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A year ago, the crypto bubble reached its level of fever before the inevitable accident that occurred during the rest of 2018 and lasted until the new year.
Crypto Market down 84% on the anniversary of the historical peak
According to CoinMarketCap, the market capitalization of cryptocurrency – which measures the combined notional value of all cryptocurrencies – reached $ 835.7 billion on January 7, 2018 at approximately 11:17 UTC.
This meant that, at least on paper, cryptocurrency as an investment class was worth more than Facebook and Twitter – combined – as well as the limited money supply of all but eight countries.
Today, however, the capitalization of the cryptocurrency market stands at 136.3 billion dollars, with an approximate drop of 84%. Even more remarkable is that this also occurred when the number of cryptography projects tracked by CoinMarketCap increased to 2.086.
Ripple is worth more in January 2018 than Whole Crypto Market Cap Today
In particular, the peak of cryptocurrency occurred several weeks after the bitcoin market declined. The introduction of bitcoin futures in mid-December seems to have pierced the bitcoin price bubble, as the flagship cryptocurrency peaked close to $ 20,000 a few days after its futures contracts began trading on the US regulated bags CBOE and CME.
However, that capital did not come out of the cryptocurrency markets, at least not at the beginning, because the bubble altcoin continued to swell in a wild film until late December and the first week of 2018.
That bubble was largely driven by ripple price movements (XRP), which became the retail speculation manifesto even when its supporters tried to market it as a cryptocurrency suit-and-tie built for banks and other financial institutions.
Ripple was particularly popular in the South Korean market, where the "Kimchi Award" pushed the global token average up to $ 3.84. On Monday morning, the ripple price was $ 0.366, a year-over-90% decline.
At its peak, the ripple – hence the second largest cryptocurrency behind bitcoin – had a market capitalization of around $ 149 billion, which is now more than $ 13 billion more than the total market cap.
Of course, the ripple was not the only cryptocurrency to take a buzz of 90% or more from its peak of 2018. Other important coins and tokens that hold this dubious distinction include bitcoin money (96%), litecoin (90%), tron (92%), cardan (96%), monero (90%), hyphen (95%), NEM (97%), NEO (96%) and zcash (94%).
Looking for the Silver Silver of Crypto Winter
Needless to say, 2018 was a difficult year for investors. However, it was not bad at all for the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole. The bear market has forced investors to examine projects more carefully, and regulatory repression has almost killed the initial market for money supply (ICO), but it is hoped that they will translate into new legislation that promotes true innovation by protecting at the same time investors from fraud.
The most important thing is that the bear market has not prevented developers from continuing to develop technologies that will help bitcoin networks and other cryptocurrency networks to adapt to mainstream adoption when it arrives. For example, The Lightning Network (LN) has continued to see its total capacity grow, despite the fact that the price of bitcoin is declining. In addition, the median bitcoin transaction fee has fallen to a minimum of over three years, although the network processes about 75 percent more payments on a daily basis than the last time the commissions were so low.
This does not mean that the work is complete. Fraud is still too common in the cryptography industry and many blockchain technology applications have not yet been proven to be useful compared to their centralized counterparts. And somehow, after 700 billion losses, many projects still seem overvalued. (Dentacoin – "The blockchain solution for the global dental industry" – has an implicit market capitalization of $ 64.9 million.)
However, as investors await the next big upward run, it is hoped that the industry will emerge from Crypto Winter as a more mature ecosystem, one better prepared to stand out as a passing fad.
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