Survivability of Top 10 Cryptos by Market Cap over time

I was cleaning up my desktop and came across a word document with few tables I had saved from 2016-2017 when I first got into crypto. I wanted to share these here to put things in perspective a bit about our ideas of what makes a top crypto and look back on the start of my journey. It’s surprising just how much things have changed and also how some things never change.

Dec. 2016 Top 10 Snapshot:

1. BTC – $896.19

2. ETH – $7.17

3. XRP – $0.0064

4. LTC – $4.35

5. XMR – $9.72

6. ETC – $1.075

7. DASH – $10.01

8. MAID – $0.098

9. XEM – $0.0036

10. STEEM – $0.1363

Dec. 2017 Top 10 Snapshot:

1. BTC – $19140.41

2. ETH – $719.96

3. BCH – $1862.88

4. XRP – $0.724

5. LTC – $318.72

6. ADA – $0.513

7. MIOTA – $3.92

8. DASH – $1105.92

9. XEM – $0.6878

10. XMR – $351.37

I had these two saved mostly because 2017 was a year of exponential growth for crypto and a major source of hopium for a lot of the early investors. These two also demonstrate a point in time when crypto suddenly became something that grabbed the attention of the media, general public, and many speculators and degens.

I used to think that the Top 10 were all that I should focus on and buy. Why DYOR when the top ten is a guide to success? These coins are here because they are superior and won’t fade, right?

Boy, was I ever wrong in that assumption.

It’s intriguing to look back at how much the top 10 has changed and what has persisted despite all the FUD and ever-changing landscape of regulations. It’s a reaffirmation that we really don’t know what the market is going to do, and that what constitutes “success” in crypto is highly subjective and often short lived.

While we might like to think that the top 10 coins are the flagship or cornerstones of the crypto market, the top ten is really a lot more fluid than we realize. By 2019 we saw the emergence of BNB, EOS, USDT, and XLM in the top 10 pushing out DASH, MIOTA, and others further into relative obscurity.

The tail of 2020 and start 2021 brought a slew of new coins into the top 10 like SOL, USDC and LUNA, LINK again pushing out some of the more seemingly solidified coins. We also witnessed the rise of the Doge/Meme coins as a new standard of what a holding in the top 10 means for quite some time. We also saw a return on DASH in 2022 briefly in the top 10.

The top 10 today still holds strong with the arguably most important crypto (BTC and ETH) and a few stables, but we’ve seen some others like XMR and DOT completely fall out of it. TON has crept into the #10 spot and is growing in MC daily.

I suspect we’ll see BASE and OP making some serious headway over the next few months up the charts, and probably some other major surprises before we get to the halving.

What do you think the top ten will look like in a year from now? Which sleeper coins/new on the scene will break into the top ten? What coins will be revived to reclaim their place in the next bull run?

As always NFA and DYOR.