XRP’s Top-5 Status Threatened By Cardano And Polkadot

Polkadot and Cardano are gaining faster than XRP which has pushed the Ripple-linked token to the sixth spot in the market cap list.

XRP has briefly lost its top-3 altcoin position on February 9, 2021, after the newcomer Polkadot (DOT) surpassed its market cap in a continuing altcoin shake-up. Data acquired from CoinMarketCap confirms that XRP is now holding the sixth-biggest crypto spot and might not manage to return to the top five if the current trends continue in the crypto space.

The new order among the large altcoins has come as a new ‘altseason’ develops in the market. It is now clear that the investors’ chosen investment targets majorly differ from those in the previous altseason of 2018.

Among the victims is Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which has dropped from the top ten altcoins replaced by Dogecoin (DOGE) and Stellar (XLM) this week.

Turning attention back to XRP, the losses could have been worse. At the time of writing, the token is trading at $0.48 with the coin previously trading as low as $0.16 amid various legal challenges affecting the major shareholder Ripple.

While these issues are yet to be resolved and the US regulators may still categorize XRP as an unregistered security, its fortunes have nevertheless improved since then.

With these impressive gains since the start of 2021, Polkadot (DOT) has so far proved that one of the old guns is no match for it. DOT/USD has gained more than 40% in the last week, after flipping XRP for a short time in January.

XRP/USD 1-week candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView

Cardano Aims For Top 5

XRP in the top 5 cryptos by market cap may soon become a thing of the past as Cardano (ADA) looks poised for a sidestep of its own. As of February 9, ADA, XRP, and DOT have market caps of over $21 billion. During its all-time high, XRP’s reached over $125 billion with a price of $3.84, which is 734% higher than its current price.

Despite the lack of progress compared to all-time highs, the coin’s infamous army that consists of social media proponents continues to say that good times are coming soon.

However, in terms of major adoption, XRP has been left far behind as major institutional investors go for bitcoin (BTC) and others continue to embrace Ether (ETH).