Day three of the New Year and all is well in crypto land. The majority of altcoins are trading higher again in this morning’s Asian trading session with some posting 25% gains in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin itself has been slow to recover from its 40% slide last month and the king of crypto is losing out to its smaller siblings.
Bitcoin’s market capacity has fallen from above 50% to below 37%, a low not seen since mid-June last year. Tumbling from an all-time high in December at a nudge over $20,000 Bitcoin has fallen to a low of $12,000 but recovered to just over $15,000 where it currently trades. It seems like crypto traders and hodlers are now channeling their funds into the altcoins which are surging at present.
Leading the pack is Ethereum which reached an all-time peak of $914 a couple of days ago. ETH has a total market share of 13% with a capacity of $85 billion; its latest spurt is in response to the release of the network’s alpha testnet for Casper on December 31. The Casper upgrade will being some long awaited solutions to scalability issues which have plagued the network under heavy load. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently addressed these issues in a Twitter post announcing plans for long term improvements by using grant programs and blockchain sharding, or taking the software off-chain.
Ripple has also hacked away at Bitcoin’s market share by surging to record highs in recent weeks. News of partnerships between the San Francisco based company and large banks and credit card companies in Asia have boosted XRP tenfold from $0.25 to over $2.50. Further news that Ripple could be listed on Coinbase have sent the altcoin even higher as it could reach $5 before the end of the month. Ripple currently has a 14% market share and is the second most popular crypto, usurping Ethereum a few days ago. Its market capacity just broke $100 billion and could go even higher.
Others gaining a larger slice of the crypto pie include Bitcoin Cash which sits at fourth place in the charts with 6.8%. Like its big brother it too slumped last month from highs of just over $4,000 however it is poised to make a recovery as the coin heads towards $3,000. Litecoin has been slow to recover but it is traditionally slow and more stable compared to other altcoins.
The top ten coins by market cap have all increased their overall percentages and could well go further. Dash, Neo, Cardano, Iota and Nem are all ones to watch out for as the total crypto market of $690 billion heads upwards.
