Bitcoin has seen a significant rise since the beginning of 2017, but a variety of different alt coins have also seen a huge rise in market cap and price over the past year. Bitcoin has recently reached a high of $18,000 per coin, which has risen from less than $1,000 per coin at the beginning of the year. The market cap of bitcoin has reached around $260 billion, the alt coins as a whole has seen a market cap increase as well leading to the overall cryptocurrency market to have higher than a $500 billion market cap.
This past week has shown how much growth potential alt coins have as a whole. For example, Litecoin and Ethereum have seen a significant rise in value to around $300 per coin and $700 per coin. Ethereum began the year at $7.98 per coin as the beginning of the year and Litecoin had begun the year at around $3.50 per coin.
Although Bitcoin has seen a tremendous rise, this is even more of a reason to start investing in the rest of the cryptocurrency market. This means that there will be more and more attention towards bitcoin and the blockchain technology. As more people start to understand blockchain and the capabilities that the technology holds, there will be more mainstream institutional investment as well as partnerships that arise, such as XRP closing a deal with American Express this past week. After this news and other rumors about the currency swirling in the crypto community the price of the coin had increased from 25 cents per coin to as high as 90 cents per coin this week. As dramatic as that increase in value was there are alt coins with high market caps all over the market that have seen a similar rise, as well as some that still have not yet risen in price, but have a high potential to breakout. The logic is simple-while bitcoin may still be rising in price, the more efficient and long term outlook is to find cheaper coins with high market caps to have a higher holding percentage that have a purpose as well as a potential for additional listings on exchanges and vital uses for financial needs. Although the prices of these alt coins will rise with rumors and all of the news surrounding them, there will be a new crypto that completely overtakes bitcoin and will be used for the planned decentralized peer to peer payments. Some alt coins to look out for are Monero (XMR), Ethereum (Ether), Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP), EOS, Stellar (XLM), Dash, NEO, IOTA (MIOTA), NEM (XEM) and Bitcoin Cash (BCC). The time for a change in the market is now and this past week has shown it is only just beginning.