Survey of the cryptocurrency landscape
How do you judge the “size” of a cryptocurrency? Not by the price per coin - the coin is an arbitrary unit. Nor by number of coins - again, the coin is arbitrary. Instead by market capitalization. “Market cap” is usually applied to companies, not cryptocurrencies. The market cap of a company is its share price multipled by its number of shares. The market cap of a company is the amount in USD it would cost to buy all of its shares. Applied to a cryptocurrency, the market cap, a value in USD, is calculated as $/coin * number of coins. The market capitalization of Bitcoin is the amount in USD you would have to pay to buy all Bitcoins. Right now, that’s about $75B. Many sites like CoinMarketCap track the “market cap” of big cryptos.
CoinMarketCap lists 1200 different cryptocurrencies. The total market cap across all cryptos is $164B. Their market cap follows a strong power law; Bitcoin has almost half the entire market cap.
Here I’ll look at the top 10.
| Crypto | Market cap | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | $75B | 2009 | The original cryptocurrency. Proof-of-work. |
| Ethereum | $32B | 2014 | Scripting. Forked in 2016 due to “The DAO” bug. Will use proof-of-stake in future. |
| Bitcoin Cash | $10B | 2017 | Fork of Bitcoin. Larger block size limit. |
| Ripple | $8B | 2012 | Tokens represent other assets, e.g. fiat currency. Formal relationship to banks. |
| Litecoin | $4B | 2011 | Bitcoin, with some attempts to increase latency and throughput. |
| NEM | $2.7B | 2015 | Proof-of-importance. |
| Dash | $2.7B | 2014 | An associated DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). |
| IOTA | $2B | 2016 | Uses a Markle DAG instead of a Merkle list. |
| Monero | $1.9B | 2014 | Uses “CryptoNote”, which somehow is more anonymous. |
| Ethereum Classic | $1.8B | 2016 | The “non-fork” of Ethereum blockchain; accepts “The DAO” thefts. |
Tagged . All content copyright James Fisher 2017. This post is not associated with my employer.
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