Bitcoin may have grabbed the headlines in 2020 with a price gain of 160% for the year to date, but this pales alongside its smaller brother, ethereum, which has clocked up a gain of 344% so far.
Bitcoin’s market cap of US$355-billion is more than five times that of ethereum’s $67-billion, showing the huge gap between the crypto market leader and the number two.
While bitcoin’s impressive rally in 2020 was driven by Covid-related fears of monetary debasement and growing institutional adoption, ether’s rise came from steady development of the type of “smart contracts” on which its value depends.