Major altcoins have outperformed Bitcoin today, this week, and this month, even as BTC dominance and media mentions of ‘altcoins’ plunge.
Be careful of what you read.
That’s the takeaway from The Tie’s latest research showing mentions of ‘altcoins’ and ‘altseason’ have dropped to historic lows this month.
At the same time Bitcoin dominance has fallen from 71% to 66.7%.
Those two points do not add up.
Altcoins outperform Bitcoin
After a long decline this week, Bitcoin bounced back, increasing 4.43% in the past 24 hours.
But every other coin in the top 10 (apart from Bitcoin SV) did even better, led by EOS (9%), Bitcoin Cash (7%) and XRP (8.15%).
It was the same story over the past week, with Bitcoin down 0.82% and every other altcoin in the top ten (apart from SV) green in that time period.
Even across the month, six of the top ten coins performed better than Bitcoin’s 20.62% loss.
After surging between June and September to an all-time high, mentions of altcoins and altseason in crypto headlines have quickly crashed to an all-time low. pic.twitter.com/UQNMytzsjd
— The Tie (@TheTieIO) October 6, 2019
Media reports on ‘altcoins’ plunge
The Tie looked at the headlines for more than 100,000 news stories from publications including the New York Times, CoinDesk, Financial Times etc.
After steadily growing to an all time high between June and September, mentions fell off a cliff in the past few weeks.
That could have been thanks to the narrative being pushed by noisy Bitcoin maximalists, many of whom – like Blockstream CEO Adam Back – were predicting BTC dominance would soon ‘revert to the mean’ and hit 90%.
That hasn’t happened.
When Bitcoin dominance peaked above 70% in early September, Micky pointed out the last time it had done so in March 2017, it had soon declined before the biggest altseason in history kicked off.
We’re not in the business of making predictions (except to predict that 95% of predictions will turn out to be wrong).
But plenty of other people are. Cryptocurrency trader Josh McGruff told his 17,000 Twitter followers that he believes BTC dominance could continue to drop as volume flows into altcoins.
“Would be exciting to see that dominance start to drop as folks get FOMO about the altcoin markets.”
$BTC dominance is at 66% but starting to see the major alts break into their 1D clouds and breaking their downtrend OBVs. Volume is coming into them.
Would be exciting to see that dominance start to drop as folks get FOMO about the altcoin markets.$XRP $ADA $EOS $TRX pic.twitter.com/pZzmjGzCys
— // Josh McGruff (@JoshMcGruff) October 7, 2019
Analyst Crypto Welson also predicted BTC dominance would decline “significantly as alts gain a lot of dominance over the next year. Many alts including $XRP and $ETH look very bullish in their BTC pairings!”
Crypto Bitlord put it simply: “Even a noob can see it breaking down. What that means, simply, is altcoins are about to pump.”
One way experienced #cryptotraders predict the possibility of an #altcoin season is by looking at the #BitcoinDominanceIndex, which strongly suggests an incoming #altseason. This tells us that #altcoins are rising in value against bitcoin. https://t.co/g8MVOMf02S pic.twitter.com/rVFMRT9m1S
— MoonX (@MoonX555) October 7, 2019
But don’t bet the house on the top 10 altcoins just yet.
As podcaster and altseason skeptic Nathaniel Whittemore points, even if altseason is coming, there’s no guarantee it’ll resemble the last one.
“Even if you think that there will be another alt season, why would you think it would be an old vintage of [often besmirched] post-ICOs, versus some new class of projects with a clean slate to capture whatever the narrative is at the moment?” he asked.