In July 2017, I began running a script to scrape and parse coinmarketcap.com market data, and calculate Ethereum’s share of the token market. As I describe in the original article:
The script tabulates the total market cap of all tokens, and of all Ethereum-based tokens, and uses these two figures to calculate the share of the total token market cap constituted by Ethereum based tokens.
The last time I set out to write about this, the market share of the Ethereum-based ERC20 class of tokens had risen from 73.81% to 91.2% in the six months leading up to January 2018.
Then the crypto bubble burst, token market caps plummeted, and Tether, the sole USD-backed token, and one of the few large-cap tokens not on Ethereum, saw its share of the total token market grow, and gradually chip away at Ethereum’s share.
Ethereum saw its share decline to 88% before I stopped running the script, and declined further in 2019 as Tether’s market cap continued its rise.
But all of that started to change from May 2019 onward, as Tether itself, the last major non-Ethereum-based token, began its migration from the Bitcoin-based Omni platform, to Ethereum. By late April 2020, the vast majority of Tether was on Ethereum, with $5.73 billion as ERC20 tokens, $1.33 billion still on Omni, and $1.68 billion on Tron.
With most Tether tokens, and almost all Tether transactions, now on Ethereum, coinmarketcap.com changed its classification of Tether as an Omni-based token, to an Ethereum-based one.
With this change, I was curious to see what my script would show Ethereum’s market share as, so I started it back up. The data shows that its share of the token market has now risen to over 98%. The remaining 2% are divided between a handful of alternative platforms, with each platform boasting about 1 token amongst the top 100 in market cap.
From a market share of 73.81% in July 2017, when the script began running, to nearly 100% today, in May 2020, the entire market has steadily converged on Ethereum as the settlement layer for crypto-assets. Reinforcing this point, all of the major stablecoins; Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), True USD (TUSD), Binance USD (BUSD), and Paxos Standard (PAX), use the ERC20 standard.
Ethereum has become the first common platform for open finance, and the ERC20 interface has become the first market standard for digital assets.
