I saw a post before claiming that from the 2017 bull run "only 10 or so coins have surpassed their previous all-time-highs". That didn't sound right, so I analyzed the data.

Okay, so earlier today I saw a post claiming that "only 10 or so coins have surpassed their previous all-time-highs" (that was not the main point, but they linked to an older post of themselves that claimed that).

That sounded unbelievable to me. So I went to Coinmarketcap, scraped the data from the historical snapshot from 17 December 2017 (BTC reached it's peak of the bull run 1 day later) and then checked when every coin in the top 200 reached their ATH.

Okay, I'll admit: it looks worse than I thought it would. I thought that probably half of those coins reached a new ATH since 2021, which is not true. But how many did? Well, 3 coins that were in the top 200 back then already had reached their ATH in 2013, 3 more had reached it in 2016.

The vast majority of coins that were in the top 200 in December 2017, however, indeed reached their ATH between December 2017 and January 2018, as you can clearly see in the figure. 31 coins reached their ATH in 2017, 125 did so in 2018. Okay, but if you did the maths: more than "10 or so" remain.

A total of 38 coins or tokens out of the top 200 on that date reached ATHs after 2018 - 19%, which is not great, but more than the 5% the original post claimed. As you can see in the figure, it's pretty much a mix of very high ranking and lower ranking coins. And that's the worst point in time I could have used - if I picked a point after the crash in January 2018, I am sure many more of the top coins reached a more recent ATH.

What's the point of this post? Well, that yes, many, many coins will never reach their old ATHs again after a bear market. But at the same time, it's not as grim as people pretend, that "almost all coins die in a bear market". Nah. Some die, some come back but not to old heights (I only checked which ones broke their ATHs, many more probably got somewhere close to it), and some - not many, but still quite a few - break through their ATHs. Not everything is as black and white as we like to pretend.