What does the $100 billion dollar CryptoCurrency market cap mean??

Market cap? What is that? Everyone interested in blockchain (funny that my spellchecker still thinks that's wrong) has likely been to coinmarketcap.com. Featuring stats on current price, volume, circulating supply, symbol, and as the domain suggests - market caps. Market cap (short for capitalization) is the total value of the company calculated by multiplying the number of coins circulating by the current price. Coinmarketcap orders the coins by their respective market caps and Bitcoin has always been the leader. Though recently Ethereum almost surpassed Bitcoin as the highest valued cryptocurrency (also needs to be added to spell checker). At the top of the site there is a calculation of the sum of the market caps of all of the 788 currencies listed. This sum represents how much money there is total in the cryptocurrency market. The total market cap of cryptocurrencies is valued at $100 billion USD now in June of 2017. That means some people are interested in this business. Only 61 of the 196 countries listed by the International Monetary Fund have a gross domestic product (GDP) greater than $100 billion. Yes, a lot of people are interested in the cryptocurrency market.

Let's take a look at Bitcoin's share of the total coin market with this chart:

Looking at this chart you can see that it's quite likely the term bitcoin dominance will be a thing of the past soon. The percentage of bitcoin contributing to the total market cap of cryptocurrencies has gone down substantially since the start of this year. Don't mistake this for the amount of money in Bitcoin itself, which has certainly increased this year, up from a market cap of $14 billion to $40 billion. What we are looking at with this chart is the amount of investment in other coins, and it has surged considerably more proportionally.

Currently Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple are giants in the market and have a combined market cap of $76 billion. All three qualifying as large cap companies, those having a value over $10 billion (Investopedia). That means that the other 785 cryptos in the total market cap only account for ~$20 billion. Half of that $20 billion dollars resides in the top ten cryptos that list under the three giants.

$100 billion total. How much is that? That's actually close to the IPO (initial public offering) of Facebook stock when it came out with a market cap of $104 billion in 2012. Today valued at $432 billion. And the market cap of Apple Inc in 2009 of $102 billion. Apple is now valued at $747 billion and the largest valued company in The U.S.

Apple Historical Market Cap:

How does Steem fit into the equation? Currently at 14th with a market cap of $400 million. Steem qualifies as a small cap company, one valued between $300 million and $2 billion (Investopedia). When did $400 million become considered small? It's all relative... $400 million was recently the value of the White House as estimated by Zillow. It's also Johnny Depp's estimated net worth in 2016. American culture aside, $400 million is a good size venture in my book. And with lots of room to grow.

The biggest exchange in the world is The New York Stock Exchage with a current market cap of $21 trillion dollars. The average trading volume on the NYSE is $169 billion.

I find it all interesting, and I hope you do too. Looking at market caps on coinmarketcap.com is a great way to throw investment darts into a sea of tokens with hopes of striking it rich. But I do wish their charts, and mobile site were a little better.