December 2017 started with a total crypto marketcap of $297 billion and ended with $550 billion (at the moment of writing, and assuming not much will happen during holidays - which may be totally wrong, because, in crypto, you never know). It's almost like the market doubled in one month.
But who were the winners and losers? Apart from fiat, obviously... Let's look at the dominance charts from Coinmarketcap.
Here's how we started:
And here's where we are today:
The biggest loser, is, obviously, Bitcoin: it lost 12.1% from the pool, ending the year below 50%. Second comes Ethereum, with a loss of 1.33%.
The biggest winner, in relative terms, is Ripple, which more than doubled its participation, from 3.17% to 7.86%.
Second comes Litecoin, with an increase from 1.56% to 2.80%.
It's also worth mentioning Bitcoin Cash, which grew from 7.54% to 9.25%.
But the bigger winner of all is the "Other alts" part, which grew from 12.39% to 17.29%. It may seem small compared with the starts above, but in absolute terms, it means that the "Other alts" part (which includes tokens like Steem, EOS or Bitshares), attracted an impressive $26.95 billion!
And just to give you an example of how this translated into STEEM, let's look at how STEEM started December and where it stands right now (I kept the volume graph as well, it's important) :
So STEEM started the month with a total marketcap of $244 million, but ended it with more than $850 million! In just one month, STEEM increased its market cap with half a billion! And on a consistent volume as well.
All in all, December marked the end of a roller coaster-ish year in crypto (which is almost a pleonasm) with a clear indication of shifting towards alts. This sets the playground for an even more roller coaster-ish 2018, in my humble opinion, because we will have to look not only at 8-10 major players, but probably at 2-300 medium players fighting to become major players.
Thoughts?
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
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