Bitcoin investors are currently experiencing one of the best periods ever with new higher record prices set every few days it seems. However one trend that should cause some concern to long term BTC holders is that its dominance of the cryptocurrency market is waning.

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Standing at 49.9%, Bitcoin’s share of the combined value for all blockchain assets is now under 50% for the first time in its history. With Ethereum already at a valuation of almost $8.5 billion, it’s actually Ripple XRP’s new market cap of $11.5 billion that has pushed BTC dominance under the threshold.

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From a record market valuation of $1.5 billion in early April, the XRP market cap jumped by about 666% as of today, making it once again the second most valuable blockchain with a new record price of $0.3 per token. In the last 24 hours alone, the value jumped by 27% with an incredible daily trading volume of $320 million.

Beating bitcoin at its own game

One possible reason for the recent jump in the XRP/USD exchange rate is that Ripple revealed a few days ago its plans to make its cryptocurrency more decentralized than bitcoin – decentralization being one of the main selling points of the blockchain concept initially.

Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas explained: “A key benchmark that we aim to achieve is to become more decentralized than Bitcoin, which at the time of writing is 51% controlled by just five mining pools. This means the largest five pools working together could achieve a 51% attack and reverse transactions (double spend) at will.

For Ethereum, this number is even lower: only three pools are needed for a takeover. To match Bitcoin, the Ripple Consensus Ledger (RCL) would need just 16 trusted validators. Add more, and the number of tolerable faults increases accordingly. In other words, RCL will not just meet, but exceed the decentralization level of other public blockchains.”