Is there a new alt season coming for the cryptocurrencies XRP, Litecoin (LTC), Stellar (XLM), and the Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV)? Probably not, says Messari chief executive officer Ryan Selkis.
In Messari’s latest newsletter, Selkis notes that Bitcoin’s dominance among “bona fide, wanna be, store-of-value/p2p payment cryptocurrencies” – not including smart contract platform tokens, DeFi tokens, stablecoins, and other alternative blockchain projects – has risen from below 60% in early January 2018 to nearly 90% today.
The Messari executive questions why such currencies still exist and still manage to have market caps in the billions of dollars.
“Why won’t these things die? The answer may be that they are ‘only mostly dead.’ Crypto assets don’t go bankrupt, so the also-rans have a tendency to just sort of fade into the abyss over time vs. implode spectacularly. Remember Peercoin, Namecoin, and Primecoin in the late 2013 bull run?
We’ve had similar washouts in the past market cycle as well. Useless forks like Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond are effectively dead. Other also-ran currencies like XRP, Stellar, and BCH are down 90% and fared 3-4x worse than Bitcoin in the downdraft.”
Selkis warns investors to avoid “this cycle’s Primecoin.”
“Perhaps altcoin holders are waiting for that dominance trend line to break, and speculating on the return of alt season. I’m skeptical and put an equal probability that there is a continued slow and inevitable decline of the monetary assets without any real differentiating features.”
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