The last month, never mind the last few days, have been rather trying for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, at the head of the ecosystem, has fallen substantially, but overall, it is the smaller cryptos, with lower market caps, that appear to have taken the brunt of the bearish turn.

Bitcoin’s own market dominance has been falling in the past few months, almost its price. However, the threat of an altcoin season has far from been realized, as BeInCrypto has previously touched on. In fact, it was pointed out by cryptocurrency analyst Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung), that the smaller market cap coins have been hit the hardest in this latest drop.

According to Young, the drop in the overall market cap of the cryptocurrency ecosystem shows a fall of more than 27 percent in less than two months. Yet, Bitcoin’s own dominance has gone from a high of 71 percent to 66 percent at the time of publishing, in the same period.

Small-Cap Cryptocurrencies Getting Rekt

Young made a note of the substantial fall in market valuation of the cryptocurrency space from October to November:

Indeed, it has been a challenging year in general for the altcoins, even the ones with a more significant share of the market. Bitcoin’s expanding dominance was the first factor to hit hard against their growth, and even with the major cryptocurrency falling away somewhat, no altcoins have managed to take the initiative and rally.

Early on in the year, it was Litecoin that was credited with sparking the cryptocurrency spring that helped Bitcoin break away from its bearish 2018. Since then, there has been very little to write home about for coins with smaller market caps, and things only look to get worse.

Ether the Exception to the Rule?

In response to Young’s assertion about some of the smaller cap, another analyst, Andrew Kang, pointed out how things on the Ethereum blockchain and its associated ERC20 tokens could be the exception to this rule.

Kang showed that: “having almost flipped ETH twice previously, the cumulative market cap of ERC20s is looking like it is finally on pace to surpass the market cap of ETH itself if the current price trends of altcoins vs. ETH continue.”

The suggestion being outlined here is that Ethereum’s own market cap is falling, but the cumulation of all the ERC20 tokens is rising, or not falling as quickly at Ether.

There could be several reasons for this, including more ERC20 tokens being created on the blockchain, or even increasing the standard of tokens resulting in higher-value contributions to the overall ERC20 market cap.

Images are courtesy of Shutterstock, Twitter.

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