The value of the top 10 cryptocurrencies plummeted in 2018, with most of the top cryptos losing value every month of the year.
Here we’ve analysed 10 cryptocurrencies which are the largest and most significant. Two cryptos in the Top 10 by market capitalisation have been excluded from the analysis. We excluded Tether because it’s a stablecoin so the value doesn’t move too much generally as it’s pegged against the US$.
We also excluded Bitcoin SV as it only came into existence following the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in November, so there is no historic pricing information for the year.
The cryptos we’ve analysed are as follows, ranked by their size (measured by value of market capitalisation):
In August 2008, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered. On October 31st, 2008, a paper was published called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. This was authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. To date, no one knows who this person, or people, are.
Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) developed by the Ripple company. It is also referred to as the Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) or Ripple protocol. It can trace its roots to 2004 when a web developer called Ryan Fugger had the idea to create a monetary system that was decentralised and could effectively allow individuals to create their own money.
Ethereum was launched by Vitalik Buterin on July 3oth, 2015. He was a researcher and programmer working on Bitcoin Magazine, and he initially wrote a white paper in 2013 describing Ethereum. Buterin had proposed that Bitcoin needed a scripting language. He decided to develop a new platform with a more general scripting language when he couldn’t get buy-in for his proposal.
Bitcoin Cash was born out of the idea of making Bitcoin more practical for small, day-to-day payments. In May 2017, Bitcoin payments took about four days unless a fee was paid, which was proportionately too large for small transactions. A change to the code was implemented and Bitcoin Cash was born on August 1st, 2017.
The EOS.IO platform was developed by private company block.one and released as open-source software on June 2nd, 2018. One billion tokens were distributed on the Ethereum blockchain by block.one. EOS is based on a white paper published in 2017.
Stellar was founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim. At launch, it was based on the Ripple protocol, but the network eventually forked. Stellar is an open source protocol for exchanging money where servers use the internet to connect to and communicate with other Stellar servers, forming a global value exchange network.
Litecoin was released in October 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. It was a fork of Bitcoin, with the main difference being a smaller block generation time, increased maximum number of coins, and a different Script-based algorithm.
The TRON protocol is pitched as “one of the largest blockchain-based operating systems in the world, offering scalable, high availability and high throughput support that underlies all the decentralised applications in the TRON ecosystem”. An ICO campaign took place in September 2017 and raised $70 million to launch the protocol. The coin is called TRX.
Cardano claims to have changed the way cryptocurrencies are designed and developed, balancing the best of the functionality of several cryptocurrencies into one coin. The project began in 2015, the work of a global team of scientists and academics. ADA was released in September 2017.
The IOTA Foundation was incorporated in Germany as a non-profit corporation. The Foundation is “dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around IOTA to accelerate its development and commercial adoption as an open source technology”. In November 2017, the Foundation had a $100 million fund to promote IOTA use.
| Date | BTC | XRP | ETH | BCH | EOS | XLM | LTC | TRX | ADA | MIOTA |
| Jan-18 | -26% | -42% | 52% | -37% | 56% | 51% | -28% | 27% | -28% | -35% |
| Feb-18 | 1% | -22% | -24% | -20% | -32% | -38% | 23% | -20% | -40% | -20% |
| Mar-18 | -33% | -44% | -54% | –43% | -28% | -38% | -42% | -22% | -51% | -42% |
| Apr-18 | 33% | 66% | 70% | 97% | 194% | 107% | 27% | 174% | 128% | 83% |
| May-18 | -19% | -27% | -14% | -26% | -30% | -30% | -20% | -35% | -35% | -10% |
| Jun-18 | -15% | -24% | -22% | -25% | -34% | -35% | -31% | -36% | -38% | -42% |
| Jul-18 | 21% | -6% | -5% | 4% | -10% | 44% | -3% | -11% | 2% | -6% |
| Aug-18 | -9% | -23% | -35% | -30% | -12% | -21% | -21% | -25% | -28% | -25% |
| Sep-18 | -6% | 74% | -17% | -2% | -11% | 17% | -1% | -13% | -16% | -20% |
| Oct-18 | -4% | -22% | -15% | -20% | -8% | -12% | -18% | 1% | -17% | -18% |
| Nov-18 | -37% | -20% | -43% | -58% | -45% | -30% | -36% | -35% | -45% | -39% |
| Dec-18 | -8% | -4% | 16% | -16% | -12% | -31% | -7% | 28% | 4% | 24% |
| Date | BTC | XRP | ETH | BCH | EOS | XLM | LTC | TRX | ADA | MIOTA |
| Jan-18 | -26% | -42% | 52% | -37% | 56% | 51% | -28% | 27% | -28% | -35% |
| Feb-18 | -25% | -55% | 16% | -49% | 7% | -7% | -11% | 2% | -57% | -47% |
| Mar-18 | -50% | -75% | -47% | -71% | -23% | -42% | -49% | -21% | -79% | -69% |
| Apr-18 | -33% | -58% | -9% | -43% | 127% | 19% | -35% | 117% | -52% | -44% |
| May-18 | -46% | -69% | -22% | -58% | 59% | -16% | -48% | 40% | -68% | -50% |
| Jun-18 | -54% | -77% | -39% | -68% | 6% | -45% | -64% | -11% | -81% | -71% |
| Jul-18 | -44% | -78% | -41% | -67% | -5% | -21% | -65% | -21% | -80% | -73% |
| Aug-18 | -49% | -83% | -62% | -77% | -17% | -37% | -73% | -41% | -86% | -80% |
| Sep-18 | -52% | -71% | -68% | -77% | -26% | -27% | -73% | -48% | -88% | -84% |
| Oct-18 | -54% | -77% | -73% | -82% | -32% | -36% | -78% | -48% | -90% | -87% |
| Nov-18 | -71% | -82% | -85% | -92% | -62% | -55% | -86% | -66% | -95% | -92% |
| Dec-18 | -73% | -82% | -82% | -94% | -67% | -69% | -87% | -57% | -94% | -90% |
If you want to take a look at any particular currency performance in more detail, then you can look at these pages:
As with any investment, it pays to do some homework before you part with your money. The prices of cryptocurrencies are volatile and go up and down quickly. In 2018 they mainly went down. In terms of the investment cycle, it was mainly anxiety, denial, and fear in the market.
You can see from this article that if you had bought cryptocurrency in January and held onto it (or HODLed in crypto parlance), you would have lost most of your money.
This page is not recommending a particular currency or whether you should invest or not.
You may be interested in our range of cryptocurrency guides along with the latest cryptocurrency news.
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