The year of 2018 has been rough on Cryptocurrencies. Most of the Crypto assets have lost over 90% of their value including a lot of tokens that were launched last year through an ICO (Initial Coin Offering).

It makes sense that most of the tokens have lost value because either they were outright scams or should not have existed in the first place as they had no real utility other than speculation. But the extent of the Crypto winter in 2018 is daunting given that 30 out the top 50 Cryptocurrencies have also lost over 90% of their value.

A diagram from Longhash shows all the top 50 Cryptocurrencies in different colors based on the value lost in 2018. Except for the stable coins which are pegged to the Dollar such as Tether and Paxos every other Cryptocurrency has lost more than 60% of its value.

Only six Cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin SV, Maker, Binance Coin (BNB), Aurora, VeChain and Bitcoin (BTC) have lost less than 80%. Nine other Cryptocurrencies including Dogecoin, Waves, 0x, EOS, etc have lost somewhere between 80-90% of their value. The rest 30 of the top 50 Cryptocurrencies have lost over 90% of their value in 2018.

The stats in the diagram are directly taken from Coinmarketcap.com snapped on December 17th. Bitcoin SV is at a favorable position as it was forked off of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) recently in November. Even the stable coins which are not supposed to be volatile with respect to US Dollars showed some volatility at times.

Tokens such as Qtum, Nano, ICON and Bitcoin Diamond have performed the worst losing over 95% of their value. To put this into perspective, for an asset to lose 95% of its value it has to drop 90% and then drop 50% more.

The tokens that are below the list of top 50 have performed even worse, tokens such as ZClassic (ZCL), RChain (RHOC) and SALT have lost 99% of their value in 2018.

Blockmanity’s Take

The market capitalization metric used to value many small and mid-cap tokens are mostly flawed as the prices are assigned rather than derived from the market due to a lack of liquidity. Most of the prices for Altcoins were derived entirely from speculative activity and had little or no value.

The drop in the prices can be compared to the dot-com mania back in 2000 where most of the stocks eventually dropped over 99% and even stocks like Amazon, Yahoo and Priceline dropped over 95% in value.

Disclaimer: Blockmanity is a news portal and does not provide any financial advice. Blockmanity's role is to inform the cryptocurrency and blockchain community about what's going on in this space. Please do your own due diligence before making any investment. Blockmanity won't be responsible for any loss of funds.

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