Crypto Market Analysis: TOP-5 Coins Overview
By: Kript Team
Tags: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency market is extremely volatile and incredibly hard to predict. There are over 2 thousand different digital currencies being traded on exchanges up to date and their quotes tend to move up and down depending on a number of different factors. Still, there is something more or less stable in this market — we can point out several definitely leading digital coins in terms of market cap. And these coins play crucial role as over 80% of total cryptocurrency market cap is divided between only 5 coins while the rest 2K+ coins have less than 20% of the market. Let’s compare the TOP-5 coins list for today with the one dated a year ago:

TOP-5 coins by market capitalization

As we can see, four out of five coins remained in this list after a year. Bitcoin dominance has slightly decreased. Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash have lost their positions while XRP showed a significant growth. Litecoin has left the chart and currently takes the 7th line having given its place to Stellar. And now let’s take a closer look at the coins from the list.

1. Bitcoin (BTC)

Market cap: $78,4 billion

Max supply: 21 million

Circulating supply: 17,4 million

Trading: April 2013 ($135,3)

Price: $4543,64

ROI: >3200%

Bitcoin is the first ever cryptocurrency and a payment system often referred to as a digital gold. Its open-source software was released in 2009. Bitcoin is a mined cryptocurrency with a limited issue and using PoW algorithm. Its market dominance has never fallen down below 30% and it remains the evident leader of the space.

2. Ripple (XRP)

Market cap: $17,8 billion

Max supply: 100 billion

Circulating supply: 99,99 billion

Trading: August 2013 ($0,006)

Price: $0,44

ROI: >7200%

Ripple is a blockchain-based platform for global payments providing connectivity across payment networks with instant, on-demand settlement and real-time traceability of funds at low cost. Ripple introduces several cutting edge solutions in the field. It has significantly strengthened its positions lately and has taken the 2nd place in terms of market cap.

3. Ethereum (ETH)

Market cap: $13,8 billion

Max supply: not limited

Circulating supply: 103,3 million

Trading: August 2015 ($2,83)

Price: $133,47

ROI: >4600%

Ethereum was the first platform of its kind allowing to run smart contracts and meant for building DApps. The project has been a great success from the very beginning. It was the second popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and it was taking the second position by market cap for over a year, but last week it moved to the 3rd giving its place to Ripple.

4. Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Market cap: $4,1 billion

Max supply: 21 million

Circulating supply: 17,5 million

Trading: July, 2017 ($555,89)

Price: $235,39

ROI: -58%

Bitcoin Cash is a hard forked version of Bitcoin with upgraded consensus rules. It is similar to Bitcoin in terms of maximum supply, block times and reward system. Though, comparing to BTC, Bitcoin Cash has increased limit of block size, it enables more transactions per second, and therefore faster payments and lower fees. It is the only currency in TOP-5 with negative ROI.

5. Stellar (XLM)

Market cap: $3,9 billion

Max supply: not limited

Circulating supply: 19,1 billion

Trading: August 2014 ($0,003)

Price: $0,2

ROI: >6500%

Stellar is a blockchain-based financial platform connecting banks, payment systems and people and expanding access to low-cost financial services around the globe. Lumen (XLM) is the native asset of the Stellar network. The number of XLM coins created at genesis was 100 billion, new tokens are added to the network at the rate of 1% each year.