Key Takeaways
When Donald Trump was first inaugurated as US President in January 2017, the crypto market differed greatly from today’s. The big bull markets of 2018 and 2021 were in the future; Bitcoin was worth less than $1,000, and the overall crypto market cap was about $15 billion.
While a look at the biggest cryptocurrencies of January 2017 will show some familiar faces – Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP were the top three cryptos, the same as today – there are some surprising entrants in the list. While Litecoin, Monero, and Ethereum Classic still have their devotees, it might surprise some people to learn that they were the fourth and fifth biggest cryptos.
However, the real differences come a little further down, as coins and tokens, which have since fallen into obscurity, were major players.
A quick note for clarity: Many of these cryptocurrencies have a higher price today than they did eight years ago. However, that has more to do with prices going up over time than with their actual popularity.
Anyway, let’s examine five cryptos that were a hot commodity in January 2017 but are now in the “where are they now?” file.
DASH, the sixth-largest crypto when Donald Trump was first sworn in as President, is still going, although how strong it is is a matter of opinion.
Originally a fork from Litecoin, Dash still promises its users “instant transaction confirmation, double spend protection, optional privacy equal to that of physical cash, a self-governing, self-funding model driven by incentivized full nodes and a clear roadmap for on-chain scaling to up to 400MB blocks using custom-developed open source hardware.”
Although general inflation has seen DASH’s price climb from $13.92 to about $44 and its market cap rise from $97.9 million to $532 million, other coins and tokens have superseded it, and in January 2025, it was the 152nd-largest crypto.
MaidSafeCoin is a crypto linked to the MaidSafe platform. Work started on the MaidSafe network in 2006, and MaidSafeCoin was created by MaidSafe founder David Irvine to allow people to buy something they could swap when SAFE Network’s native token came out.
As of Jan. 17, 2025, the MadeSafe Network’s native token—now called Autonomi—is still unavailable, although a token generation event is supposedly set for the end of January .
Anyway, MaidSafeCoin was worth $0.116 then and is worth about $0.42 now. Its self-reported market cap is $169 million, again up from $52 million. However, there are two important things to recognize.
Firstly, if its self-reported figures are accurate, it would now be just outside the top 350 cryptocurrencies. Secondly, its daily trading volume on Jan. 17, 2025, was just $68.77, a significant drop from just under $200,000 eight years ago.
In January 2017, Augur’s REP was the highest-ranking crypto token. Based on Ethereum, it was designed to power and reward users of the Augur online betting platform.
While crypto gambling has grown since then, Augur—which has not updated its Twitter since late 2021—has fallen back into obscurity.
Both REP’s price and market cap have dropped, from $4.35 to $0.565 and from $47.8 million to $6.21 million, respectively. On Jan. 17, 2025, it was the 1,409th-largest crypto by market cap.
The Steem blockchain was one of the first crypto platforms to allow people to build their own decentralized applications (DApps), with the Steemit social network launching in the summer of 2016.
By early 2017, the STEEM coin was in the top 10 cryptos, worth $0.1621 and enjoying a market cap of $37.4 million.
Although inflation has seen those figures climb to $0.2594 and $124.78 million, there are now far more cryptos on the market.
Not only that but traders and investors seem to have rather bypassed Steam. Despite a reasonably healthy daily trading volume of $41.37 million, it was the 426th-largest crypto as of Jan. 17, 2025.
Perhaps the most depressing story on this list of once-great cryptos is that of Iconomi’s ICN token. The Iconomi platform was designed to support an asset management program. The Ethereum-based crypto was riding high with a, for the time, healthy market cap of $32 million and a trading price of around $0.37.
However, the crypto collapsed after the late 2017 and early 2018 bubble popped. While the Iconomi platform is still going, ICN is very much not, with Iconomi announcing it would replace ICN with company shares in late 2018. ICN holders were forced to swap their tokens for either the tokenized shares (eICN) or for ETH.
The last ICN-related transaction took place at the start of 2020. Iconomi’s status as a dead coin shows just how risky the world of crypto investing can be, and if someone insists that a coin or token will go up and won’t hear anything against it, you should basically just ignore them.
One final point, though. In January 2025, someone created a Solana-based memecoin called Iconomi . The name, if not the token, still lives.