Bitcoin [BTC] has weathered a total of 82% decrease in its market cap from an all-time high in December 2017, while other cryptocurrencies have undergone losses much worse than that.

Cryptocurrency market has suffered a much worse fate as the cumulative market cap has reduced from a massive ~$835 billion to a mere $100 billion.

Despite such massive drops in the current bear market the adoption of cryptocurrencies keeps on increasing steadily to new heights as per the new research conducted by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

Source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

The total number of users/accounts as seen in the chart above has increased from 2016 to 2018 by a staggering 208%.

The research also shows the number of verified users are on the rise, the report stated:

“It also shows that KYC’ed user growth has dwarfed total user account growth, which means that new users are more likely to get immediately verified. Growth rates were at their highest in 2017, and the number of new user accounts as well as ID-verified users continued to rapidly grow in 2018 as well.”

The same research also shows that the crypto-asset industry, even though global, is mainly driven by companies based in North America, China, India, and Western Europe.

Source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

The US and China dominate the map, which is shown in the chart, with India, and Canada following these countries in their contribution to the crypto-industry through crypto-based companies.

Another research titled “The State of Bitcoin” by Delphi Digital shows a comparison between the distribution of Bitcoin.

Source: Delphi Digital

The research by Delphi Digital reveals a rather dark and disturbing side of Bitcoin as it shows that out of 22.9 million users that had Bitcoin wallets, 20.4 million users had Bitcoin between 0.01 to 0.1.

According to the research, approximately 679,347 users held 1 to 100 Bitcoins in their wallets. The research further stated:

“Taking a look at the charts on this page, we can see that close to 50% of Bitcoin addresses have less than 0.001 BTC (which is around $3.70 as of December 5th). Additionally, only ~20% of addresses store more than $100 USD at the moment. Lastly, less than 700,000 addresses own 1 BTC or more at this time.”

Although the situation for Bitcoin and other crypto-assets that most of the users observe looks grim, the underlying fundamentals for these assets are growing steadily with strong roots.

The adoption for the digital assets are increasing and institutional investors slowly but definitely getting into crypto-space. Governments and regulating bodies are trying to regulate the assets to avoid misuse and protect investors from getting scammed and all of the above-mentioned pieces of information points the finger to one thing, that these assets are here to stay.

In a recent interview with Internet History Podcast, David Schwartz, the Chief Technology Officer of the leading blockchain firm, Ripple spoke about the mining scenario in the XRP ecosystem and compared it against that of Bitcoin [BTC]. Here, he stated that the initial idea, while developing the XRP ledger was to get rid of the proof-of-work mechanism that Bitcoin uses.

Here, the CTO backed his statement by mentioning the issues that align with the protocol. Schwartz explained that XRP is not an adversarial system like the Bitcoin ledger. Furthermore, the BTC ecosystem pits miners against each other in a competition for a fixed pool of resources. This creates adversarial interests that make the security model of Bitcoin difficult, he said. In his words:

“It’s not an adversarial system like the Bitcoin ledger is. if you’re mining and I’m mining, we’re competing for sort of a fixed pool of resources and that creates sort of adversarial interests that make the security model more difficult.”

Subsequently, the blockchain mastermind also elaborated on the nature of the XRP ledger, addressing it as cooperative. He stated that all the members of the ecosystem are working together on advancement. He added:

“[…] which means that if you’re going to improve the stability of the network, I want you to participate.  Because you’re not taking anything away from me and I think that can make a more secure model but it does mean that the system can’t sort of give out the digital asset.”

He further stated that all the XRP that will ever exist was created in the genesis ledger in June 2012, when the system was built. Regarding proof-of-work, he said that the mechanism has distributed the asset broadly but miners have high expenses wherein the costs of ASIC and power have to be taken into consideration. In his opinion, the money is sucked out of the ecosystem as the miners start selling due to high costs of mining.

Lastly, the Ripple official mentioned that the XRP ledger leaves out one inherent feature of predictable market supply, which is fulfilled via Ripple-created escrow accounts.