The market has been dominated by altcoins, despite Bitcoin having a good year in 2021. Many altcoins have risen to new heights this year, even though market-mover Bitcoin had been stagnant at times. The altcoins have remained dominant in the market due to this move and the adoption boom.
Altcoins Rule 2021
This year saw many innovative things come out of altcoin and also have seen success. When we consider the performance of certain assets, 2021 is basically one long alt season.
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Decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs and, more recently, metaverse popularity have fueled a lot of the growth. They have also brought out some great projects that saw their tokens rise due to it. They largely followed bitcoin’s growth. Sometimes, however, they were able to break free of the bitcoin growth and rally by themselves.
Source: Altcoins Total market Cap on TradingView.com| Source: Altcoins Total Market Cap on TradingView.com
It has seen bitcoin lose a large portion of its market share to altcoins. Starting the year out at about 75% of total market dominance, it has now fallen to 38% where altcoins have continuously eaten into the pioneer cryptocurrency’s market share. As the biggest market share, Ethereum led this charge.
Memecoins were also popular in this market. Coins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu grew into the thousand and million percentile, as well as “ETH killers” also making a play in the market.
Mid-Caps take the lead
Altcoins were always in the top three percent of the annual gains. The only index to return double-digit gains was Bitcoin, despite its incredible run this year. Other indexes saw gains, including the small, medium, and large caps.
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Bitcoin’s returns for the year only came out to 73%. While this is still vastly ahead of top investment vehicles like gold, the S&P, and NASDAQ, it still performed poorly in comparison to the other indexes.
Mid Cap Index has the highest 2021 returns | Source: Arcane Research
Large Cap Index had the second lowest returns at 179%. However, it still saw more than 100% better returns than bitcoin. Small Cap Index saw impressive returns, reaching up to 485% in the course of the year.
Finaly, the Mid Cap Index won the 2021 election with returns of 830%. It consists mainly of Layer 1 tokens that saw some of the highest gains, surpassing even ethereum with its huge 485% year-end returns.
Featured Image from Investment U. Charts by Arcane Research and TradingView.com