In another clear sign of a crypto collapse, most of the world’s most prominent altcoins erased their 2018 value gains in the latest breakdown within the industry this Tuesday. Ethereum (ETH,) Litecoin (LTC,) Dash (DASH,) and NEO are, at the moment of writing this article, priced below of where they were a year ago.
A similar scenario is undermining Bitcoin’s name in the last few hours. Despite a slight gain in price in the last 24 hours (0.24 percent, to be precise,) the most influential cryptocurrency of the planet will most likely fail to continue its run of years with price gains, an occurrence that had become common since its birth in 2008. BTC is currently trading at $6,335.40, whereas it was closer to $6,400 at this time in 2017.
A hefty drop in Price of Cryptocurrencies
In fact, Bitcoin has endured a tough start to the week, as have all top 20 coins in market capitalization. All of them have seen their price decrease by 3-10 percent, a development that has put a halt to a 12-day consolidation window that appeared, at least momentarily, to spark a revival in what has been 2018 to forget.
Now, Dash (DASH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ether (ETH) and NEO (NEO) have all erased the gains that the struggled so much to earn in the year, always according to data found on the specialized site CoinMarketCap.
DASH is currently trading at $154, a marked decline on the $284 that it showed by this date last year. The $130 difference is one of the broadest within the industry. Another affected cryptocurrency is Ethereum: on October 30th, 2017, it was changing hands at $305, but right now, it is doing it at a base value of $197, not even reaching the $200 mark and showing a-$108 difference.
Bitcoin Cash has not managed to escape the crisis, either, trading at $419 right now and paling in comparison with that of last year’s digits: it was changing hands at $472 by this time in 2017, a -$53 balance. Litecoin and NEO are also down, $6.66 and $12.55, respectively, failing to reverse the downward trend that has affected Bitcoin and most of the top altcoins since the start of the year.
What are the Most Common Trends?
The surge that started at the end of last year activated the ICO proliferation, which in turn was the ignition to the fire that started to catapult the price of Bitcoin, which surpassed $19,000 in late December, a record-breaking number. As a side effect, most of the top numbers of altcoin in value were inflated, and the total market cap surpassed $815 billion in early January.
However, the nightmarish year for crypto investments started off in March, the first time that BTC fell under a key indicator. That caused numerous investors to back out of their assets, and the industry began experiencing a domino effect that is still underway.
Despite the problems of the industry, Bitcoin has increased its margin as the top cryptocurrency by market cap by 0.44 percent; extending, at least, its dominance in the market. Some people are expecting BTC to start making a run towards an increased price, just as it happened last year, and they have been shifting away from altcoins in preparation for that possible scenario.
By Andres Chavez
