Bitcoin’s (BTC) grip on the whole digital asset class rose to a fresh 3.5-year high on Tuesday as alternative cryptocurrencies, or altcoins continued to struggle against the leading crypto with the U.S. election looming over the market.
While BTC was down less than 4% from last week's near-record high of over $73,000, large-cap altcoins like Ethereum's ether (ETH) and Solana's native token (SOL) both dropped nearly 10% from their recent highs. The broad-market CoinDesk 20 declined nearly 6%
Smaller cryptos fared even worse, as the combined market capitalization of altcoins excluding the top 10 largest cryptos, shown as OTHERS on TradingView, plummeted to the lowest relative to bitcoin since early 2021.
The price action propelled bitcoin’s market cap dominance, which measures BTC's share of the total crypto market capitalization, to 60.6%, its strongest level since April 2021.
"Altcoins are now seeing severe drawdowns whenever BTC pulls back," Bitfinex analysts said in a Monday report.
"With BTC absorbing most of the capital flow into crypto assets, altcoins are struggling to keep up, and without a fresh catalyst, their prospects for a comeback in the near-term appear slim," the authors added.
Speculative interest that supported altcoin outperformance during brief periods have vanished, as funding rates on perpetual futures markets normalized, the report noted.
Bitcoin's winning streak against alts may continue for a while, Bitfinex analysts forecasted.
"We believe that the altcoin market may experience further declines relative to bitcoin in the mid-term, primarily due to the apathy of speculators."
Altcoins have lagged through this year against bitcoin, in part because of their regulatory ambiguity, K33 Research noted in a Tuesday report. This means that the election results and the perceived outlook for digital asset regulations will matter more for smaller cryptos than BTC, the report added.
"Bitcoin’s attributes and wide availability position it to thrive in the medium term, regardless of the [U.S. election] outcome," K33 Research analysts Vetle Lunde and David Zimmerman said. "For altcoins, the election is more sensitive,"
"This implies that the medium-term path dependency in alts should be more sensitive to the election than BTC," they added.
The elections, and the uncertainty around the outcome weighing on the market, might as well be the inflection point for altcoins starting to catch up with bitcoin, according to David Duong, head of research at Coinbase.
"I would expect bitcoin dominance to start to kind of plateau here as altcoin names are probably going to take more of a front seat due to the fact that people are going to play them more because of the elections," said Duong in an interview with CoinDesk.
He said the election will be a catalyst for crypto prices but likely won’t have an outsized impact, as favorable macro conditions will provide a tailwind to the whole asset class.
"I would actually say I'm fairly optimistic through probably early to first half of the first quarter of 2025, in part because I think we're in a very strong macro environment and it's been very favorable,” he said. “I do think that we're gonna see us benefit from the elections as well, regardless of who wins."
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