Crypto Market Gains Retrace As Ethereum Merge Draws Closer

In August, crypto market sentiment was more positive. The space saw double-digit gains in digital assets during the first week. The market is not able to maintain its bullish trend and cryptos are starting to lose the gains they made in the first week. Although the asset’s are generally at positive levels, last week’s gains were not as impressive as the ones from the previous week.

All across the board, weekly gains drop

For the week, the weekly gains in the crypto market were down. As one would expect during recovery periods, the Small Cap Index remained the obvious winner. However, it wasn’t as close to the gains recorded the previous week.

With 8% gain last week, Small Cap altcoins won the race with an impressive 8%. This put it 2% ahead of the Mid and Large Cap Index and 5% better than Bitcoin’s performance. But, small-cap altcoins are more volatile than the rest of the indexes. This is why there are large swings between gains and losses.

Surprisingly, the Large Cap Index outperformed the Mid Cap Index’s returns last week. The Mid Cap is usually more successful than the Small Cap in such cases. However, last week it posted 6% growth, which was equal to the Large Cap Index.

Crypto total market cap chart from TradingView.com

Bitcoin again was among the worst performers. This index was able to see a mere 3% gain, keeping it well ahead of other indexes. 

Bitcoin sees a decline in crypto market dominance

Over the past two years, Bitcoin’s dominance in crypto markets has fallen. The entry of other popular cryptocurrency like Ethereum has forced the leader asset to lose more market share in order to make way for newer assets. Altcoins have continued to build on the market share that was already taken by Ethereum, even though it has so much.

Bitcoin’s market dominance fell again last week. The 0.42% taken over by altcoins has now dragged bitcoin’s dominance down to the 40% territory. Ethereum has a rapidly growing market share. Last week’s 0.89% increase in the altcoin brought its market share to over 20%, or 20.74% as of today.

Stablecoins also lose market share, as investors take on more risk. USDT and USDC saw declines respectively of 0.03%, 0.17 and 0.03%. Surprisingly Dogecoin gained 0.15% market dominance while Solana received a 0.01 increase.

More than $50 billion has been wiped from the crypto market cap to bring it down to $1.10 trillion as of the writing.

Featured image taken from Analytics insight. Chart from TradingView.com

Follow Best Owie on Twitter for market insights, updates, and the occasional funny tweet…

Get more Crypto News at CFX Magazine