift in the cryptocurrency market capitalization value and share.
Gradual Change in Cryptocurrency Market Cap
The value of 1 bitcoin has jumped from less than 1 Rupee ($0.00001), 10 years ago to 8,00,000 Rupee ($11700) in today’s times. The rising value of bitcoin has also subsequently brought another shift in the cryptocurrency market in recent times. After noticing the soaring success and importance of BTC, other cryptocurrencies started popping out one after another. In fact, if you take a look at today’s data, there are more than 2000 cryptocurrencies that exist in the market today.
The rise in cryptocurrencies has resulted in declining dominance of bitcoin. So even though, since 2009, the value of bitcoin kept on rising, the share of bitcoin in the cryptocurrency market has declined. Take a look at the graph below. It shows the overall change in the dominance of bitcoin in the cryptocurrency market from 2013 to 2019
Cryptocurrency Revolution
The cryptocurrency revolution began with the pioneer of all cryptocurrencies- Bitcoin. It had a market capitalization of 10.20 billion dollars as of January 2014 representing 89% of the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies. Today, in 2019, the market capitalization of bitcoin has increased to more than 207 billion dollars. However, it currently represents only 65% of the total cryptocurrency market.
As of July 2019, there are more than 2000 cryptocurrencies existing in the market.
But wait, the story doesn’t end here. While it is true that the number of altcoins has increased, not all of them have skyrocketed or are successful.
Take a look at this chart
Now, take a closer look at the red box highlighted inside the image.
As you can interpret, only the top 9 cryptocurrencies share a marked dominance of 85% in the crypto market. Other 2000 cryptocurrencies only share a total market share of around 15%.
From graphs and figures, one can easily analyze that not all cryptocurrencies or altcoins in the market have managed to gain the same success as bitcoin or ethereum. This phase of the market is similar to the boom and burst bubble phase of the internet. While companies like Amazon gained incredible popularity during the dotcom phase, innumerable companies failed in the late ’90s.
But, needless to say, the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies has seen major growth in these recent years with virtual currencies other than bitcoin upping their game. The total market cap of cryptocurrencies has reached more than 300 billion dollars today (July 2019)
Data Source: coinmarket.cap