How many coins have reached the top 10 in the past – and where are they now? A short data analysis
I'm sorry! I posted this an hour ago, but I made so many small errors that I decided to just delete it and post it again with the correct data. Sorry if you're reading this the second time!
I saw a thread earlier today about which current top 10 coins will drop out of the top 100 at some point. Not the most creative thread, saw it often enough in the past, but it got me thinking – how many coins have there been in the top 10 in the past? How many of them are still around? And which was the most recent top 10 coin that died?
So I went to CoinMarketCap – they have "historical snapshots" – snapshots of the market from every Sunday since April 2013 – and scraped all of these snapshots, 449 total (there are actually 452 on the website, but three pages are broken). As we "only" have weekly snapshots, this means my data could theoretically be incomplete if a coin was in the top 10 at some point, but never on a Sunday – this shouldn't be too much of a problem though. Some results:
In total, there were 82 coins in the top 10 since April 2013 – for any time frame between 1 and 449 weeks. BTC always held the top spot, only 3 coins ever were # 2 (ETH, XRP, LTC), 15 coins held spot #3 and it gets more diverse the lower down we go. 14 coins were only in the top 10 for a week.
The coins that spent the longest time in the top 10 are:
- Bitcoin (449 weeks)
- XRP (435 weeks)
- Litecoin (415 weeks)
- Ethereum (331 weeks)
followed, with some distance by Bitcoin Cash (189), Dash (183), Tether (181), Dogecoin (162) and Stellar (161). Comparing it over the years, it looks like this:
| Year | Coins in Top 10 | Currently in Top 10 | Currently in Top 100 | Currently in Top 300 | Worse than Top 300 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 23 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 20 |
| 2014 | 24 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 18 |
| 2015 | 18 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 10 |
| 2016 | 23 | 3 | 8 | 1 | 11 |
| 2017 | 25 | 4 | 11 | 2 | 8 |
| 2018 | 15 | 5 | 10 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 14 | 6 | 8 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 18 | 6 | 10 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 21 | 10 | 11 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 82 | 10 | 23 | 3 | 46 |
2021 data is, of course, still missing the last Sunday, but it's almost complete. As data for 2013 only started in late April, we can assume that the early days were the most diverse, with 23 coins being in the top 10 in only slightly more than 8 months. Other than that, the number of coins in the top 10 in each year don't really show any patterns. 2018 and 2019 were less diverse than all others, but since then the number has started to increase again, with 21 coins in the top 10 this year.
Most of the top 10 coins of the early days are out of the top 300 or completely dead today. 20 out of 23 top 10 coins in 2013, 18 out of 24 in 2014 and 10 out of 18 in 2015 are not in the top 300 anymore. 2016 and 2017 were transition years, since 2018 only two top 10 coins are currently not in the top 100.
I will put some additional fun facts in the comments so this post doesn't get absurdly long, if you have any questions about the data just ask!
submitted by /u/mic_droo
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