A cryptocurrency’s market cap has long been held as the determining factor for ranking it among other competing digital currencies. But, ever since UCASH has managed to make its way to the 21st place, many agree that you can’t rank a cryptocurrency based solely on its market capitalization.

UCASH: Out of the Unknown

Prior to its launch, U.Cash was a company focused on the transfer of capital and asset securitization with its headquarters seated in Canada. In an attempt to set up a global digital conversion network, they created UCASH. The main goal of the project was to facilitate the exchange of fiat currency with a digital currency. U.Cash also plans to create digital representations of real assets like gold, diamonds and other precious metals.

On February 12th, UCASH, who wasn’t even featured in the top 100 cryptocurrencies, suddenly and miraculously made its way in front of a few big names such as Omisego, Statis, and Zcash.

Market Caps Are Not Reliable

The market capitalization of a digital currency is the result of taking the total number of tokens in circulation and multiplying by its current trading price. This product approximates the scale and importance of a cryptocurrency. Most of the time, this works as a good way to deduce a currency’s worth, but, sometimes, it can be a little off. With UCASH, this case-study is perfectly illustrated.

Anyone who knows about the market cap calculations knows that it’s easy to play around with the number. All it takes is a single person to create a “shitcoin” and issue 300 million tokens and list them at a trade value of $1. Instantly, this would make the new coin more valuable than Bitcoin.

It seems that UCASH has taken advantage of the same strategy that also caused Dentacoin (DCN) to see record growth.

An Unprofessional Exchange

Let’s look at the cold hard facts. BTC-Alpha, the Russian exchange where UCASH is traded doesn’t seem like a very serious company. Registered in the UK, the company has over 2000 followers on Twitter and 600 subscribers on Telegram. Their logo even seems to be a knock-off of Maestro’s. Still, despite all this, UCASH is listed on CoinMarketCap and is valid to be officially ranked among cryptocurrencies.

Not long ago, it was Dentacoin (DNC) who used the same strategy to climb their way up the ladder of success.

Currently, UCASH has over 8.6 billion tokens in circulation and Dentacoin has nearly 325 billion. Whether these companies used a simple Pump and Dump strategy or not doesn’t make much of a difference. In a market with very low liquidity such as BTC-Alpha, any type of cryptocurrency will always be extremely volatile.

The number of altcoins listed on CoinMarketCap often make for some rather interesting literature, especially when they are filtered in terms of their profitability. Recently, we have seen unknown currencies such as Unity Ingot experience exponential growth. And this, even though it is only listed on one small exchange.

These two examples, UCASH and Dentacoin, have gone to show that you can’t judge a cryptocurrency based on its market cap. And, even though UCASH had managed to make its way to the 21st position, it has crashed back down and now sits at 128th.