Polkadot passes Bitcoin Cash as the 6th largest cryptosystem
- Polkadot has reached the Top 6 in crypto market capitalisation in less than a year.
- Bitcoin Cash is still plagued by divisions within its ranks.
- Even the rapid rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum has failed to raise the market price of BCH.
Polkadot and its cryptomony, the DOT, has surpassed Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as the sixth largest cryptomony by market capitalisation.
According to CoinGecko, a market capitalization aggregator of cryptography, Polkadot has a market capitalization of $7.63 billion. It now ranks sixth in terms of market capitalization, compared to Cryptosoft market capitalization of $6.35 billion. What was very impressive was the short time it took Polkadot to reach this level. The crypto project is less than a year old.
As Polkadot reached this milestone, co-founder Gavin Wood published a new roadmap for the New Year. Wood has also included a variety of statistics on the network’s growth and successes. More than 200 projects were funded through DOT grant programs and the DOT Treasury. More than one billion DOTs representing 63% of the token’s circulating supply is staked on the network.
What is Polkadot?
Many smart contracting platforms aim to one day become an „Ethereum Killer“. But Polkadot takes a different approach. The project has surpassed all of Ethereum’s other competitors in terms of total market capitalisation, including major players such as Cardano and EOS. This is not because the platform intends to compete with Ethereum. Instead, Polkadot wants to act as a bridge between the platform where Ethereum applications and assets can be „wrapped“ in the Polkadot ecosystem for faster and cheaper functionality.
Polkadot intends to act as a layer two scaling solution for the smart contract ecosystem. So far, Polkadot only interacts with Ethereum applications and assets, but plans to extend and integrate other blockchain platforms.
BCH continues to collapse
It has been a difficult few years for Bitcoin Cash. It recently came out of its lowest price ever. However, there hasn’t been much optimism around the currency. In November, Bitcoin Cash went through another difficult fork that split the chain into two distinct and unique chains. Still claimed to be „real“ Bitcoin by many of its supporters, this hard fork represented yet another rift in the community.
Usually, especially in the cryptomoney space, a rising tide such as the rise in the BTC price causes all other digital currencies to rise. But in the case of BCH, it seems that the crypto community and investors at large are unaware of this. Meanwhile, other projects such as Ethereum are growing by more than 500% over the year and reaching high prices over several years. It is difficult to say whether Polkadot’s sixth place represents the success of DOT or the failure of BCH.