Bitcoin and Ethereum, today slid to fifth place as an SEC lawsuit drives its price further into the ground.

Litecoin, a Bitcoin spinoff, is now the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. This isn't due to hype around Litecoin—the coin fell in price by 10% today to $121—but rather that XRP has fared even worse. XRP fell in price by a further 40% today, pegging its total losses since the SEC filed a lawsuit against XRP's creators at well over 60%.

Litecoin's market capitalization today stands at $8.2 billion; XRP's is $8.1. XRP's market cap would have to fall by a further $2.8 billion to fall behind Bitcoin Cash, another Bitcoin spinoff that comprises decentralization in favor of speed and cheap transactions, Bitcoin Cash's market cap is $2.8 billion.

XRP's price started to drop after Ripple spread news of the SEC lawsuit last Monday.

The suit, filed on Tuesday, alleges that Ripple has raised $1.3 billion worth of XRP in unregistered securities sales since 2013—and continues to do so. Ripple maintains a large amount of XRP in escrow wallets, which it sells periodically to manipulate the supply of XRP in circulation, a little like a central bank. The SEC alleges that such activities are illegal. The suit also named Ripple's co-founder Christian Larsen and incumbent CEO Brad Garlinghouse as defendants.

Ripple disputes the case. "We are right and will aggressively fight - and win - this battle in the courts to get clear rules of the road for the entire industry in the U.S. We are on the right side of the law, the right side of policy and will absolutely be on the right side of history," said Garlinghouse in a statement shared with Decrypt.

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

$1.3B in unregistered securities since 2013 through selling XRP to investors, including those who came from the US.

The lawsuit has made the price of the coin collapse after crypto exchanges suspended trading of the coin and crypto funds liquidated assets.

The Start of Misery

XRP has benefitted from Bitcoin’s bull run. Last Thursday, the coin was hovering at a price of $0.6 and a market cap of $27B. However, when Ripple spread the news of an imminent SEC lawsuit, everything turned into chaos.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Christian Larson said that the SEC was about to file a complaint against them that would say that they violated securities laws by selling XRP.

The coin dropped to $0.5 by the time the SEC filed its lawsuit the next day. As predicted, the complaint alleged that Ripple held illegal unregistered securities sales of XRP.

The complaint has a huge impact on the crypto industry. If the SEC can convince a judge that XRP carries an investment contract in the US law, it can sue crypto companies that trade with XRP or exchanges that facilitate the sale of the coin on the same grounds.

The price of XRP dropped quickly after the SEC’s announcement, it has been made worse when many crypto companies announced that they will cut ties with XRP or stop trading of the coin.

Beaxy was one of the first exchanges to delist the coin, then others followed afterward. On December 23, XRP’s price closed at $0.26 after Galaxy Digital, Jump Trading, Bitwise, Cross Tower, and OSL made similar announcements.

Fortunately, the price of XRP recovered to $0.31, but the news that Bitstamp will halt trades and deposits of XRP for the US customers in January descended the price of XRP once again, this time to $0.29.

London-based B2C2 was the next exchange to prevent US investors from trading XRP. The price of XRP fell to $0.28 after news broke of B2C2’s decision on December 27.

B2C2 was the next exchange that prevented US investors from trading XRP. The price fell to $0.28 after news broke of B2C2’s decision last December 27.

Ripple’s Hot Water

A huge blow was experienced last December 28, when two US crypto exchanges, OKCoin and Coinbase announced that they will suspend the trading of XRP.

After OKCoin announced its suspending XRP trading, Coinbase also announced that it would suspend trading of XRP for its US Customers effective on January 19.

As of now, XRP has a total market capitalization of $9B and trades at $0.19.

How long can this misery by XRP go? Who will be the next exchange to announce its stepping out of XRP? How low will the price of the coin collapse?

cryptocurrencies is at $1.003 trillion at the time of writing. Bitcoin remains the market leader with a $676B market cap, followed by Ethereum with a $136 billion market cap. Tether, XRP and Litecoin round out the top five. 

The last time total market capitalization came close to $1 trillion was in January of 2018 when it reached nearly $800 billion. This is the first time it has surpassed the $1 trillion mark.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

cryptocurrency in the world has a market capitalization that is bigger than so many top firms in the world. According to CZ, Ethereum’s market cap is now bigger than BMW, Ferrari, Baidu, GM, Spotify, and others.

He also said even though BNB’s (Binance Coin) market cap is considerably smaller in comparison with Ethereum, it’s still larger than the market cap of Xerox.

“ETH‘s market cap is larger than Spotify, GM, Baidu, Ferrari, BMW, and so on,” CZ remarked.

To compare tentatively, he said the Ethereum’s market cap is now closer to that of Google. At the time of writing, the market cap of Xerox is $4.48 billion, BMW is $47.18 billion, Ferrari $36.28 billion, while Badu’s market cap is $65.04 billion. General Motors has $59.51 billion, while Spotify has $61.61 billion.

CZ also said both the BNB and Ethereum coins have a brilliant future going by their year-in-year performance. Also, the potential of the Binance sensible chain and ETH 2.0 means both coins have a brighter future.

Additionally, there is an increased acceptance level and adoption of the DeFi protocol. When the DeFi protocol has been widely used, it will grow the worth of their respective digital property. CZ said the influence of Ethereum is already much in the cryptocurrency market and the entire finance sector.

Ethereum is not the only cryptocurrency doing well in the market when it comes to market capitalization. Other cryptocurrencies are also breaking new grounds. CZ’s statement about Ethereum is coming after Bitcoin overtook Visa when it comes to market capitalization.

Presently, Bitcoin’s market cap is about $507 billion.

And with the current upsurge of the top cryptocurrency, its market cap could even surpass Mastercard and Visa combined.

Presently, Mastercard has a $334.97 market cap while Visa has $487.79 billion market cap. So, Bitcoin needs to reach about $823 billion to reach the market cap of both firms. Interestingly, if the activities of Bitcoin in recent months continue the same way, it won’t be too long before the cryptocurrency reaches that level. Other cryptocurrencies are also doing well at the moment in terms of market cap.

ranked 7 with a market cap of just above $770 billion and is followed closely by Facebook (roughly $767 billion).

Market capitalization is the total dollar value of a firm’s stocks, calculated by multiplying the total number of its outstanding shares by the current market price of each share. For cryptocurrencies, it similarly refers to the total number of coins in circulation multiplied by the current market price of each coin.

— Documenting Bitcoin 📄 (@DocumentBitcoin) January 8, 2021

However, Erik Voorhees, CEO of self-custody crypto platform ShapeShift, argued that cryptocurrencies’ road to their second trillion won’t take another 10 years. A lot less, in fact.

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) January 7, 2021

“Crypto Market Cap: $1 Trillion. Took ten years. It will take less than six months to get to $2 Trillion,” Voorhees wrote.

But Bitcoin’s fight to break into the top 5 will be a challenge, with market caps in the range of trillions of dollars. For it to overtake Apple, it would need a price of $116,000—a lofty goal.

data obtained from Coinmarketcap, which indicates that the market had seen a 10% increase in the last 24 hours.

This means that the crypto industry is now a tenth of the gold market cap that stands at $10 trillion. The crypto industry has kept growing in leaps and bounds since the beginning of the year. Bitcoin and other crypto-assets have kept performing well, with many of them reaching new all-time highs (ATHs).

According to the available data, Bitcoin contributes a major quota in the market cap of the industry. This leading crypto-asset has over $720 billion in its market cap, while the closest challenger, Ethereum also has over $140 billion in its capitalization.

Other crypto assets like Tether, XRP, Litecoin, Cardano, Bitcoin Cash and others also contributed their quota into making the crypto market cap rising to its new ATH.

Erik Voorhees of ShapeShift has predicted that the crypto market cap would get to $2 Trillion in the space of the next six months. According to him, though it took the industry ten years to get to the current level, it will take considerably less time for the market to hit its next trillion.

Josh Rager, a crypto analyst, noted that there is still the possibility of the market cap moving up, especially as more people begin to adopt Bitcoin and other crypto-assets.

The two analysts might have taken into consideration the increased level of institutional adoption of crypto-assets which helps to keep pushing the price of these assets higher.

Bitcoin alone in 2021 has broken countless numbers of its ATH. At the time of writing, the asset has broken the $39k level, and analysts are already predicting that the coin’s value will reach $43k.

million and approximately $10.37 million worth of Storj was traded on exchanges in the last 24 hours. One Storj token can now be purchased for approximately $0.29 or 0.00001000 BTC on major exchanges. During the last seven days, Storj has traded down 5.3% against the U.S. dollar.

Here’s how similar cryptocurrencies have performed during the last 24 hours:

About Storj

Buying and Selling Storj

Storj can be traded on the following cryptocurrency exchanges:. It is usually not presently possible to buy alternative cryptocurrencies such as Storj directly using US dollars. Investors seeking to acquire Storj should first buy Bitcoin or Ethereum using an exchange that deals in US dollars such as Changelly, Coinbase or Gemini. Investors can then use their newly-acquired Bitcoin or Ethereum to buy Storj using one of the aforementioned exchanges.

proven to be a reliable complement to Ethereum as it has rapidly improved the scalability of the network.

Within the last one year, Polkadot token, DOT, has grown to become the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap overtaking the more popular crypto asset, Bitcoin Cash, in its wake.

The Polkadot token currently has a market capitalization of over $7 billion, beating other competitors like EOS and Cardano.

In a recent post, Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Polkadot, said that only Ethereum is ahead of Polkadot as the most active ecosystem in the DeFi system.

According to the post, Polkadot has operated as an ecosystem that allows for the transfer of digital assets across various blockchains. Currently, the focus of the project has been on interoperability geared towards Ethereum. However, there are plans to integrate other platforms in the future.

The co-founder added that 2021 would be a very pivotal year for the development of the platform. He posited that the ecosystem would bring features like parachain together and lease them to project developers who might be looking to build more applications on such parachains.

It is also expected that Ethereum’s smart contract ability on Substrate would be available in the first or second quarter of next year.

In recent times, the price of crypto assets has been appreciated massively. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets have risen as more adoption and acceptance of these assets are generally accepted.

The Polkadot token is also not left out. The token has also garnered momentum alongside other cryptocurrencies. Currently, the asset sells for $8.2.

The protocol’s network is currently secured by 63% of the token holders.

dollar. One Curecoin coin can now be purchased for $0.0829 or 0.00000225 BTC on popular exchanges. Curecoin has a total market cap of $2.06 million and approximately $8,890.00 worth of Curecoin was traded on exchanges in the last day.

Here is how similar cryptocurrencies have performed during the last day:

About Curecoin

Buying and Selling Curecoin

Curecoin can be traded on these cryptocurrency exchanges:. It is usually not currently possible to buy alternative cryptocurrencies such as Curecoin directly using US dollars. Investors seeking to acquire Curecoin should first buy Ethereum or Bitcoin using an exchange that deals in US dollars such as Coinbase, Changelly or GDAX. Investors can then use their newly-acquired Ethereum or Bitcoin to buy Curecoin using one of the aforementioned exchanges.

$362,373.19 and approximately $12,916.00 worth of EventChain was traded on exchanges in the last 24 hours. One EventChain token can currently be purchased for $0.0116 or 0.00000033 BTC on exchanges including Livecoin and Mercatox. In the last week, EventChain has traded 0.8% higher against the US dollar.

Here is how related cryptocurrencies have performed in the last 24 hours:

About EventChain

EventChain Token Trading

EventChain can be bought or sold on these cryptocurrency exchanges: Livecoin and Mercatox. It is usually not presently possible to purchase alternative cryptocurrencies such as EventChain directly using US dollars. Investors seeking to acquire EventChain should first purchase Bitcoin or Ethereum using an exchange that deals in US dollars such as GDAX, Coinbase or Changelly. Investors can then use their newly-acquired Bitcoin or Ethereum to purchase EventChain using one of the exchanges listed above.

Nxt coin can currently be purchased for $0.0117 or 0.00000032 BTC on popular exchanges. Nxt has a market cap of $11.67 million and approximately $1.33 million worth of Nxt was traded on exchanges in the last day.

Here is how similar cryptocurrencies have performed in the last day:

Nxt Profile

Nxt Coin Trading

Nxt can be bought or sold on the following cryptocurrency exchanges:. It is usually not presently possible to purchase alternative cryptocurrencies such as Nxt directly using US dollars. Investors seeking to trade Nxt should first purchase Bitcoin or Ethereum using an exchange that deals in US dollars such as Changelly, Coinbase or Gemini. Investors can then use their newly-acquired Bitcoin or Ethereum to purchase Nxt using one of the exchanges listed above.

trading. The market cap of the token has passed the $11 billion threshold for the first time. 

According to Coin Market Cap, PolkaDot is now the fifth-largest cryptocurrency, snuggled between XRP and Litecoin. Polkadot is one of the prominent projects that provide extraordinary economic extensibility by enabling a common set of validators to secure multiple blockchains.

Among the Blockchain Networks, Polkadot is relatively a newcomer built under the leadership of Gavin Wood and Jutta Steiner of Parity Technologies. 

Polkadot is a flagship project by Web3 Foundation, a Swiss foundation to facilitate a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web. According to Polkadot’s product positioning, the protocol doesn’t seem like a competitor to Ethereum.  It is a next-generation Blockchain protocol connecting an entire system of blockchain built networks. 

Polkadot is also moving quickly, making its position in the top crypto-space. In August 2020  it ranked in the top 10 of all crypto, and a month later assembled a market capitalization of over $5 Billion.

Analyzing the market predictions of the Polkadot currency and based on research conducted by our team, we also speculate a good DOT momentum within the crypto space. We also believe DOT price might plunge recording decent gains till the end of 2021, which could continue in the coming years.

The DOT price as per our analysis may also touch $13 to $15 by 2022 which might touch $20 in the next couple of years

price — and more importantly its market cap — has taken a fair bit of attention from BTC.

Ethereum’s new price surge did not lead to an old or new ATH, but it did lead the coin into the top 100 largest assets in the world by market cap.

The new price rally led ETH to the list of the largest assets by market cap for the first time in the coin’s lifetime. Ethereum achieved this by having its price go up by 13% yesterday, which increased its market cap.

As a result, ETH ended up being the 88th largest asset by market cap in the world, sitting between Anheuser-Busch Inbev and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Ethereum has seen massive growth in the new year. While there have only been 7 days of 2021 thus far, Ethereum has still surged up by 62% this year. This allowed it to go beyond $1,200, making it only about $200 away from its old all-time high, set in the early days of 2018.

The coin’s gains translate to around $53 billion which Ethereum added to its market cap, which was more than enough for it to overtake a number of major conglomerates.

— CompaniesMarketCap.com (@CompaniesMarke1) January 6, 2021

While Ethereum’s move is impressive, it is worth remembering that it is not the only crypto on the top 100 assets list. Bitcoin is another coin that can be found there, and it sits significantly higher.

In fact, BTC currently occupies the 10th spot with a market cap of nearly $700 billion, sitting comfortably between Tencent and Tesla, and closing in on Facebook.

Of course, market caps of different assets are calculated differently, and so while it is possible to compare Bitcoin to Ethereum — cryptos and stocks are not directly comparable. The same can be said for precious metals, and alike.

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