Steem (rank 78) have just overcame Bitshares and temporarily Bytecoin (now ranks 74) in the CMC ranking, two long time competitors that I was watching for last couple of month. Both Bitshares and Bytecoin have limited developments compared to steem but enjoyed higher ranks for months.
The main reasons for staying above Steem is that they fell slowly in this bear market due to their low inflation rate.
Bytecoin (BCN) is a cryptonight based privacy coin along with Monero. It had advantage over Monero (XMR) having very low transaction fees in less than a penny while Monero had transaction fee over $1. With recent upgrades, XMR has reduced transaction fee to 2 cents while killed main advantage of BCN.
Though it is traded in few exchanges and low volumes, it has strong community and HODLers as proved by its marketcap. Its most volumes come from minor exchanges such as HitBTC and Poloniex. Interestingly, it has only $19K volume in the last 24 houts.
Earlier BCN took controversial decision to adopt ASIC while most CryptoNight coins switched to modified CryptoNight algorithms such as V7 or heavy to be ASIC resistant. Argument for accepting ASIC or not changing algorithm form the Bytecoin developers is that forks may de-anonymize its users and also ASIC provides more hashpower.
It had big success one year back when it was enlisted in Binance and went through a pump and dump phase. Later it was delisted from Binance.
Moreover, BCN has shady launch too. BCN developers claimed to launch the first CryptoNight coin back in July 2012. However, Monero developers claims that CryptoNight algorithm never existed before 2013.
BCN is claimed to be ninja mined by early developers or miners. Almost 82% of the BCNs are mined already (e.g. 154 billions mined out of 184 billions total) over a period of 2 years since July, 2012. Therefore, it is said that more than 80% of are held by of people unknown, and untrustworthy developers. However, interestingly, it was never been dumped in huge quantity and thus kept it high marketcap.
However, considering its low volume, low profile exchange listing, shady beginning, skewed distribution and almost unprofitable mining incentive, it is still top 75 coin cryptocurrency.
The staying power of Bytecoin shows that Steem's with die-hard followers is not going anywhere. The only issue is that due to its high inflation for reward-pool and compensation to witnesses, it needs higher growth (i.e. more onboarding and investors).
Disclaimer: This opinion is not a financial advice, it my personal perspective and opinion. Please seek professionals for financial decisions. This opinion is only for educational purpose.
Image sources: Most images are open sourced (e.g. Pixabay, Wikimedia etc.) with Creative common license. Some images are used with due courtesy to respected owners.
Thanks for reading.
@dtrade
Cryptominer , occasional trader and tech blogger since 2013