What an incredible year 2017 was for cryptocurrencies. Having begun the year with a combined market cap of less than $18 billion, the aggregate value of all virtual currencies by year's end hit $613 billion, representing a better than 3,300% increase.
Cryptocurrencies soared even more to begin 2018, hitting an all-time aggregate market cap high of $836 billion on Jan. 5, before losing a little bit of steam.
These are essentially lifetime gains for investors that have been crammed into a span of just 52 to 53 weeks!
Yet, what's really interesting is that bitcoin, the world's most valuable and popular cryptocurrency, wasn't a primary focus in 2017. Rather than investors flocking to bitcoin, the goal among digital currency investors became to find the next bitcoin.
As a result, a number of burgeoning cryptocurrencies ran circles around bitcoin last year.
In particular, Ethereum, Ripp, Litecoin, and Dash were veritably unstoppable, with respective gains of 9,383%, 36,564%, 5,260%, and 9,282%!