The cryptocurrency market has been fluctuating for a while. It has seen significant price increases and decreases, even in the past week alone. On a larger scale, the market saw a severe decline last year and has recovered partially since the start of 2019. Interestingly enough, the market capitalization one year ago on this date was exactly the same as it is now. So what has changed?
All cryptocurrencies saw notable price movements in late 2017 and early 2018. The market crashed during most of 2018, finishing the year with a total market cap of $127 billion. This means that in less than a year, the total capitalization decreased by almost 85% from $813 billion at the beginning of 2018. This year, on the other hand, the tide has turned.
However, if we look at a specific date, September 27th, in both 2018 and 2019, a curious similarity appears. The total market capitalization numbers for those dates are the same – $215 billion.
At a glance, the pictures appear to provide identical data with lots of green. Nevertheless, there are several main differences worth mentioning.
The main difference emerges when we compare Bitcoin with altcoins. Last year contained significant 7-day recovery periods for various altcoins such as Cardano (29%), Stellar (36%), and most notably XRP at over 100%. Yet, the prices of all of these coins and most of the other alts are considerably lower now than they were in 2018. XRP, for example, is worth $0.24 now though it was $0.57 a year ago. EOS, Bitcoin Cash, and Cardano Althave lost over 50% of their value in the course of a year.
Only two major cryptocurrencies have a higher price now compared to last year – Binance Coin and Bitcoin. While the former marked an all-time high in 2019 with $40, the latter’s market dominance has steadily increased. A year ago, BTC’s dominance rate was 52%, whereas now it’s 67.8%.
Even though the price of Bitcoin dropped by almost 20% over the last week, the fundamentals of the largest cryptocurrency by market cap are still strong. Bakkt’s Bitcoin futures platform was just launched and promises to attract institutional investors because of its regulated nature. Bitcoin’s hash rate has been increasing consistently, and the number of on-chain transactions recently hit an all-time high.
