Bitcoin dominance stumble at 50% as ETH, altcoins gains traction

Bitcoin (BTC) dominance in the crypto market briefly fell below 50% last week for the first time since January 2018, showing strong signs that more speculative bets on altcoins are on the rise.

Bitcoin dominance stumble at 50% as ETH, altcoins gains traction

The Bitcoin dominance index, which measures BTC’s market capitalization relative to the broader cryptocurrency market, reached a low of 49.35% on Thursday, which was 70.68% at the beginning of 2021, according to CoinMarketCap.

Meanwhile Ethereum accounted for nearly 15% of the overall market at its peak on Thursday. Ether dominance is up nearly 4 percentage points since the starting of the year.

ETH has outperformed BTC over the past seven days, charting an impressive 9.5% return. Currently, the second-largest cryptocurrency is down 10% from its previous all-time high whereas Bitcoin has corrected over 20%.

The native of the largest exchange Binane, BNB has also seen its share of the overall market grow remarkably this year, from 0.71% at the starting of the year to 4.17% on April 25. BNB is being fundamentally supported by different factors, including growing adoption of the Binance platform and a coordinated burn of $600 million worth of tokens in the first quarter.

Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies outside the top ten have seen their share of the overall market inflate from less than 11% to over 18% since the starting of the year.

Commenting on the market shuffle, the Chief Strategy Officer of crypto investment manager CoinShares, Meltem Demirors said she is “seeing a lot of folks chasing returns by moving further out on the risk spectrum.” Meltem also observed that about 94 cryptocurrencies now have a market capitalization of $1 billion or more. At the time of writing, that figure had fallen to 87, according to the data available CoinMarketCap.

The current market cap for altcoins is $937 billion.