The vast majority of Top 100 (market cap) coins from 5 years ago vanished from the Top 100 [Data/Graphs]

Had a little free time tonight and felt like playing with some rudimentary data. I pulled up historical pricing/market cap data from CoinMarketCap, specifically to the date of December 17th, 2017 (five years ago). I very briefly looked at what coins were in the Top 100 by market cap in 2017 and how that compared to today's Top 100 list.

It's not pretty, folks, much to no one's surprise.

​

Fig. 1 - 78 of 100 Top 100 coins from 2017 are no longer in the Top 100 (by market cap)

​

Figure 1 kinda says it all - based on market cap, the vast majority of Top 100 coins from 2017 are no longer in the Top 100 in 2022. Specifically, 78 of 100 coins have vanished. A few of those have actually completely disappeared e.g. BitConnect, but many others e.g. NANO (I miss you my sweet prince) still exist, but have just fallen from grace (you can find NANO at rank #219 these days).

We can break this down a little further. For example, of the 22 coins that heled onto their Top 100 listing, where were they in 2017? I've split up the Top 100 in to pentiles (batches of 20).

​

Fig. 2 - Of the 22 coins that remained in the Top 100 from 2017 to 2022, 15 of those were in the Top 20 in 2017.

By splitting up the coins into groups of 20, we can see that 15 of the 22 coins that were in the Top 100 in 2017 and remained in the Top 100 in 2022 were actually in the Top 20. Only 3 coins from rank 21 to 40 stayed in the Top 2022, 2 coins from 41 to 60, and 1 coin each from groups 61 to 80 (MANA) and 81 to 100 (LINK).

I studied human nutrition in college, and one of my professors one made this analogy: bone density is like paragliding, where you want to start high up at the beginning, because you'll be going down as you age. Basically, get your bones as strong as they can be in your teens and 20s because further building of bone density is difficult after age 30. Just like bones and paragliding, if your crypto starts near the top, it'll take longer in most cases to fall out of favor.

So, what happened to those 15 coins in the Top 20? What about the other Top 100 coins that remained in the Top 100? Did they fall or rise within the Top 100? Let's look at a simple table.

​

Table 1 - The market cap rank of each of the 22 coins that were in the Top 100 in 2017 and remained in the Top 100 in 2022.

The two numbered columns show the market cap rank of the coin on that line in 2017 and in 2022. For example, BCH was ranked #3 in 2017 and is now ranked #26 in 2022. Coins highlighted in YELLOW did not change rank from 2017 to 2022. Coins highlighted in GREEN actually GAINED positions from 2017 to 2022 (shout out to LINK, which moved up 70 spots from #91 to #21). All other coins, shown in WHITE, lost rankings, with the largest drop being XEM which dropped 84 positions from #9 to #93.

If you look carefully, you'll see that 15 of the top 16 coins from 2017 are still on the Top 100, but #11 from 2017 is missing from the 2022 Top 100 list. Which shitcoin fell all the way from #11 to off of the Top 100? That honor goes to Bitcoin Gold (BTG) which is now ranked #117, falling a flaccid 106 positions in the last five years.

Now, it's important to keep in mind that market cap isn't the end-all-be-all of a coin's value, monetarily or functionally. This is mostly just a bit of fun I wanted to have, and maybe a small reminder that many coins can fall out of favor, even solid alts with seemingly worth-while use cases. Perhaps some data to keep in mind the next time you considering DCAing.