XRP Held Second Place Over Ether as 2018 Neared Its Close

CoinMarketCap’s December 30, 2018 historical snapshot ranked XRP as the second-largest cryptocurrency by circulating market capitalization, behind bitcoin and immediately ahead of ether. The dataset valued circulating XRP at $15,076,740,856.33 and ether at $14,560,066,114.19.

The difference was $516,674,742.14, a Coinburn calculation obtained by subtracting ether’s reported capitalization from XRP’s. XRP’s lead was therefore approximately 3.55% of ether’s capitalization. The margin was meaningful enough to preserve the ranking but narrow enough that ordinary price movements could reverse it.

XRP had traded at $0.3696 in the snapshot, based on a reported circulating supply of 40,794,121,066 XRP. Ether was listed at $139.86 with 104,104,984 ETH in circulation. Bitcoin remained far ahead of both, with a reported capitalization of $67.48 billion and a price of $3,865.95.

A renewed contest for second place

The December 30 order was not the product of a single event-day announcement. XRP had overtaken ether on November 15, according to contemporaneous CoinDesk reporting, and by November 26 had completed its longest uninterrupted stretch in second place since 2016. The December 30 snapshot verifies that the position survived into the final weekend of 2018.

The ranking also reflected different losses within a market-wide contraction. CoinMarketCap’s January 1, 2018 snapshot had placed XRP at $2.3910 and ether at $772.64. Comparing those observations with December 30 produces declines of approximately 84.54% for XRP and 81.90% for ether. These are snapshot-to-snapshot calculations covering January 1 through December 30, not audited investment returns or universal exchange closes.

Despite XRP’s larger calculated price decline, it began the comparison period in second place and its reported circulating supply increased from 38.74 billion to 40.79 billion units. Ether’s reported supply rose from 96.71 million to 104.10 million. Because market capitalization multiplies an asset’s marginal quoted price by its classified circulating supply, both price and supply affected the relative ranking.

Supply made the comparison complicated

Ripple’s October 25 XRP markets report supplied important context for the XRP figure. The company said 55 billion XRP had been placed in cryptographically secured escrow in late 2017. During the third quarter of 2018, three billion XRP were released from escrow, 2.6 billion were returned to new escrow contracts and 400 million were retained for ecosystem-related uses. Ripple also reported selling $163.33 million of XRP during that quarter.

Those disclosures did not invalidate the circulating-supply figure, but they showed why XRP’s capitalization could not be interpreted as cash invested in the asset or as a valuation of Ripple. XRP was the digital asset being ranked; Ripple was a company holding and selling a substantial quantity of it. Ether followed a different issuance model and had no directly comparable corporate escrow arrangement.

What the ranking established

The December 30 evidence establishes a market-data result, not technological superiority. Ethereum remained a programmable blockchain supporting smart contracts and decentralized applications. Contemporaneous reporting also noted that its developers were preparing the Constantinople network upgrade for 2019. XRP’s higher capitalization did not measure developer activity, transaction utility, decentralization, liquidity quality or institutional adoption.

CoinMarketCap reported rolling 24-hour volumes of approximately $487.0 million for XRP and $2.66 billion for ether. Those figures suggest substantially more displayed turnover in ether under the provider’s methodology, but 2018 cryptocurrency volume was fragmented across venues and vulnerable to inconsistent reporting. The defensible event-day conclusion is narrower: on CoinMarketCap’s December 30 snapshot, XRP retained second place by circulating market capitalization, while the small gap and methodological limitations prevented that ranking from settling the broader contest between the two networks.