Don’t buy a random low cap coin without DYOR and hope “It will moon one day”. I made a quick analysis from a historical snapshot (top 100) – Lesson: Only the strongest will survive, you may find a gem but in many cases, that day will never come.

Cryptocurrency market has become a lot more mainstream this time around. Coinmarketcap currently shows a whooping 10,749 cryptos being traded in 384 exchanges. A number of new coins are being added every day drawing the interest of many new retail investors.

Today I look at a historical snapshot of the top 100 coins taken 4 years ago (02 July 2017). We will see how many coins are still performing well, and how many coins have faded into oblivion.

Top 2

1st BTC: back then $41B market cap, now $642B

2nd ETH: back then $27B market cap, now $265B

No surprise here.

Top 3 – 10

3rd XRP – now ranked 7th, from $9.9B to $31.2B

4th LTC – now ranked 13th, from $2.2B to $9.4B

5th ETC – now ranked 18th

6th NEM – out of top 50, now ranked 66th, market cap down from $1.43B to $1.2B

7th DASH – similar situation like NEM, now ranked 63th

8th IOTA – slightly better than NEM or DASH, now ranked 44th

9th MONERO – now ranked 26th, market cap has grown from $630M to $3.8B

10th STRATIS – out of top 100. Now ranked 138th, market cap has reduced by more than half from $579M to $229M

Top 11-20

No coin in top 11-20 back then is still in top 20 today. NEO and Waves are still in top 50 though. Zcash is still in top 100.

11th BitShares – out of top 100. Now ranked 190th

12th Zcash – did grow in market cap, but now ranked 62nd

13th NEO – not bad, now still ranked 37th

14th Bytecoin – out of top 200! Now only ranked 231st

15th Golem – out of top 100, now ranked 118th

16th Steem – out of top 100, now ranked 180th

17th Waves – now at ranked 50th

18th Siacoin – double in market cap, but now ranked 89th

19th Gnosis – out of top 100, now ranked 126th

20th Bitconnect – GONE INTO OBLIVION – many got rekt here.

Top 21-50

Move up in rank: Tether (27th to 3rd); DOGE (25th to 6th); XLM (26th to 21st)

The vast majority has faded into oblivion. 5 completely gone (Funfair, Iconomi, 1ST, MCAP, BitcoinDark). LKK is now ranked 4444th. 2 coins are out of top 1000 (SingularDTV, MGO). 4 coins are out of top 500.

Except Tether, Doge and XLM, all have moved out of top 50. The closest being Decred at rank 52nd

Honorary mention: Digibyte 37th then, now 90th. Market cap rose from $151M to $619M (around 4 times)

Top 51-100

Only 1 coin are now in top 100, being LEO (back then ranked 55th, now 43rd)

The rest had been largely faded away:

6 coins are now ranked between 100th and 200th

5 coins are now ranked between 201st and 500th

22 coins are now ranked between 501st and 2000th

3 coins are now ranked between 2001st and 5000th

1 coin is now ranked out out top 5000 (Peerplays)

10 coins have gone forever.

Honorary mentions:

Verge – back then 69th ($39.2M), now 114th ($376M)

Peercoin – back then 52nd ($57M), now market cap down by half to $25M (ranked 568th)

NMR – back then 54th ($52M), now triple market cap to $158M but now only ranked 173th.

In conclusion, only the best ones will have the chance to survive. Do your own research, don't just fomo into the shills and the hype. You will hear coin X or coin Y being "criminally undervalued", "high adoption", "top 1% blockchain” “huge number of transactions processed", "real case use", "partnership with company ABC, fund DEF", "great tech", "growing potential", "attractive staking rewards". As history prevails, only a few will survive the test of time.