Earlier this year, in February, Tom Lee — co-founder of Fundstrat Global Advisors, the first Wall Street strategy firm to embrace bitcoin — opined that the crypto market had turned a corner and would see new highs in July. Nine months and several year-end price target reductions later, cryptocurrency assets remain firmly in the red. In fact, according to data from OnChainFX, nearly every major cryptocurrency is down at least 90 percent from its all-time high.
Three-Fourths of Top Cryptocurrencies Down 90% or More
Ripple (XRP), which has distinguished itself as the second-largest cryptocurrency since knocking ethereum off this pedestal last month, is one of the handful of large-cap crypto tokens whose one-year return remains positive. However, this will not be true for long, as the ripple price is down a full 91 percent since it made a parabolic run to $3.84 in early January. As it stands, XRP — which still hasn’t been listed on Coinbase — can be purchased for about $0.34.
The ethereum (ETH) price, meanwhile, now sits at $107, down 92 percent from its all-time high at $1,431. This is particularly remarkable considering that, as CCN reported, crypto whales have been stockpiling ETH throughout the year, offsetting sales from their disillusioned counterparts who have already exited the market. Altogether, these whales have expanded their holdings by 80 percent to around 20 million ETH — nearly a fifth of the cryptocurrency’s total supply.
The large-cap coins hardest hit by the downturn have been bitcoin cash (BCH) and cardano (ADA), each of which has taken a 97 percent haircut since peaking at $4,329 and $1.33, respectively. Bitcoin cash, as CCN reported, has struggled to rebound after a contentious hard fork that split BCH — which itself had splintered away from BTC — into two competing currencies. Cardano, on the other hand, has made developmental strides throughout the year but has not been immune from the “ICO Winter.”
NEO and NEM (XEM) have each declined by 96 percent from their peaks, with the latter never quite recovering from the downturn that set in after hackers stole $530 million worth of XEM from Tokyo-based crypto exchange Coincheck in January. Following closely behind, tron (TRX), IOTA, and dash are each trading at 95 percent discounts to their late 2017 and early 2018 highs. Other top 15-cryptocurrencies facing declines of 90 percent or greater include EOS and litecoin (LTC).
Top-Performing Cryptocurrency Assets Still Down at Least 70%
Among the 15 largest cryptocurrencies by circulating market cap (stablecoins excluded, for obvious reasons), every blockchain has seen its native cryptocurrency decline by at least 70 percent, and just four have declined by less than 90 percent: bitcoin (BTC), stellar (XLM), monero (XMR), and Binance coin (BNB).
Bitcoin, the crypto market’s bellwether, has plunged by 81 percent since peaking around $20,000 and can now be acquired for just $3,812. Stellar, which often mirrors ripple’s movements, has actually outperformed XRP by a small margin, though it still trades 85 percent below its early-year peak. The privacy-centric monero, meanwhile, is down 89 percent despite the fact that one of its more established use cases — dark web transactions — is largely market agnostic and recent network upgrades have greatly reduced transaction fees.
The top 15’s “best” performer is BNB, which — unlike its peers — has consistent buy support in the form of Binance’s quarterly buyback program, through which the crypto exchange has committed to using 20 percent of its profits to repurchase and destroy BNB tokens until the supply has been cut in half. Even so, at $6.08, the crypto market has dealt BNB a 73 percent blow.
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