Bitcoin and XRP were the world’s largest virtual assets going into 2019. However, while Bitcoin continues to dominate the market over the year, Ethereum did manage to overtake XRP on the cryptocurrency charts.
Over the course of the last twelve months, Bitcoin and Ethereum have recorded a period of prolific performance, with the two crypto-assets helping scale the collective market by almost $75 billion from 1 January to 30 November.
According to a report by Blockchain Capital, 2019 witnessed major highs in the market with regards to Bitcoin, whereas Ethereum also recorded strong fundamentals. The data cited by the report suggested that the market valuations of BTC and ETH were strongly oppressed over the 2nd half of 2019. That being said, the report added that the overall gains of the two cryptocurrencies remained positive.
Source: Coinstats
At press time, Bitcoin was priced at $7255. The valuation of the king coin was up by approximately 95 percent year-to-date, while Ethereum registered a growth of over 10 percent. Although other assets such as BCH and Litecoin recorded better performances than ETH in terms of price, they lagged behind in terms of market cap.
It was also reported that the top 10 crypto-assets collectively accounted for 76 percent of the total market cap on 30 November. On the other hand, the top 10 coins only accounted for about 70 percent of the market cap last year.
Binance’s native token, BNB, led the charts, however, after it scaled by over 150 percent in 2019.
Speaking about Ethereum, the Vitalik Buterin-led token witnessed a lucrative year in terms of increasing contract calls as the derivative market of ETH started to gain progressive interest. The active addresses on the network recorded a minor slump after it rapidly spiked during the bullish phase of April-June.
From a technical point of view, plans of a transition to ETH 2.0 were shared with the community as the organization suggested that it will be a steady shift over the course of the next 3-5 years.
For Bitcoin, its hash rate recorded its highest spike ever in 2019. The network also witnessed over $1 billion transactions every day. As a matter of fact, of the total 2 trillion transactions executed since 2011, around 1.6 trillion of them were executed over the last 2 years.
