Perhaps the greatest year in the history of any single asset class has officially come to a close. At the end of 2016, the aggregate market cap of all cryptocurrencies combined was a mere $17.7 billion. But by year’s end, this combined market value had skyrocketed to $613 billion Opens a New Window. , representing a better than 3,300% increase. That essentially leaves all traditional equities, including the stock market, eating the dust of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin, the virtual currency with the highest market cap in the world, is the cryptocurrency that really started it all, and is often credited with being the backbone of the 2017 rally. After all, it rallied from $967 per coin at the beginning of the year to finish at $14,156 per coin. Considering that it traded for just $0.003 per coin at the beginning of the decade, it’s truly a remarkable run.
These cryptocurrencies ran circles around bitcoin in 2017
As good as 2017 was to bitcoin investors, it was really all about cryptocurrencies not named “bitcoin” last year. Excluding bitcoin, the aggregate market cap of every other cryptocurrency in the world grew from $2.24 billion at the beginning of the year to $374 billion by year’s end. In other words, it would appear that investors were so motivated to “buy the next bitcoin” that they chose not to buy the actual bitcoin.
The result is that there were plenty of cryptocurrencies that simply ran circles around bitcoin in 2017. Here are 20 of them that absolutely left bitcoin eating their dust, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com:
- Verge: up 1,171,479%
- PIVX: up 141,880%
- Einsteinium: up 71,082%
- Reddcoin: up 67,818%
- NEO: up 52,372%
- Ripple: up 35,564%
- NEM: up 27,920%
- DigiByte: up 27,713%
- ZCoin: up 23,395%
- Stratis: up 19,270%
- Ardor: up 16,847%
- BitShares: up 16,382%
- Stellar: up 14,511%
- Lisk: up 14,033%
- Bytecoin: up 11,945%
- Nxt: up 11,783%
- Ethereum: up 9,383%
- Dash: up 9,282%
- Litecoin: up 5,260%
- Waves: up 4,922%
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