A trip down memory lane, looking at historic market cap's of BTC and Alts and look at the driving forces of each rally.
Altcoin markets as a whole are growing and in the last few weeks have trumped previous highs set in late 2013.
The charts below show that Altcoin (Alternative currencies) have evolved and the real value in certain projects is starting to shine!; the markets are still dominated by bitcoin but the percentage of bitcoin's slice of the pie is reducing.
The total market capitalisation of the whole digital currency space is butting up against the peak made in 2013 as seen in the chart below; but it gets more interesting when you separate the alts from BTC and break down the drivers in each.
Alts are BOOMing - Peaks and the driving force/s behind them
In the chart above you can see that in the last few month the total Altcoin market has been in a raging bull market and peaked on the 16 of June 2016. Since the peak in June the market has come down to its current price which is resting on top of the previous high and also the historic double tops set in late 2013 and early 2014.
These historic double top peaks were caused mainly by the rise of Litecoin to its peaks of around $50 USD per LTC in late 2013. The March 2014 peak was driven by a rise in the altcoin market over all against a falling BTC; still the main driver were Litcoins, Aurora coin, Ripple and others; but the market caps were a lot smaller comparatively than 3 months earlier; real driver behind the valuation of the total market was the boom a 'shitcoins' the projects in the space had nearly tripped since December 2013 and with massive rally of bitcoin fresh in everyone's mind there was no shortage of buyers for even the lowest of projects.
The final 2 peaks are mainly driven by the Ethereum price especially the first where Ethereum peaked it bull run on 13th of March 2016; and the most recent rally in price was mainly Ethereum rising to its former glory and then being cut down by the DAO hack on the 16th of June 2016; which from the chart above you can see influenced the overall market dramatically. It is important to note that at these 2 points in time the ETH markets counted for more than 33% of the total altcoin market cap;
Please see the below market caps of the time mentioned above in the below images (data is not on the exact peaks but as close as i could get):
Given that Ether drove the last two peaks and large crash i have included a recent chart
Bitcoin's shrinking piece of the overall digital currency pie
Another interesting chart shown above; is the percentage of bitcoins slice of the total digital currencies pie. Despite the recent rally in it's percentage; the total percentage is in a long term downtrend showing that more value is being placed on the growing alternative currencies space.
There is no solid metric here but i also feel that the projects that are surviving and thriving are not the traditional shitcoin from the days of 2013-14. Altcoins these days have dedicated companies, development funds, marketing campaign's, governance structures, real world identities, unique vision and drive; that's not to say that all Alts are built equal there is still a number of the old school style coins but with the choice of real world changing projects the difference in market caps and support between them significant and growing.
The most recent rising in Bitcoin percentage of the total market capitalisation come from a rather large rally in both the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum and other market participants; running from the 22nd of MAY 2016 - 16th June 2016 in which the price nearly double between which cause Alt markets to be worth more simple because their price is based on BTC
Current top 10 players in the digital currency space
As you can see from the table above the current market has some highly valued players in the top 10; 1 of which is our beloved STEEM at spot #7 with a market cap of $ 57,411,796 USD and a market price for Steem sitting at $0.715547 USD.
Given the current traction of STEEM; the nature of voting power and 90%+ being vested to the network and also the buzz around the internet and chat rooms i wouldn't be surprised to see STEEM in position #5 sometime in the next couple of months and the total market cap of all Alt's rising in the meantime.
Why do i think STEEM will continue moving up over time??.... Look at the statistics above showing were its visitors are coming from; it clearly shows a decent portion of visitors are coming from social media platform's that could be considered Steemit's competitors; These competitors are worth Billions of dollars!. Their customers/ the people know how social media works and consume it frequently and i bet the never thought a platform could pay them for what they enjoy doing :) - it won't take long, news spreads quickly on the internet especially with network effect and the incentives offered.
Given the super low barrier to entry that Steemit offers; we are doing the world of digital currencies a huge justice just by existing.
That is why i think the boom of digital currencies as a whole is still to come and why STEEM will consume a larger chuck of that pie going forward.