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.
This banger from the New York Time was published days earlier.
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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