In addition to Bitcoin (BTC +0.65%), there are over 4,000 other cryptocurrencies in the market. In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on March 18, Motley Fool board member Randi Zuckerberg and CoinShares chief strategy officer Meltem Demirors discuss the most important ones for investors to put on their radar.
Randi Zuckerberg: I'm curious, is you're thinking right now only about Bitcoin, are there other cryptocurrencies that you're passionate about or excited about right now?
Meltem Demirors: Yeah, absolutely. Bitcoin's not the only game in town, but it is important to note, if we look at cryptocurrencies, by market cap, Bitcoin is still 70% of the overall cryptocurrency market, and if you go to any price site that lists out the price of different cryptocurrencies, they will typically track something called the Bitcoin dominance index, which is the percent of Bitcoin of the market cap is comprised of, and historically, it's always hovered around 60% to 70%. I typically talk about Bitcoin the most because it's the asset that I think people are most familiar with, but we're also really actively involved in the Ethereum (ETH 0.02%) ecosystem. We have over $1.5 billion of assets under management in our Ethereum ETPs. We've seen a large number of institutional inflows over the last quarter into Ethereum-related products and funds, so we're definitely very excited about everything that's happening around Ethereum, particularly with the advent of decentralized finance and how much that's grown over the last 12 months.
Other assets that I'm personally really excited about are, there a lot of new protocols that are launching that are focused on something called Web3. This idea of rearchitecting web services around protocols instead of around corporations. For example, one project I'm an investor in and excited about is something called Radical, which is building a decentralized GitHub and a number of crypto projects are already using it to push their code to this decentralized code repository.
Another one that's really popular and widely used is a project called Filecoin (FIL +8.63%), which basically is building a new way of storing data using this distributed model as opposed to relying on AWS. I think there are a lot of these interesting applications that are emerging. My entire portfolio that I've personally invested in is on my website on meltondemirors.com. But I think generally, with the things I'm most excited about are Bitcoin and Ethereum, and then looking more broadly at some of the changes that are going to come to the financial services in compute and connectivity as a result of these new tools that we have in our toolkit. It is taking a long time. This is definitely a long evolutionary arc, so we'd definitely say to everyone on this call, not investment advice, definitely proceed with caution and do your research. Messari.io is a great website that has a lot of in-depth data points and research on each of these different crypto assets, and so highly recommend finding a source of information you like and getting smarter on it. But there are a lot of great ways in the U.S. now that you can trade cryptocurrencies, and so highly encourage people to start learning and start getting active, and obviously, crypto Twitter (TWTR +0.00%) is also very active, [laughs] very vocal, and a great way to stay on top of what's going on in this space.
