Will there be a new altcoin season for the cryptocurrencies XRP, Litecoin (LTC), Stellar (XLM) and Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV)?
Ryan Selkis, CEO of Messari, says investors shouldn’t build on it
In Messari’s latest newsletter , Selkis states that the dominance of Bitcoin among the “bona fide, wanna be, store-of-value / p2p payment cryptocurrencies” has increased from under 60% at the beginning of January 2018 to almost 90% today. It does not include tokens from smart contract platforms, DeFi tokens, stablecoins and other alternative blockchain .
The newsletter raises the provocative question of why such currencies like the above-mentioned currencies still exist and how they still manage to have market capitalizations in the billions.
The only reason, according to the Messari newsletter, is that such projects are already seemingly dead. It is only in their nature that such projects gradually fade into the abyss instead of going bankrupt overnight. That was the case before and will continue to be so.
Do you remember Peercoin, Namecoin and Primecoin in Bullrun at the end of 2013?
In the last market cycle, too, Selkis writes that we had similar cleanups on the market. Useless forks like Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond are practically dead. Other currencies like XRP , Stellar and BCH have also fallen by 90% and performed 3-4 times worse than Bitcoin in the downtrend.
Selkis warns investors about this and advises them to avoid “the Primecoin this cycle”.
Perhaps the altcoin holders are waiting for the trend line of dominance to be broken and speculating on the return of the alt-season. I am skeptical and think it is just as likely that there will be a sustained slow and inevitable decline in financial wealth with no real differentiators.