Bitcoin Market Capitalization Drops Below 50% for the First Time as Ripple’s Cap Tops $12B

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by Polina Chernykh · 3 min read
Bitcoin Market Capitalization Drops Below 50% for the First Time as Ripple’s Cap Tops $12B

Bitcoin’s share of the combined value of the cryptocurrency market decreased below 50% for the first time in the history of the virtual currency.

Although the price of bitcoin has been on an upward trend lately, hitting an all-time high last week, its market share has been falling for the last two month. The digital currency is now accounting for less than half of the total value of all blockchain assets.

For a long time bitcoin held its market cap dominance, accounting for more than 90% of all cryptocurrencies. However, two months ago, bitcoin’s share dropped below 80% before falling below 50% this morning. The cryptocurrency’s market cap is now standing at $28,4 billion.

As Forbes reported, one of the factors that has driven its market cap to decrease is the lack of common decision by the bitcoin community on how to advance the cryptocurrency network to allow more transactions. Bitcoin transaction fees increased from 11 cents a year ago to $1.70, while the average confirmation time almost doubled to 20 minutes.

A number of new ICOs that have been launched recently contributed to the growth of the cryptocurrency sector, but also narrowed bitcoin’s dominance as the leading digital currency. At the same time, ICOs are used as an easy way to raise money for startups for which tokens don’t make sense and for scams. Speculative trading is rising as investors don’t always understand the technology and invest in poorly conceived tokens.

Boost VC, a fund that has already invested in over 180 blockchain companies, has just announced its intention to invest directly into ICOs.

Meantime, two other digital currencies, Ripple and Ethereum, have been showing fast growth lately, what caused bitcoin dominance to drop under the threshold. Over the last day, Ripple demonstrated a huge surge in market capitalization, escalating past Ethereum and becoming the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

Ripple’s market cap was at around $11,5 billion yesterday and now has a valuation of about $12,5 billion, according to Coinmarketcap. Over the last two months, Ripple’s market cap has grown from $200 million to $11.4 billion.

During the last 24 hours, the price of the digital currency increased by more than 31% with a daily trading volume of $411 million. Meantime, the value achieved a record $0.3 per coin.

The growth of the market capitalization may be a result of the recent partnerships in the ripple network. Last month, Ripple announced that 10 new members, including Akbank, BBVA, MUFG, SEB, SBI Remit, and Axis Bank, joined its global network.

Two months ago, a consortium of 47 Japanese banks completed a trial of Ripple’s blockchain technology for domestic money transfers. By the end of March, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Japan’s largest bank, joined Ripple with plans to establish an international blockchain payments network in 2018.

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