Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency, has been managing to stay above the $4,000 mark after it leaped over the psychological barrier on January 6. Despite the rise, however, it’s losing its dominance over the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
According to CryptoCompare data BTC is currently trading at roughly $4,030 after falling 0.79% in the last 24-hour period. It’s up roughly 7% in the last two weeks, and its market cap is of $70.4 billion.
The cryptocurrency’s surge this month came shortly after it was revealed that nearly 80% of cryptocurrency investors are still net-invested in it, and after the Gemini Trust company, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, launched an ad campaign that calls for cryptocurrency regulations and argues there needs to be a “bridge” between the traditional financial system and the cryptocurrency space.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins behind the cryptocurrency exchange, have recently argued that bitcoin is “better at being gold than gold,” and as such could grow to have a market cap of about $7 trillion. The rise was also fueled by Weiss Ratings noting bitcoin will “rise up and head for new all-time highs.”
Good to see Bitcoin holding above $4,000…. but this was never really a significant level to begin with.
The current range that we're in is between 3k & 5k, so 4k is just the halfway mark. Only a strong breakout of the range can give us a new direction. pic.twitter.com/bsCllL3YNa
— Mati Greenspan (@MatiGreenspan) January 7, 2019
Despite the cryptocurrency’s rise, various altcoins have been outperforming it. So much so that its share of the cryptocurrency ecosystem has dropped roughly 4% in the last 30 days, going from 55.1% to 51.4% at press time.
This, as this month the price of litecoin (LTC), often seen as the silver to bitcoin’s gold, has surged after it hit a 100 LTC node milestone on the Lightning Network (LN). TRON’s TRX has also seen its price surge 11.6% after it was revealed BitTorrent – which was acquired by the TRON Foundation – is launching its token on Binance’s Launchpad.
More recently NEO, a cryptocurrency that’s often referred to as the “Chinese Ethereum,” has surged to become the 16th most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap. Ether itself has been rising as well,as ahead of its Constantinople hard fork various top exchanges, including Binance, OKEx, and Huobi, have revealed they’ll be supporting the upgrade.
In December of last year, WAVES surged a whopping 72% and bucked the bearish trend the crypto ecosystem was going through, thanks to various developments that included the launch of a new mobile app, and a wallet extension for FireFox.
