Data from: Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market

The cryptocurrency market surpassed the barrier of $100 billion market
capitalization in June 2017, after months of steady growth. Despite its
increasing relevance in the financial world, a comprehensive analysis of
the whole system is still lacking, as most studies have focused
exclusively on the behaviour of one (Bitcoin) or few cryptocurrencies.
Here, we consider the history of the entire market and analyse the
behaviour of 1469 cryptocurrencies introduced between April 2013 and May
2017. We reveal that, while new cryptocurrencies appear and disappear
continuously and their market capitalization is increasing
(super-)exponentially, several statistical properties of the market have
been stable for years. These include the number of active
cryptocurrencies, market share distribution and the turnover of
cryptocurrencies. Adopting an ecological perspective, we show that the
so-called neutral model of evolution is able to reproduce a number of key
empirical observations, despite its simplicity and the assumption of no
selective advantage of one cryptocurrency over another. Our results shed
light on the properties of the cryptocurrency market and establish a first
formal link between ecological modelling and the study of this growing
system. We anticipate they will spark further research in this direction.