A market cap of $1 billion used to be rare just last year, while at $2 billion heads would turn, but now both are becoming more common, with even ethereum based tokens rising to a unicorn market cap.
The digital currencies space has become more diverse, with the distribution of its $165 billion market cap spread more widely. Bitcoin still retains the majority of it at $75 billion, while eth stands at $35 billion, but all top four are near or above $10 billion.
That’s a level higher than some traditional established companies or web 2.0 businesses as well as more than the GDP of some small countries.
But even $1 billion is not easy to achieve, hence why they’ve been dubbed unicorns, with the top 13 very near or above it, while the top 10 are very near or above $2 billion.
That gives this space a different dimension as with these market cap levels institutional investors may start taking an interest, not least because plenty of traditional stocks have lower market caps and trading volumes.
However, digital currencies and tokens remains very volatile. NEO, for example, was above $2 billion, but now has fallen down. While some, like Qtum, see a decrease in price of 13%.
But, the stock market can be very volatile too and sometimes it fully crashes down, so the phenomena is hardly unique to digital currencies or tokens, some of which now affect traditional stocks like AMD and Nvidia.
The question in some’s mind may be whether this space can reach a cool one trillion dollars. It would be an “only” 10x increase, but with their global nature, as well as ease of access and trading in all jurisdictions, it might be something that comes to pass.
Another way would be the addition of new tokens and projects, so continuing the boom of 2017. However, whether any of it will actually be the case, only time can tell.
