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Only one coin has ever come near flipping bitcoin, round this time, eight years in the past.
In June 2017, bitcoin was within the ultimate phases of warming up for a historic push to just about $20,000 by Christmas.
Altcoin costs had been wacky. Bitcoin could be flat one week, whereas cash like BitShares would bounce massively, by 250%. Others, like Stratis and DigiByte, had been down as much as 50% in the identical interval.
Ethereum, in the meantime, was poised for an explosion in token initiatives. One examine calculated that $7 billion flowed into ICOs all through 2017, virtually all of it going to Ethereum-based initiatives. That was supposedly 4x greater than the fairness investments into crypto corporations throughout the identical interval.
The worth of ETH rose as buyers piled into coin choices by way of Ethereum’s native token. And on June 12, the market cap of ETH got here inside 17% of surpassing bitcoin’s: $36.8 billion to $44.3 billion.
Had bitcoin stayed flat, ETH would’ve solely wanted to leap from $400 to $470 to slip into the No. 1 spot.
This banger from the New York Time was revealed days earlier.
However it could by no means be: BTC and ETH each fell by 60% over the subsequent month, previous a 10x pump by way of the tip of the bull marketplace for BTC — however solely a 9x for ETH. Ether by no means made the bottom again.
By late June 2017, it was turning into clear the Flippening was now not practical.
