Ethereum Almost Dethroned Bitcoin in 2017 — Here’s Why It Never Happened Again
Flashback to crypto’s wild west days: Ethereum came within striking distance of flipping Bitcoin in 2017—then the dream evaporated. What went wrong?
The near-miss that shook crypto
Back when ICO mania peaked, ETH’s market cap hit 80% of BTC’s. Smart contracts were the new shiny toy, and Wall Street interns were mortgaging their dorm rooms to get in early. Then reality bit harder than a Bitcoin maximalist at a DeFi conference.
The scalability wall
Gas fees skyrocketed, transactions crawled, and ‘ETH killer’ became a full-time job title for VC-funded founders. Meanwhile, Bitcoin kept doing what it does best—being digital gold while crypto tourists learned the hard way that ‘ultrasound money’ doesn’t mean free healthcare.
2025’s brutal truth: Eight years later, BTC’s market cap is still triple ETH’s. Maybe the real ‘flippening’ was the friends we lost to leverage trading along the way.
But it WOULD never be: BTC and ETH both fell by 60% over the next month, preceding a 10x pump through the end of the bull market for BTC — but only a 9x for ETH. Ether never made the ground back.
Still, ether came much closer than the other two primary hopefuls ever did. Litecoin made it to 10% of bitcoin’s market cap in late November 2013, $11.8 million to $1.18 billion, while XRP reached more than half in May 2017, about a month before ether’s attempt.
These days, ETH sits at around 13% of bitcoin’s market value, with bitcoin dominance currently at almost two-thirds — its highest point since January 2021.
If there’s a status quo in crypto, it’s bitcoin.
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