Digital currencies have been popping up like daisies over the last several years and there doesn’t seem to be an end to it. Some might say that it would be more accurate to compare them to weeds and that an awful lot of them need to be removed from the cryptocurrency environment.
It is certainly true that there are questions marks over the long-term survival of a significant number of them. Brad Garlinghouse, the Ripple CEO, thinks that around 99% of digital assets will “got to zero”. And there are many others who agree with him, even if they don’t put a precise figure on it.
Now the survival of what I might call the ‘smaller’ coins is even more in question, because central banks are moving into the digital asset arena with their own digital currency, and this will put a lot of pressure on all but the strongest cryptocurrencies.
Mati Greenspan, senior analyst at eToro remarked to Charles Bovaird at Forbes: “At the moment the three biggest currencies in the world are racing to make their fiat digital.” In this race, China is winning, because the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve haven’t put in the effort to keep up. Then we add something like Libra into the mix and for a time it looked like Facebook’s digital coinage had the potential to threaten every other cryptocurrency,. Now, that project looks less certain to be such a major threat.
So what is the likely outcome? Some market observers believe that whatever happens, there won’t be a winner-take-all scenario. Jacob Eliosoff, a cryptocurrency fund manager thinks there will be around 100 widely used cryptocurrencies that will survive. Marouane Garcon, managing director of Amulet said, “There won’t be a single currency because of too many political differences in the world, but just like fiat currencies some will be stronger in value than others.”
Furthermore, bitcoin, which is currently the leading digital currency, may not be the ultimate winner, but it is likely to be in the winning group. Jake Yocom-Piatt from Decred had this to say: “Instead of a large amount of capital and attention spread across many currencies, we will increasingly see that same capital and attention spread across a smaller number of SOVs, leading to a corresponding increase in their value.”
Who do you think will win the race to be Top Dog in this race? The central bank coins, stablecoins like Libra, or bitcoin and its peers?