The PoW Dominance Purge — Only 6 Crypto Assets out of the Top 50 Market Caps Use Proof-of-Work

At the time of writing, only one coin in the top ten crypto assets by market capitalization is a proof-of-work (PoW) token and out of the top 20, there are only three tokens that leverage a PoW consensus mechanism. Moreover, out of 50 of the largest crypto coins by valuation, only six use PoW and out of all of them, there’s roughly 230 exahash per second (EH/s) of hashpower combined.

With Ethereum changing from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS), only 12% of the top 50 coins now leverage PoW. Six crypto asset networks use PoW consensus mechanisms like SHA256 or Scrypt to verify transactions and mint new coins. Bitcoin.com News recently reported on how the top ten would only see one PoW asset remain and at the time of writing, that’s bitcoin (BTC). Dogecoin (DOGE) was a top ten contender just recently, but the meme token’s market cap has been pushed down to the 11th position.

That leaves ethereum classic (ETC) as the third PoW coin in the top 20 standings today. Doge has roughly 429 terahash per second (TH/s) of hashrate or 0.00042994 EH/s. ETC has even less with 0.00022551 EH/s, which equates to 225 TH/s of hashpower. Following ETC is litecoin (LTC), which is the fourth-ranked PoW coin in the top 50. Roughly 0.000469 EH/s or 469 TH/s is dedicated to the Litecoin chain today. Behind LTC is monero (XMR) with 2.71 gigahash per second (GH/s) of hashrate. The last and final PoW coin out of the top 50 crypto assets by market cap is bitcoin cash (BCH).

Bitcoin Cash currently has 1.28 EH/s of hashpower dedicated to the BCH blockchain. Bitcoin (BTC) has 228 EH/s, and between all six PoW networks, there’s close to 230 EH/s of hashpower securing all six chains. While BTC’s market valuation commands 37.7% of the entire crypto economy’s net value, out of every PoW coin in existence, BTC equates to 94% of the PoW coin economy’s USD value.

Eight years ago, PoW crypto assets dominated the pack of top valuations, and now there are only six PoW crypto assets in the top 50. It will be interesting to see what the trend looks like in another eight years, and whether or not PoW dominance continues to slide.

What do you think about the fact that only six coins out of the top 50 largest crypto capitalizations are proof-of-work coins? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.