These two very different blockchains now have the two largest market caps of any cryptocurrencies, with BTC at $128,469,761,721 USD at time of writing, and ETH at $58,534,876,766 USD. But beyond their mutual success, how have these two cryptocurrencies performed relative to each other over the years?
Here’s how Ethereum (available on Coinbase) stacked up to Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) back then, on August 7, 2015:

Here’s how that compares to Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) vs Ethereum (available on Coinbase) now (as at May 24, 2018):

For some time Ethereum (available on Coinbase) has been the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap. But, contrary to what groups such as those advocating “The Flippening” would have you believe, this growth isn’t the story of one cryptocurrency fighting to eclipse another: rather, it’s the story of two very different kinds of projects succeeding, driving the growth of a whole new sector.
Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) and Ethereum (available on Coinbase) have radically different use cases
How would you compare Apple to Amazon? Sure, they’re both publicly traded technology companies, but they’re also businesses with totally different goals, business models, and products.
That’s what it’s like to compare Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) and Ethereum (available on Coinbase): even though they’re both leading blockchain networks, they have totally different goals, use cases, and design philosophies.
You can see this in the structure of each network. Coding for Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) is like writing assembly code, whereas coding for Ethereum (available on Coinbase) is much more flexible and capacious. This is no accident:

Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) is intended to be digital money and a store of value, but this makes its programmability limited: you don’t want someone programming and stealing your money at the same time.

Ethereum (available on Coinbase) is intended as a development platform and therefore is easy to program — but that makes it susceptible to vulnerabilities like the parity bug and the DAO hack.

Fundamentally, Ethereum (available on Coinbase) is a platform,  “a blockchain with a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create ‘contracts’ that can be used to encode arbitrary state transition functions,”whereas Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) is more of a currency. Therefore, Ethereum (available on Coinbase) isn’t competitive with Bitcoin (available on Coinbase): unlike Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) Cash, which intends to supplant Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) as a form of digital cash, BTC and ETH can and have grown without cannibalizing each other.
The smart contracts that operate on Ethereum (available on Coinbase)’s virtual machine are empowering developers to build everything from collectable, non-fungible cartoon cats to decentralized securities exchanges. This platform-oriented design has led increasingly more developers to rally around Ethereum (available on Coinbase), which has been reflected in the growth of the network’s annual developer conference, Devcon: in three years, it’s grown from 50 attendees to over 2,000.
People have recognized the value of Ethereum (available on Coinbase) as a platform, which is most obvious in the amount of money that’s been put into ICOs by startups issuing tokens built on the Ethereum (available on Coinbase) network. In 2017, over $5.6 billion was invested in ICOs; that entire amount was surpassed by the first three months of ICO investment in 2018, which totaled $6.3 billion.
The heavy focus on ICOs in the press might make you think that all the developers are flocking to Ethereum (available on Coinbase) from Bitcoin (available on Coinbase), but that’s not the case. In fact, if you take a look at Github, you’ll see that ‘Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)’ is mentioned in almost 60% more repos than ‘Ethereum (available on Coinbase)’ is.
How can we make sense of the discrepancy between the many public development projects on Ethereum (available on Coinbase) and the broader development community behind Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)? This seems to be a case of breadth vs. depth: whereas Ethereum (available on Coinbase) has people working on a huge diversity of projects (ICOs, layer 2 protocols, etc), Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) has many people working on a single thing (Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)). The difference in the cryptocurrencies’ communities, in other words, reflects the difference in their use cases.
Ethereum (available on Coinbase) has grown faster than Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)
A product that invents a new market will have to work hard to get traction. The products that follow it in that market will have a correspondingly easier time getting traction. Only by carving out their own niches will these different products survive in the long run. You can see this all over the place:

Uber and Lyft

Netflix and Hulu

Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) and Ethereum (available on Coinbase)

Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) didn’t surpass a $55 billion market cap until August 8th 2017 — over 7 years into its existence. Ethereum (available on Coinbase) crossed that market cap for the first time on December 13th of last year, just about 2-and-a-half years into its existence.
Ethereum (available on Coinbase) also captured a fair amount of overall market dominance from Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) fairly quickly, despite the fact that it was relatively late to the cryptocurrency space and Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) had the advantage of being the first cryptocurrency.
It took Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) until December 9, 2015 — over 5 years — to reach a daily transaction volume of 200,000 transactions, whereas Ethereum (available on Coinbase) reached this benchmark on June 6th of last year — about 2 years into its existence. That was the point at which Ethereum (available on Coinbase)’s daily transaction volume surpassed Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)’s.
 

Comparison of daily transaction volume between Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) and Ethereum (available on Coinbase). Source: bitinfocharts.com.
As with products in other sectors, the first mover (Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)) and the follow-up (Ethereum (available on Coinbase)) have been able to both survive because they are complementary, rather than competitive. People can and do endorse both Ethereum (available on Coinbase) as a platform and Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) as a store of value. And, all things considered, it’s probably better that Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) came first: the notion of “digital gold” is easier to grasp than a “decentralized supercomputer,” meaning that BTC probably primed people to understand ETH’s value proposition more readily.
Scaling is a more pressing issue for Ethereum (available on Coinbase) than for Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)
Both Ethereum (available on Coinbase) and Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) need to handle many more transactions than they can at present — but that need is more urgent for one of them than it is for the other.
To get a rough-and-ready handle on orders of magnitude, think about the transaction goals of Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) and Ethereum (available on Coinbase) as similar to those of VISA and Facebook, respectively.
Assuming that Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) wants to have the transactional capacity of VISA and Ethereum (available on Coinbase) wants to be able to support dapps as far-reaching as Facebook, Ethereum (available on Coinbase) has to be able to handle transactions that are an order of magnitude greater than Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)’s. This is why Ethereum (available on Coinbase) is pursuing a slew of scaling solutions (Casper, Raiden, Plasma, Sharding) whereas Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) is only really focused on the Lightning Network.
Over time, it’s virtually inevitable that both Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) and Ethereum (available on Coinbase) will scale significantly. But right now, it’s more important for a decentralized supercomputer to handle tons of transactions than it is for digital gold or digital cash.
The future of Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) and Ethereum (available on Coinbase): a complementary ecosystem
The success of Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) and the success of Ethereum (available on Coinbase) are not mutually exclusive. In fact, having robust developer communities behind both cryptocurrencies does a lot to improve the chances of crypto succeeding as an entire sector. Ethereum (available on Coinbase) may be chasing Bitcoin (available on Coinbase) in terms of market cap, but both BTC and ETH are still very much in the early days of growing and maturing. Time will tell what lies ahead for their communities.
About the author
Akbar Thobhani is the CEO of SFOX — a broker-dealer for institutional cryptocurrency trading. He started his career as a software engineer at JPL / NASA, and began mining Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)s while attending MIT. Akbar was head of growth and business development at AirBNB.  Specializing in trading and payments platforms, he has developed solutions for ITG, Boku, and Stamps.com. Article originally published here.