5 years ago Bitcoin saw a Cambrian explosion of forks. These wanted to benefit from the hype of the 2017 bull market and present an alternative to the king of blockchains. Time to take a closer look at what became of them.

Of the 44 Bitcoin forks that I am aware of, only 14 are now being tracked by Coinmarketcap. Among those 14, the market cap of 5 of them is not available. And that already says a lot about the general health of the forks.

But let’s look at them in detail. The chart below shows the ROIs of the 14 remaining forks the over the last 5 years.

Bitcoin Cash was the only Bitcoin fork that was able to perform positively, at least temporarily. The rest crashed shortly after their creation and have never recovered in price since.

The bear market of 2018 certainly played a decisive role here. But what is also striking is that their performance in the 2021 bull market was not noticeably better.

The situation looks correspondingly dreary when we look at the market cap. According to Coinmarketcap, the complete data is only available for a part of the forks. And of these, only Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold have significant values. However, against Bitcoin’s current market cap (over four hundred forty-three billion), they appear like dwarfs.

However, this does not mean that as a crypto investor you cannot make a profit with the forks.

The above chart shows the percentage price increase of each coin at their respective ATH compared to the value they had at launch.

Even more profit could be made with some Bitcoin forks if you bought them at their all-time low and held them until now. However, most of the forked coins are traded in very small exchanges with low volume.

The crux of the matter, of course, is that it takes fantastic timing to actually rake in those wins.

And that pretty much says it all on the subject.

Aside from Bitcoin Cash, none of the Bitcoin forks have made a lasting impression.

Bitcoin does not care. The king remains the king.