Polkadot is the third most valuable blockchain after just 150 days
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.