What is Bitcoin dominance?

Bitcoin dominance currently sits at 61%. On January 13, 2018, Bitcoin dominance hit an all time low of 35%

What is bitcoin dominance?

Bitcoin dominance is bitcoin’s marketcap dividend by the marketcaps of all cryptocurrencies combined. It shows how much value bitcoin has versus the all cryptos combined. This is important because it shows the relative strength of altcoins over time. For most of bitcoin’s lifetime (pre-2017), dominance sat at over 98%. Bitcoin was the entire market. But since the first altcoin boom in 2017, it has never come close to that peak again.

Why did it happen?

There are a few reasons why bitcoin value relative to the rest of the crypto market fell so dramatically in 2017. One major reason was the bitcoin cash fork that occurred in July 2017. Bitcoin cash gained momentum throughout late as the “true” bitcoin because of miner support while bitcoin was suffering from network congestion and high fees. There were calls that “the flippening” was going to occur in early 2018 and there would be a mass exodus of bitcoin supporters moving to bitcoin cash. This never ended up happening and bitcoin cash rapidly fell off after this point.

Another reason was that other established altcoins at the time like eth, litecoin, dash and monero had huge rallies and hit their all time highs versus bitcoin. While they are similar prices today against the USD, they are still well off their all time highs vs. bitcoin.

The third reason was the first ICO boom. Hundreds of new ICOs hit the market from late 2017 and early 2018. Today we are seeing a similar boom of new ICOs and shitcoins hitting the market.

What does this mean?

Bitcoin dominance sitting at 65% means that alt season could run for quite a bit longer. If we see another nosedive of bitcoin dominance. Bitcoin dominance going back below 50% would mean that altcoin values would have gained hundreds of billions in value. While the altcoin market has absolutely surged over 2021, its still far from its all time highs in early 2018. I think the altcoin market will continue to boom.

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