At the beginning of the existence of cryptocurrency was a pilot project in the field of cryptoanalysis. Now, 10 years later, they play a serious role in the global economy, and the total market capitalization exceeds 270 billion dollars. Let's look at the history of the main digital currencies and give a forecast of their value for the future.
BITCOIN (BTC) is the first cryptocurrency created by anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in early 2009. Since 2010, the first exchanges began to appear and more and more people began to learn about cryptocurrency. But no one took the digital currency seriously, users transferred thousands of coins between them.
Since 2011 the price of Bitcoin has started to grow rapidly: first it rose to $1, then to $10, and at the end of the year it was $30. The exchange rate of coins was unstable throughout the entire time: the price could fall by 40-50% in one day. But always the cost of Bitcoin returned to previous levels.
At the end of December 2017, the most popular cryptocurrency was trading at $20,000, with a capitalization exceeding $ 330 billion. This record is still held. Now the capitalization reaches 170 billion dollars, and one coin is worth about $9250.
Analysts ' forecasts are optimistic — most of them believe that the value of Bitcoin will increase in 2021. Some enthusiasts predict new highs and an increase in value to $100,000 or even more.
ETHEREUM (ETH) is the main platform for creating decentralized applications and the main altcoin of the cryptocurrency market. The cryptocurrency was launched in 2015, its Creator is Vitalik Buterin, a canadian programmer of Russian origin.
At the very beginning, the project had many problems. They led to The Ethereum hard fork, which resulted in the creation of a new cryptocurrency — Ethereum Classic. Since 2016, the cryptocurrency has started to grow rapidly, and the maximum value was recorded in early 2018. Then the capitalization reached $130,000,000,000, and one coin was worth more than $1,200. Currently, the cryptocurrency is trading at a price of $240 per coin, and the capitalization is $27,000,000,000.
In 2020-2021, the launch of Ethereum 2.0 is being prepared. the Key feature of this hard fork is the transition to the Proof — of-Stake consensus algorithm. The speed of transactions should also increase, and the need to use the internal currency — Gas-should decrease.
Analysts believe that by the end of 2020, Ethereum can cost up to $500. But some predict that the value of the currency may grow even more on the background of the rise in price of Bitcoin and the launch of Ethereum 2.0.
LITECOIN (LTC) appeared in 2011. Its Creator is a former Google engineer, Charles Lee. The idea was simple — to create a faster version of Bitcoin that can scale better. A new block in the Litecoin network is extracted in 2.5 minutes, for Bitcoin this indicator is 10 minutes. Transactions on the Litecoin network are very cheap and do not exceed a few cents. In other respects, Litecoin is almost no different from its older brother.
The cryptocurrency reached its peak value at the end of 2017 — when the price of one coin was just over $365. The market capitalization reached $ 15 billion. This price did not last long, and the exchange rate began to fall. Now one coin is worth about $40, and the capitalization is 3 billion dollars.
Analysts believe that Litecoin is unlikely to surpass Bitcoin as an investment tool — even if it is better from a technical point of view. However, if the digital currency becomes more popular, then Litecoin will have a promising future. Against the background of an increase in the cost of Bitcoin, the Litecoin rate can update its maximum or even reach the price of $500.
DASH is a digital currency created in 2014 by Evan Duffield. Initially, the project was called XCoin, but in 2015 it acquired the name Dash. The cryptocurrency was created to pay for services and is highly anonymous. The system uses the X11 algorithm, which reduces the energy consumption for mining. Due to the features of this algorithm, mining on ASICS is difficult, you can even extract coins on a computer.
Since its introduction in 2014, the cryptocurrency has grown slowly. In January 2017, its price was $10. Then began a rapid growth: in mate, the coin cost $100, and in June, $300. The peak cost is $1,500 with a capitalization of $1,100,000,000. Now the cost of the cryptocurrency is about $70, and the capitalization is $200,000,000.
Many analysts believe in the future of this cryptocurrency. For 2020, they predict an increase in value: most investors believe that the rate will be able to fix at the level of $100 or higher.
ZCASH (ZEC) is a peer — to-peer payment system developed in late 2016. Its creators are cryptographers Matthew green, Jan Myers, Christina Garman, and Abel Rubin. The main features of the system are anonymity and low commissions in 0.0001 Zcash.
The project was promising from the very beginning. In 2016, one coin cost $35. By the end of 2017, the cost has grown to almost $900, and the capitalization has exceeded $2,000,000,000. but very quickly, the cryptocurrency lost its capitalization. Now the capitalization is about $550,000,000, and one zcash coin costs about $55.
Zcash developers have big plans for the development of the project. Now they intend to make radical changes to the architecture of the cryptocurrency, so that the network can process millions of transactions per second.
Recently, the cost of Zcash has been moving up. Analysts are confident that the price growth will continue, and in the future, the price of Zcash will increase to $100 or more.