We’re used to hearing about the big household names in the cryptocurrency world – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and a few others. But some analysts suggest that smaller “altcoins” may soon be having their heyday.
As recently as last night, tech writers were at work talking about a recent drop in Bitcoin dominance, a marker showing diversity in crypto by illuminating how big of a market share Bitcoin currently enjoys.
“(Bitcoin dominance) had reached an all-time low of 37% in January 2018,” wrote Aditya Worah at Cryptoground March 24. “However, it since rose to 55% – but is now down to 50% again. This reduction in Bitcoin dominance basically means that people have begun to trust other cryptocurrencies again – and are starting to experiment with more trading options. Usually, when markets go through a rough patch, Bitcoin dominance rises as people tend to trust Bitcoin more than other cryptocurrencies.”
Writing within the last 24 hours, Dalmas Ngetich at NewsBTC agrees that Bitcoin dominance figures show a bigger potential for all coins to take on more power in the market.
“At the time of writing and drawing data from CoinGecko, Bitcoin enjoys a dominance of 50 percent with a market cap of roughly $69,994 million,” Ngetich writes. “If anything, this points to uncertainty. All the same, we expect prices to stabilize in coming few days.”
Ngetich also provides some technical BTC analysis, looking at the candlestick arrangement of Bitcoin’s price activity to consider whether the Bulls or the Bears are going to win out
“As we can see,” Ngetich writes, “we have a three-day bear reversal, but bulls are firm as prices are trading above $4,000 and Mar 16-21 lows. That’s roughly the 31.8 percent Fibonacci retracement level of Feb 24 high low and a region of interest as laid out in our last (analysis) …If prices sink below $4,000, aggressive traders should unwind their longs and wait for pullbacks above Mar 16 highs at around $4,200. At the same time, risk-averse, conservative traders should wait for full breaks above $4,500 as prices break free from the $1,300 of the last four months.”
A Bitcoin selloff, Ngetich suggests, could lead to more interest in all coins and the greater use of some new indices that will look at a more broadly weighted basket
“With better tools to gauge volatility and influence of BTC, predicting price moves and measuring sentiment has been made easy with news of CoinMarketCap collaboration with Solactive,” Ngetich adds. “The two plan to launch two crypto indices. One, CMC Crypto 200 Index (CMC200), will collect price movement data of the top 200 crypto assets weighed by market capitalization including Bitcoin. The other–CMC Crypto 200 ex BTC Index (CMC200EX) — won’t and helps in tracking the general performance of crypto assets without the influence of Bitcoin. Interested firms can draw data from Global Index Data Service (GIDS) of NASDAQ, Börse Stuggart, Refinitiv of Reuters and the Bloomberg Terminal.”
Will these new tools and a lower BTC dominance marker lead more investors to “go altcoin?” If you are looking at crypto, look at the whole spectrum – do your research – and then make your picks.