Polkadot Enters Crypto Top 5: Now the Fourth Biggest Coin by Market Cap

• Polkadot has increased almost four times during the past month.
• The coin ranks fourth by the market cap as the XRP drops down.

The top 5 of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies changed tonight. The new member, Polkadot (DOT), took the position for the first time and now is the fourth biggest digital asset by market capitalization.

With its market capitalization of over $16.9 billion, a fairly new digital asset skyrocketed over the past week and is about 80% up in the past few days alone. It surpassed Litecoin (LTC) and Ripple (XRP) along the way and now sits only behind Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Tether (USDT).

What is Polkadot?

Polkadot is the next-generation blockchain protocol and the cryptocurrency. The protocol is created to connect multiple specialized blockchains into a single universal network.

As individual blockchains are unable to communicate with each other, Polkadot tries to offer interoperability that could lead to data exchange. Polkadot focused on building infrastructure for Web 3.0 and thus disrupting the monopolies of the internet and empowering its individual users.

Polkadot protocol allows spreading transactions across multiple parallel blockchains and thus provides scalability, which is still a big issue on the Ethereum network.

The Polkadot was first launched in August 2020 after four years of development. The protocol was first initiated in 2016 by Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum and a Web3 Foundation.

Climbing to crypto Olymp

Polkadot (DOT) has increased over four times since December 2020. It started a strong rally on December 28, climbing to the all-time high of $19.05 on Saturday, January 16, and is more than 500% higher compared to the initial and all-time low price of $2.70 in August 2020.

During this weekend alone, DOT climbed up by over 40%. The coin has dropped nearly 8% since the record high and trades at around $17.55 for the time of writing.

On the flipside

• DOT price spurt started after the Binance crypto exchange reported a $10 million funding for projects built on Polkadot.
• The competition around Polkadot is high as the protocol is playing in the same field with Tezos, Cosmos, Cardano, NEAR, or Solana blockchains.

The fast growth of DOT token made the long-lived top currency XRP to drop down to the fifth position. The market cap of Polkadot is now over $16.9 billion, meanwhile, XRP dropped to $12.9 billion as of today’s data of CoinGecko.

The drop of the XRP market cap comes amidst its delistings from multiple crypto trading platforms. The move was made after the United States SEC sued Ripple Labs for selling XRP coins as security. Following the lawsuit, the world’s largest digital currency asset manager Grayscale announced the shut down of its XRP Trust last week.