Weekly Update: The 3 Largest Cryptocurrencies

With so much focus on bitcoin lately, we’ve added a new weekly update that tracks the three largest cryptocurrencies by market share: bitcoin, Ether, and Ripple. According to Wikipedia, a cryptocurrency is “a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets”.

Bitcoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency and decentralized digital currency. The first bitcoin transaction occurred in early 2009 and has since grown worldwide. Ether is another cryptocurrency run on the Ethereum blockchain platform and has the second largest market share, despite being the newest of the three with its launch in July 2015. The third largest market share of cryptocurrency, XRP, is owned by Ripple and launched in 2012.

Here are all three cryptocurrency prices over time along with their trading volume. Data for all three is sourced from Coinbase.com and by request, we have shortened the time frame for a more recent picture.

We have also created an index in order to chart these together given their very different pricing history. Notice that Ether tops the chart – the price of an ether has changed the most out of all three cryptocurrencies.