Any chance of XMR to catch up with ETH (in terms of price) this year? ETH have the smart contracts, but XMR have the privacy. It should be on top 10.
Also, check Haveno:
https://github.com/haveno-dex/havenoIt is a exchange based on BISQ, which is being developed for Monero.
I personally think ETH is a badly designed project that makes the mistake of building a network protocol that will have to scale without using layers. This has TWO main problems. First of all, ETH can't scale. Secondly, every harebrained idea anyone has to build some lunatic Rube Goldberg machine risks not only the funds in it, but the stability of the whole network. And there are MULTIPLE proofs of this insecurity in the history of the asset.
Monero on the other hand is a rock solid crypto asset with privacy by default, and one of the only coins that has a mining algorithm where we do not have to compete with hashrate demands of other projects, and a hybrid blocksize that actually combines the strengths of both small and big blocks.
The two projects are not even in the same class of quality.
The coinmarketcap ranking is more about herd psychology, and narrative quality than it is quality of the actual project.
The reality is ETH has one of the strongest narratives of any crypto asset platform, in some ways even better than Bitcoin's as long as you do not grade it on practicality.
Monero's narrative is also quite good. But people do not want to bet on simple/strong and basic when they can bet on complex/shiny and whiz bang.
In the long run, however Monero will see greater and greater use since it actually DOES the ONE THING it is designed to do, and does it EXTREMELY WELL.
ETH, on the other hand keeps inventing new problems to not be able to solve.
In the short run, I think ETH will keep drawing in suckers, so the price is not done going up. And who knows... maybe it will actually survive and continue being "used", or find an ACTUAL useful use case. Also I could be wrong.
But there is NO WAY Monero does not rise. It HAS TO.