Edging toward the end of 2017, the lucrative bull ride that the markets were enjoying was beginning to look at little too good to be true, an outlook already proving to be true.
Bitcoin managed to build itself up to an all-time high at just over USD 20,000. At this point in time, every altcoin out there was piping hot.
That time is long past; the months following December and January have been miserable days of bearish trends which have seen cryptocurrency shed approximately 58% of all-time highs according to athcoinindex.com.
That does seem devastatingly low, but with good news starting to creep back in, especially after G20 outcomes, the days of the bear’s dominance could be coming to an end and it makes for a suitable time to see who thrived and who barely survived the crypto-winter of Q1 2018.
Doing Well Despite Adversity
Of the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap, ten managed pretty well despite the overall heavy crashes in the market:
- DigixDAO (-41.19%)
- Bytom (-51.61%)
- Litecoin (-57.72%)
- Aeternity (-58.06)
- Monero (-58.06%)
- Binance Coin (-60.72%)
- Decred (-61.22%)
- Ethereum Classic (-61.40%)
- OmiseGo (-62.18%)
- Ethereum (-63.92%)
Litecoin, DigixDAO and Bytom interestingly managed to keep themselves out of the eye of the storm, faring slightly better than the BTC bear.
DigixDAO appears to owe its resilience to the premise upon which it was built, which was to “tokenize gold on Ethereum”, giving it the ability to hold strong during volatile market periods. The cause for Bytom’s ability to hold up with the best of them remains somewhat of a mystery, but Monero, Litecoin and Ethereum were all expected to survive due to their popularity with online communities.
Hanging On by a Thread
This period of decline has shaken the hands of the strongest ‘hodlers’ around and there are some particularly notable names on this list of losers.
- ZCash (-96.07%)
- Bitcoin Gold (-89%)
- Ardor (-88.95%)
- Siacoin (-88.82%)
- Verge (-88.36%)
- TRON (-88.14%)
- NEM (-86.74)
- Cardano (-85.73%)
- Bytecoin (-85.65%)
- Hshare (-85.10)
ZCash had some great potential that gave focus to privacy and anonymity, yet suffered the biggest losses of all, losing out heavily to its rival Monero.
SiaCoin, the decentralized cloud storage platform, experienced a massive rise over December for reasons that weren’t quite so obvious but since then, the coin has been on a steep and sure decline. Bitcoin Gold took quite the hit, probably as it doesn’t quite share the same demand that its big brother (Bitcoin).
Despite these lists displaying relatively small margins between the top ten winner and the top ten losers, the market presses onwards and since the G20 summit, the negative trends look as though they could be on their way out.
As for the biggest losers, only time can really tell as to how things will shape up; BTC can swing upwards at steep inclines but if investors and hobbyist traders have lost total faith in some cryptocurrencies, it may only be a matter of time before they are relics of a brutal period in the crypto-world.
