Bitcoin’s market share has fallen below 40% for the first time in three years as altcoin sezun gives rise to many cryptos.

In particular ethereum has risen to its highest crypto market share since the last peak in February 2018, accounting for more than 19%.

That’s almost as much as all other cryptos combined at 21%, which themselves have seen considerable appreciation with the top 20 ranking transformed:

Bitcoin’s market cap has fallen now to $800 billion, while ethereum is almost half of it at $400 billion.

Then we have Binance Coin which is like their token share, worth $80 billion in part because Binance buys it back based on quarterly profits.

Cardano is the only one to survive in rankings from the 2017 ICO whitepaper wave with it on fourth position based on promises of smart contracts ‘soon,’ albeit about five years too late as eth invented smart contracts in 2015.

Doge is perhaps the wildcard crypto as no one thought it would rise to top five, yet maybe it should have been predictable, except no one could guess Elon Musk would shill it even on SNL.

Tether is at the top still with a market cap of $60 billion. Some say the bull will end when tether goes to the second page of rankings, but we’re not sure how much that will be true.

XRP survives. Still no all time high as it fights SEC in court, but it’s clinging on despite being delisted from many exchanges.

Polkadot has risen to a market cap of $37 billion with this trying to solve scalability by getting shards to go through a central coordinator which happens to be a bottleneck.

Finally a new coin, the Internet Computer. Ohh, it’s Dfinity! Finally this has launched. Just now actually on May 10th. We haven’t quite looked at it yet, but back in 2019 Joseph Lubin of ConsenSys said:

“Dfinity has a very strong team. Because dfinity is a currently closed system controlled by a small number of investors and token holders – though they’ve indicated they will open source their project at some point – it is hard to tell, but it appears to me they are less interested in being a global base trust and settlement layer and more like a somewhat decentralized AWS replacement.

They’re likely to do a very good job of this whenever it gets released.

Ultimately, it doesn’t seem viable for Dfinity to be a base trust layer for the planet as there is one fundamental design choice that they and Cosmos made that will prohibit this.

Both Dfinity and Cosmos favor safety or consistency over availability and liveness. This means that if 34% of the nodes on their networks find themselves on the wrong side of some great firewall that blocks traffic for a period, their entire global network will halt, freezing every system built on it.

And there are other known related failure modes. This is a non starter for many different classes of application.”

As it happens, eth 2 has this 34% as well, which is why plenty think the ethereum PoW chain will keep running even if the eth 2 PoS chain becomes dominant.

Bitcoin Cash is down to 10th now with Litecoin keeping on since 2011. Uniswap keeps up and up, with quite interestingly even USDC making top 20 with a market cap of $14 billion (wow).

Solana, this launched in March 2020 and never got our attention but seems a bit interesting on the surface because they claim they use a Proof of History in the blocks themselves or in the transactions.

At the most basic and utterly simplistic to the point of perhaps misleading, it sounds like each transaction has a private key of sorts (a hash) to prove that it was made before its inclusion.

The full details are worthy of study for those interested because, unless our surface view is mistaken, this is an experiment in scientific blockchain pruning.

We all know about the blockchain data ever increasing and that means no scaling. If you can remove old data from storage however, while still being able to prove the history of such old data so that you can trustlessly synch on the network and obviously so that you can prove coins are not just being printed, then there are effectively no scalability constrains.

So if Solana proves itself, their method or some adaptation of it may be incorporated into bitcoin where devs there have been tinkering with crypto hash based pruning, something that would make bitcoin globally scalable.

Polygon (Matic) is a second layer on eth so how this is so valuable is not clear, but the token is probably used in a Proof of Stake environment and so speculators are maybe betting this will find much usage in eth.

VeChain is ancient by crypto standards of the second blockchain generation wave with it focusing more on supply chain use of the blockchain and presumably doing something right since it keeps surviving.

Theta is a new one in rankings, although this launched in January 2018, and is “a blockchain powered network purpose-built for video streaming.”

Showing thus the crypto space is transforming, as was predicted during bear years, with two new entrants as well as an eth token ranking.

Interestingly both new entrants are scaling focused, so maybe at some point we’ll hopefully get out of the 80s dial-up and into 90s broadband when cryptos can go mainstream in usage.

As well as technical challenges to get there, there are also political challenges but somewhat slowly it looks like this space is generally moving in the right direction with innovation still clearly very much booming.

Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/05/18/bitcoins-market-share-falls-below-40