So far this year, only 6 of the top 50 tokens by market capitalization have outperformed Bitcoin, with Bitcoin’s dominance reaching a three-year high over the weekend.
According to TradingView, Dogecoin is the best-performing altcoin in the top 50, with a year-to-date gain of just over 77%, climbing from $0.09 on January 1 to $0.15 at launch.
Other outperformers include memecoin Shiba Inu, Bitcoin smart contract network Stacks, Binance’s BNB, Ethereum layer 2 network Mantle (MNT), and GPU-shared blockchain network Render (RNDR).
Bitcoin is up 54% year-to-date.
Many attribute the rise in bitcoin prices to the continued inflow of institutional funds into 10 U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) approved in January of this year, which have cumulatively generated more than $12 billion in net inflows, according to Farside Investors.
Notably, Bitcoin rebounded sharply as the market sell-off triggered by escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East saw its dominance hit a three-year high of 56.5% on April 13
The Bitcoin Dominance metric refers to the ratio of Bitcoin’s market capitalization to the cumulative market capitalization of all other cryptocurrencies.
While Bitcoin recovered somewhat over the next few days, most of the smaller altcoins failed to gain a foothold and fell sharply in price.
Alternative layer 1 network Aptos and decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap led the declines among the top 50 tokens by market capitalization, falling 35% and 31%, respectively, over the past seven days.
IG Market analyst Tony Sycamore said that bitcoin seems to be on track for a fourth week of decline, with expectations that the Federal Reserve will not raise interest rates further weighed on crypto investment sentiment.
Despite the current negative bias towards risk assets, Sycamore predicts that Bitcoin will gradually climb to around $80,000 in the coming months, depending on whether it can hold on to key support levels.
Sycamore wrote: “If Bitcoin holds above the [$60,000/$58,000] support zone, we expect the uptrend to resume to $80,000,” Sycamore wrote. ”