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.
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.