As Bitcoin crosses $2,000, it also now accounts for less than half of total cryptocurrencies market cap, following growth of Ethereum and Ripple
May 20, 2017, 12:46 pmMay 21, 2017, 6:52 am — The world's most popular cryptocurrency is now worth over $2,000 per coin.
Context & Ripple Effects
This story captures the moment Bitcoin stopped being synonymous with 'crypto': it crossed $2,000 per coin while simultaneously losing majority share of total cryptocurrency market value to Ethereum and Ripple's rapid growth. The price milestone made headlines, but the dominance shift was the structural news.
The rotation only accelerated afterward — within seven months Ripple had surged past Ethereum itself to become the second-most valuable cryptocurrency — before the whole complex repriced together in January's sharp selloff, when Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple all fell double digits in a single day.
First-order effects
- Bitcoin investors now hold an asset that no longer defines the asset class, forcing anyone tracking 'the crypto market' to follow multiple coins rather than one ticker.
- Ethereum and Ripple gain credibility from having visibly diluted Bitcoin's share, making them easier to pitch to buyers who previously treated Bitcoin as the only entry point.
Second-order effects
- Competition for the number-two position hardens into a real contest — the same dynamic that soon produced Ripple overtaking Ethereum at roughly $85B — pushing exchanges and media coverage to rank and track altcoins individually.
- Capital chasing non-Bitcoin coins inflates their prices faster than Bitcoin's, raising the stakes of any correction because more of the market's value sits in thinner, more volatile assets.
Third-order effects
- If the dominance slide continues, cryptocurrency matures into a multi-asset market where individual narratives matter — but the January 2018 crash showed the downside: lower Bitcoin dominance did not decouple altcoins from Bitcoin's drawdowns, they amplified them.
- The pattern points toward a recurring cycle of altcoin rotation during bull phases followed by correlated collapses, which is what ultimately pressures regulators and institutional buyers to treat crypto as one risky asset class rather than many independent bets.
The trend: Cryptocurrency is transitioning from a Bitcoin-monoculture to a multi-asset market whose components rise and fall together, with each rotation cycle widening the field and deepening the eventual corrections.