Cryptocurrency Winners Are Starting to Emerge
There’s still a lot of dead wood that needs jettisoning, but a few digital coins are gaining traction
By Aaron Brown
The value of all cryptocurrencies in circulation is about $275 billion, which is around the same level as late November 2017. But a lot has happened in between, with values soaring to more than $800 billion at the every end of that year, and then plunging to barely $100 billion in late 2018.
The wild swings are not unlike the early days of the internet era. Internet stocks soared 50 times in value from 1997 to 2000, then lost 95% of their value in a crash that bottomed around September 2002. Prices were recovering by the end of that year, but many investors were still licking their wounds and were reluctant to buy. Of those who did, some looked for bigger companies such as Amazon.com that had weathered the crash, while others looked forward to initial public offerings from firms like Google.
There’s one important difference for crypto. Failed companies liquidate, sell themselves or get delisted. There’s no similar process in crypto. So the Pets.com of crypto are still around. There may be no one maintaining or improving the code, there may be no users, but as long as some optimists somewhere are trading the…
