We began 2017 with a Bitcoin dominance of over 87%. That's enormous.
Let's look at the top 10 players, by market cap, in this exact day, one year ago:
| Token | Market cap (%) |
|---|---|
| Bitcoin | 87.32 |
| Ethereum | 3.92 |
| Ripple | 1.32 |
| Litecoin | 1.2 |
| Monero | 1.07 |
| Others | 4.50 |
I included only the players which experienced the highest ups and downs.
Now, let's look at the charts now:
| Token | Market cap (%) |
|---|---|
| Bitcoin | 37.94 |
| Ripple | 16.03 |
| Ethereum | 12.07 |
| Litecoin | 2.10 |
| Monero | 0.91 |
| Others | 18.58 |
In order to understand all this, you have to put it in perspective. Here's a helping chart, displaying total market cap during last year.
It started with $17 billion and it ended with $572 billion. Market cap grew more than 33 times during 2017.
Now, let's see the losers:
- Bitcoin lost half of its dominance. That's humungous.
- Monero lost about 0.10%. That's very. very little, compared with what happened around the entire spectrum. It shows unexpected resilience from Monero.
Now about the winners:
- Ripple grew 12 times.
- Ethrereum 3.2 times.
- Litecoin almost doubled, with a growth of 1.75 times.
- "Others" (Steem included) grew 4 times. More than Ethereum.
Personally, I think the biggest winner is the "Others" area. It shows an exceptional potential for alts during 2018.
I am rather cautious towards Ripple's growth and I'm expecting Ethereum to bounce back significantly once they move towards PoS (Casper).
Monero will probably continue to be the more stable currency and Litecoin will probably plateau.
But the most important consequence of Bitcoin losing its dominance will be the need for new fiat gateways, bypassing the good ol' BTC. The proliferation of more direct fiat to crypto gateways may propel cryptos to unprecedented levels of usage (which may positively impact their price). Just imagine: exchanging Steem directly for USD, or EUR, without using a proxy like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
2017 is basically over and it was an amazing year for cryptos.
Let's dive into 2018!
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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