var divElement = document.getElementById(‘viz1499972889156’); var vizElement = divElement.getElementsByTagName(‘object’)[0]; vizElement.style.width=’1004px’;vizElement.style.height=’869px’; var scriptElement = document.createElement(‘script’); scriptElement.src = ‘https://public.tableau.com/javascripts/api/viz_v1.js’; vizElement.parentNode.insertBefore(scriptElement, vizElement); This ranking can teach us about the evolving market for cryptocurrencies and the direction it may take as more and more competing players emerge.

A MATTER OF SCALE

The movement – or lack thereof – of market cap rankings as shown in the chart can be deceiving at first.

Keep in mind that the rankings, as listed, don’t take the scale of differences in market cap (or coin price) into account. The ever-increasing valuation of Bitcoin is a great example of this. With a market cap recently reaching $40 billion, it surpasses most other cryptocurrencies on the list by an order of magnitude despite only being separated from them by a few ranking points.

CRYPTOCURRENCIES GROW ACROSS THE BOARD

Just because a particular currency falls down the rankings doesn’t necessarily mean that its market cap is shrinking: it may simply not be keeping up with the growth of its peers. Dashcoin, for example, fell four ranking points between March and May of the past year despite nearly $200 million in growth in value.

This simply reflects a much broader overall trend: the extraordinary speed at which the cryptocurrency market as a whole is growing in value – that is, until the recent pullback in the last month.

Some mainstream analysts have characterized the rapidly rising valuations of cryptocurrencies in the past several months with words like “insane”, stoking fears of a bubble set to burst. So far that hasn’t happened yet, but it is true that the coin universe has had a significant pullback after powering through $100 billion in value in June 2017.