Ethereum spent a very long time as the world’s second most important digital asset (it’s hard to beat Bitcoin) both because of market capitalization, and technological influence. Over the recent weeks, Ripple’s XRP took over that second spot. But the market felt a bit of a pump last week, and it pushed ETH back to the second place.
Recent market performance
The price has risen by about 1% over the last day (again), and it’s now trading at USD 123 and still in green numbers. As both BTC and XRP are trading in red numbers, that’s been enough for ETH to gain some momentum, even if BTC saw a 5% rise last week when the Litecoin network was upgraded.
It seems that Ethereum’s growth has to do by some major movements made by some of ETH’s larger holders, according to data by a cryptocurrency whale tracker. That’s even more remarkable as the rest of the market keeps moving sideways or going down.
It’s all about the whales
We’ve seen how USD 8.5 million worth of Ethereum’s tokens have been traded a couple of days ago only by some investors known as whales (which means they’re big). So they increased the coin’s daily volume.
This happens because the digital asset market is still dominated by retail and small investors, so changes that would be considered relatively small in other trades can make a huge difference in crypto.
The new capitalization is worth more than $12.6 billion, which is not that much more than Ripple‘s XRP ($12.5 billion) but still enough to change the rankings. Litecoin is at fourth with $2.6 billion, so it’s still nowhere near to compete for the second or third spot.
Ethereum now has a market capitalization of over $12.6 billion, slightly above Ripple’s XRP $12.5 billion market cap. Litecoin, which powered to fourth place in the list of largest cryptocurrencies last week, has a market cap of $2.6 billion.
So is the bear market over, at last?
“Crypto price movements over the last week have been encouraging, with litecoin experiencing an impressive price surge of around 40%, but it’s important to remember that we’re not out of the bear market just yet,” explained Mati Greenspan, who works at eToro (one of the world’s main crypto brokers) as senior market analyst.
“While some might argue the bears are weakening, bitcoin needs a strong breakout above the psychological level of $5,000 before the bulls can sharpen their horns in earnest.”
In something of an ironic development, ETH’s value went up soon after a report announced that Ethereum’s decentralized apps don’t have that many users anymore. 86% out of 1,300 active apps were completely unused last Saturday. And only 7% of all those apps managed to transact any tokens on the previous day.
The expectation is on the air to find out which digital asset will become the next Bitcoin and also for the next bull run. But having prices as high as they were in December 2017 will not be very useful if those rises happen without mass adoption for at least a handful of essential projects.
In the meantime, Ripple’s XRP is stuck at its current level, which is rather mysterious as well, because, unlike Ethereum, Ripple has been reporting good news for months.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
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