By: Mahmoud El-Zahwey
Mubasher: Although cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and Ripple, dropped significantly during Monday’s trading with losses surpassing $133 billion, some analysts adopted an optimistic outlook towards other less-focused-on cryptocurrencies.
In terms of market capitalisation, which refers to the value of the entire digital currency in circulation, ethereum and ripple, which are competing for the second spot depending on their prices, are expected by some to surge and replace bitcoin.
Since the start of 2018, bitcoin has seen weak performance, prompting many investors to start looking for alternative digital currencies to trade.
Some market analysts noted that the ripple’s price does not need to get much higher to become the biggest digital currency, as it only needs to rise by 164% to $6.57 in order to surpass the bitcoin. The ripple has more coins in circulation than bitcoin and ethereum.
With 38,739,144,847 digital coins in circulation, ripple reached $2.45 each, while its market cap reached $94,816 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com.
Furthermore, the volatile cryptocurrency market pushed some investors to consider new currencies like Dogecoin, which analysts began recommending owing to its steady gains all through December.
Launched in 2013, the dogecoin, which was inspired by a short-lived online craze for pictures of a particular Japanese dog breed, nearly doubled in value and is now worth more than $2 billion.
“I wouldn't read too much into [the cryptocurrency market],” digital currency expert Kyle Samani told Forbes.
The reason why the market sees a rise in one cryptocurrency only to see another gain traction a few weeks or months later is that some cryptocurrency exchanges require the use of bitcoins in order to pay for coin transactions.
This means that investors who already own bitcoins have to sell them to execute those other digital currency transactions.
“The crypto market is 99% noise right now. In general, we see rotations between BTC and alts. First half of 2017 was alts, second half was bitcoin, seems like we're back in an alt cycle,” Samani concluded.
By 05:17 pm GMT, Bitcoin declined 8.58% to $14,998.8, while ethereum lost 1.73% to $1,112.2.
Meanwhile, ripple fell by 25.69 to $2.50, and dogecoin went down 14.30% to $0.015438.
