While bitcoin's price has stagnated in the last two weeks, smaller digital currencies such as ripple, stellar and tron have surged into the ranks of the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
wrong and wrong.
bitcoin price has not "stagnated", it was actually rising with a solid slow pace for the pat two weeks with one bigger faster jump when it reached the resistance.
as for XRP it has always had a huge market cap because it has billions of coins as its supply!
and Stellar got pumped hard because Coinbase said they will list it on their platform that is all!
Erik Voorhees, CEO of digital asset exchange ShapeShift, said that in contrast to bitcoin's dominance on the platform a year ago, about half of transactions on the platform now don't involve the popular digital currency at all.
ShapeShift is a special form of exchange people use it to trade altcoins with each other. for example you dump ETH to buy LTC, you dump LTC to buy something else and so on! the volume of different coins change based on which one of them is being pumped at that point. just like any other exchange out there.
However, bitcoin should still benefit from the increased interest in the "alt-coins." Analysts also point out that since bitcoin is the most established digital currency, it is often the way new investors access the cryptocurrency space.
i disagree, the damage is more than any benefit that you are thinking of. the damage is two things:
1. damaging the image of bitcoin as altcoins are useless, buggy, scam, pump and dump and ...
2. damaging the price as when the big dumps come money usually exits through bitcoin and can crash bitcoin price too.