In the early days of automotive manufacturing, there were 100's of car manufacturers. In the US, it reduced to a oligopoly of the 'big three' [Ford, GM, and Chrysler] for many years.
I fully expect the Crypto world to go through a similar consolidation. So many alt coins are junk. Money is seeking out the Crypto currencies with the best designs and history (start-up story).
For example, Bitcoin has first-mover advantage, but 10 minute block times are SLOW and the Bitcoin community is at a log jam on how to scale.
Litecoin on the other hand, has a community that can reach consensus, has a 2.5 minute transaction time (as-is without Lightning Network), and well documented start up (Charlie Lee started it out in the open and did NOT pre-mine - started on a mail list.)
Dash, for example, has reasonably good tech (I need to learn more about it), but the history is not so good. My understanding the original author accidentally pre-mined 2 million of them due to a bug. Since it will only have a limited supply (18 million I believe, the original author has 1/9 of the total supply - not a good start.)
It is my understanding that Ripple is a corporate coin, and the originating company kept 25% of them. Not a good thing.
Ethereum has some good technology but unfortunately does not have a limited supply (most cryptos have value because you know ahead of time that the supply is limited). Furthermore, Ether had a nasty split and both ETC and ETH now exist. Which is the real one?
Coins with bad history (Dash), inflation (ETH), or old technology (BTC), will eventually be superseeded by the crypto-currency with the best technology AND number of places accepted. Bitcoin is winning locations accepted, however, because Litecoin is essentially the same code base with small modifications (4x faster blocks, 84 million coins instead of 21 million, and better resistance to mining consolidation).
It will be interesting to see if Litecoin really takes off. With a $15 to $16 USD price,