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The big bear market cryptocurrency of 2018 may have put a brake on the speculative interest of investors in this nascent asset class, but it does not seem to have led to a slowdown in the number of new altcoins that have been launched on the market.
CMC reaches 2,000 listed cryptocurrencies
As for the cryptocurrency resource site, CoinMarketCap reached a new milestone on Friday, as its market capitalization rankings now include data on over 2,000 tokens and active tokens, with an increase of over 600 from the start of the 2018.
A significant percentage of this increase comes from the growing popularity of tokens, cryptocurrencies running on the blockchain of another currency and are guaranteed by its network. Even projects that eventually launch their own blockchains often begin as initial token tokens (ICO) on Ethereum, Stellar or another network.
At the time of writing this article, CoinMarketCap had 2,000 cryptocurrencies listed on its market capitalization index. The site does not provide data on the number of cryptocurrencies it removes, but according to its website, indexed projects must be listed on a public cryptocurrency exchange with a functional API and have a non-zero trading volume.
It is not a tall bar. PayCoin, a true scamcoin whose founder was recently sentenced to 21 months in prison, managed to cling to a $ 157,000 ceiling on the back of $ 7 in the daily trading volume.
Even so, the attrition rate is not insignificant. For example, three of the 10 major cryptocurrencies of May 9, 2013 – the first date on which the Internet Archive Wayback Machine scanned the site – are no longer listed on the site. Inexplicably, a cryptocurrency called "BBQCoin", which was ranked 11th on that date, failed to achieve traditional adoption.
Bitcoin: still the king after all these years
With so many cryptocurrency projects constantly throwing hats in the ring every day, it's even more surprising that bitcoin, the project that started it all, still represents such a large share of the global market.
As of Friday morning, bitcoin controls a 52.1% stake in the cryptocurrency capital cap. In other words, BTC is not only the most valuable cryptocurrency, but it is also worth more than the other 2,007 combined.
This has not always been the case. After having held a 97% market share at the end of 2013, the bitcoin domain recorded a moderate decline in the next few years, but has consistently maintained over 80%. This changed in 2017 when – supported by the emergence of ICO – ethereum briefly challenged the bitcoin for its crown. At one point, supermarkets controlled two-thirds of market capitalization, but the bear market this year consolidated the dominant bitcoin position in the cryptographic ecosystem.
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