Bitcoin Dominance

Bitcoin Dominance plots BTC’s share of the total tracked cryptoasset market capitalisation as a single 0–100% line, drawn against the right axis. The muted line behind it is Bitcoin’s USD price on the left log scale, carried forward so regime shifts can be read alongside price action. Coverage starts 1 May 2013 — among the longest single-line histories on the site — and runs to the most recent daily close.

Today’s reading is 58.6% — Mid-band — on 1,596 daily observations, with an implied total cryptoasset market cap of $2174.34B. Over the last 60 days dominance has moved +0.1 pts. The crucial thing the line hides is that it is a ratio: it can rise because Bitcoin gained, because alts bled, or because tokens left the basket — three different stories that print identically.

The formula is mechanical:

Dominance = BTC market cap / Total cryptoasset market cap

Bitcoin market cap is spot price × circulating supply — the latter deterministic from the halving schedule and including any coins long since lost. That is the well-behaved half. The denominator is the sum of every tracked cryptoasset’s market cap, including stablecoins (USDT, USDC, DAI…) and wrapped tokens (WBTC, stETH…) — and it is the half that misbehaves. Different publishers track different baskets and apply slightly different inclusion rules, so dominance numbers across sites disagree by a percentage point or two on the same day. Provenance for the basket we ship is documented on the data sources page.

The 60-day trend cell on the reading row above tracks the change in dominance over a rolling 60 trading days, expressed in percentage points. A +2 pts move over 60 days reads as “Dominance expanding”; a −2 pts move reads as “Dominance contracting”; between the two is “Stable”. Sustained directional motion over two months is more meaningful than the instantaneous level, especially in a market where the absolute number is structurally biased by stablecoin supply growth. For the regime classifier and threshold choices, see the methodology page.

Reading dominance against canonical cycle anchors makes the cyclic pattern explicit. The 2013 cycle topped near 88.5%; the 2017 cycle topped near 53.0%, a totally different basket; the dominance ATL came roughly a month later as ICO supply saturated the denominator. The 2018 cycle low pulled dominance back near 55.0%, while the 2022 post-FTX trough bottomed deep in the altcoin-led band near 38.5%; the 2024 pre-halving high sat above 50% at a cycle peak for the first time since 2017. Broadly, cycle tops have anchored to lower dominance levels over time — consistent with a maturing market in which the alt complex commands a larger share — though the pattern is not strictly monotonic, and the live extremes table below shows where it breaks.

One thing the dominance line does not advertise: the denominator it divides into has not been the same denominator. Dominance is the ratio of Bitcoin to a basket that gained a new vertical in every cycle, and watching the line slide from 95% to 38% is partly the story of the denominator’s growth, not just Bitcoin’s relative weakness. The era table below is this page’s distinctive contribution: it names exactly what entered the basket each cycle, so a cross-cycle comparison can be made with eyes open.

A second cut: dominance's range within each cycle window. The broad tendency runs in two directions — cycle highs have come down from the near-total dominance of the early years, and the floor has lifted off the 2018 sub-33% trough. Neither move is strictly monotonic, though: as the table shows, the 2025–present high ticked back up versus the prior cycle, and the very first cycle's low sits above every trough that followed it. The basket has grown more diverse and, on balance, the floor has thickened.

It is not a directional Bitcoin signal. Dominance is a relative-performance ratio, and reading high dominance as “bullish for BTC price” or low dominance as “bearish” mistakes the ratio for the numerator. The 2017 cycle top printed dominance near 53.0% with Bitcoin at a fresh ATH — and dominance kept sliding for roughly another month, only dropping below 40% in early 2018 as ICO supply saturated the denominator, well after the price top. The 2018 bear bottom (15 Dec 2018) printed dominance back above 50% with Bitcoin down sharply from that high. Same line, opposite price stories — because what moved was the denominator, not BTC.

Stablecoin flows move it on days nobody traded Bitcoin. A $5B stablecoin mint enters the denominator as fresh market cap and compresses dominance by ~0.2 pts on a market-flat day. The mirror image is the USDC SVB de-peg week (10–13 Mar 2023): ~$3B of USDC briefly evaporated from the basket, nudging dominance up without a single Bitcoin changing hands. When dominance and the Altcoin Season Index — which excludes stablecoins by construction — disagree, the disagreement is the signal.

Token-cap resets fake out the trend. When UST broke peg on 9 May 2022 and LUNA collapsed to effectively zero inside four days, tens of billions left the denominator and dominance jumped — not because anyone bid Bitcoin, but because the basket shrank. The same one-way ratchet happens whenever a large alt or stablecoin implodes (FTT in Nov 2022, the broad 2022 alt drawdown): dominance “improves” on destruction. A rising line during a crisis is often the basket dying, not Bitcoin winning.

No two trackers measure the same basket. The total cryptoasset market cap depends on which assets are listed, which exchanges feed prices, and how illiquid micro-caps are filtered, so different sources publish dominance numbers on the same day that differ by a point or more. The Real Bitcoin Dominance Index strips stablecoins and non-proof-of-work assets and prints in the 70–76% range over recent years — a different reading of the same underlying question. We ship one consistent basket; do not splice readings across providers into one series.

If you only hold Bitcoin, dominance is peripheral — it tells you how the rest of the complex is doing, not what your position is worth. The one genuinely useful read is regime context: sustained low-dominance stretches have historically coincided with the speculative, late-cycle phase, so a falling line is a soft “closer to the top than the bottom” tell, never a precise one.

If you allocate across the broader complex, the 60-day trend is the cell that matters, not the instantaneous level. Several percentage points of sustained motion over two months tends to anchor a durable rotation; whiplash around a flat level is noise. Pair it with the Altcoin Season Index, which reads the BTC-versus-alts rotation without stablecoin distortion, and the stablecoin float to separate a mechanical denominator move from a real altcoin bid.