It took Ethereum rival Polkadot just 150 days to become the world’s third biggest blockchain by market cap.
Polkadot is now worth $16 billion after surging more than 100% in the past week.
That ranks the Gavin Woods-led interoperability project ahead of long-standing third-place crypto XRP, which has been around since 2014.
It’s also more than seminal Bitcoin fork Litecoin and peer-reviewed crypto Cardano, respectively launched in 2011 and 2017.
On the other hand, Polkadot only began trading on exchanges in August 2020, a few months after devs deployed one of its mainnets.
No doubt, Polkadot is boosted up the leaderboards by a disastrous New Year’s for XRP, which has halved in price in the past 30 days.
[Read more: SEC vs. Ripple Labs — Is XRP a security?]
But despite Polkadot’s market value multiplying 50 times since August, Ethereum’s is still nine times bigger ($142 billion).
Update 20:52 UTC, Jan 18: This piece has been updated to correctly date Cardano’s launch, which occurred in 2017 and not in 2015 as was originally reported.