While the cryptocurrency market has started to show signs of stabilizing over the past few weeks, it is important to remember we are still trading far away from all-time highs (ATHs) for all coins.
The total market capitalization for the entire cryptocurrency industry has fallen by a staggering $598 billion from the all-time-high market cap of $823 billion seen on January 7, 2018. The current total market cap is around $228 billion.
Bitcoin is currently down by 65% from its ATH. With such a volatile industry, it is no surprise that the rest of the altcoin market is performing worse than Bitcoin. Top ranking coins such as Tron, Verge, Ripple, QTUM, and SiaCoin are all down from their ATH by up to 90% or more.
The chart below represents the disastrous year that the Bitcoin market has been experiencing.
Considering these precipitous declines, the market is currently in a troublesome and fragile position. However, not all of the altcoins have seen such a significant drop, and many have managed to resist a 90% decline. The following 3 coins have all maintained a price decline which totals less than 80% from their respective ATH.
These coins were selected based on their use case, the expertise of their team & developers, and their community size.
Binance Coin (BNB) — 55% Down From ATH
Binance Coin is one of the strongest performing cryptocurrencies during this period of the bear market cycle.
BNB has even sustained a lower drop from its ATH than Bitcoin. The following is a chart showing BNB/USD over the course of the trading year.
Binance Coin is an ERC-20 token that allows users to receive discounts for fees on the Binance trading platform. Binance is still the number 1 ranked exchange by trading volume.
The Binance team has pledged to conduct a quarterly buy back and burn by using 20% of their profits to buy BNB. They will continue to do this until they buy up 50% of the supply. This provides a solid reason to stay invested in BNB as the the promised quarterly demand buys from the team will restrict token supply.
According to Michael Arrington, the founder and previous co-editor of Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, up to 90% of the Binance team has recently been reported to have chosen to receive their salary in BNB, allowing them to benefit from lower fees and further token appreciation on their salary.
In just a short period of time, Binance has achieved some incredible milestones. One notable achievement is they topped the volume rankings at first position in just a mere 165 days. Binance has also reported that they are, arguably, the fastest growing company to reach a valuation of over $1 billion, in under 6 months.
Find out more information on the project by checking out our article on the first year review of Binance.
Although the BNB use case is extremely limited, the niche use case has an established user base as Binance is the largest exchange in the world. This provides a sustained demand for BNB for as long as Binance remains dominant.
EOS — 73% Down From ATH
EOS is currently ranked 5th in the market, with a total market cap value of $4.6 billion. The graph below shows EOS/USD over the course of the trading year.
EOS has commonly been referred to as the most powerful infrastructure for dapps. It is a decentralized operating system designed to be able to rival Ethereum.
The network is designed to allow it to be scalable through techniques such as parallel processing. This is already evident in the number of transactions per second (tps) that EOS can handle.
According to EOS Network Monitor, EOS can currently process a maximum of 3,972 transactions per second. This is significantly higher than the maximum 25 tps currently achievable from Ethereum.
The cryptocurrency has recently released a new version (v.1.2) of their EOSIO platform, showing that development continues despite falling prices in the market. They have also consistently been ranked at first place, for the past three months, in one of China’s official government cryptocurrency ranking reports delivered by the China Electronic Information Industry Development Research Institute (CCID).
Another reason to weather the storm with EOS is the upcoming decentralized exchange from BitFinex, built totally on EOS. The new DEX will be called EOSFinex and allow for high-speed decentralized transactions to take place by combining both technologies.
EOS has a lot going for it with a lot of buzz, as evidenced by their $4 billion ICO. If the governance systems proposed by EOS continue to develop, EOS could seriously live up to their name “Ethereum killer.”
BAT — 77% Down From ATH
BAT is one of the projects on this list that has a clear and succinct use case. The graph below shows how BAT/USD has fared during this bearish market.
Basic Attention Token is the token that fuels the Brave Browser, a web browser designed to be faster than major competitors such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Founded in 2015 by the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla Firefox, the BAT project is rethinking the way that adverts will be delivered on the internet in hopes of changing the online advertising industry. They believe that adverts can be better delivered based on user attention and geared towards users that actually want to see the adverts—thus creating a digital advertising exchange.
Brave browser is designed to keep user privacy in mind, and therefore comes preinstalled with features that allow users to block trackers, cookies, and advertisements.
There are currently over 3 million users that actively use the Brave browser, indicating the size of the user base that BAT can access. The BAT team has recently grown to 67 employees all working on BAT and the Brave browser, making it one of the largest and strongest development teams in the industry. They have also recently expanded their reach to Twitter and Reddit, allowing users to tip their favorite content providers with BAT tokens.
BAT has a clear development roadmap with a specific use case for its project. This is one of the main reasons that BAT has a good chance to succeed after this bear market has passed.
Conclusion
The coins selected above are based on percentage down from ATH, community size, team and development capability, and specific use cases of the coin. However, although these coins present many reasons to stay excited about them, there are still others in the Top 50 that are less than 80% from their ATH that deserve a mention, such as Decred, Stellar, 0x, Ontology, and Monero.
This bear market has been tough on everybody involved in the entire cryptocurrency industry. The elation of trading at peak highs has long passed as sentiment starts to turn fearful and toxic.
However, it is important to keep the main fundamentals in mind before investing and continue to remember them as you HODL through the storm.
Related: 7 Cryptocurrencies That Will Survive the Altcoin Apocalypse (Opinion)
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