You Don’t See This Very Often

It’s been a rough week for Bitcoin and a lot of other crypto-currencies in the last three days. Bitcoin’s price is down for a third straight day, during which period it has declined over 17%. What’s really amazing about the declines in bitcoin from its high back in mid-December, is that even though it is down over 30%, the price is still 14% above its 50-day moving average. You don’t see that very often, and it just goes to show how insane the rally was from early November through December.

Even after the recent declines in Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, there are still 23 crypto-currencies with market values in excess of $2 billion. The table below lists each one of them along with their current value. Not included on this list are another 18 cryptos with market values above $1 billion. That includes Dogecoin, which has a market value of $1.4 bln, but was created as a joke. The founder has even been quoted as saying, “New features aren’t being implemented into dogecoin because there’s no active development anymore… Eventually, it will become outdated.” Yet people are still paying for it.

As shown at the bottom of the table, the combined market cap of the 23 cryptos listed below is over $600 billion, while the top 100 cryptos have a combined market cap of around $700 billion. Now, in this age where billions are seemingly thrown around like bags of rice, that may not sound like much, but with the total market cap of US equities at around $30 trillion, $700 billion represents nearly 2.5% of all US listed equities. That’s not an insignificant account for an “asset class” that most people hadn’t even heard about before this past fall.