Only six altcoins from the top 50 tokens by market cap have surpassed Bitcoin (BTC) in terms of performance this year, as Bitcoin dominance reached its highest point in three years over the weekend.
Leading the pack is the memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE), which has seen year-to-date gains of over 77%. It has climbed from $0.09 on January 1st to $0.15 at the time of publication, according to TradingView data.
The other altcoins that have outperformed Bitcoin include Shiba Inu (SHIB), Stacks (STX), Binance’s BNB, Ethereum’s layer-2 network Mantle (MNT), and Render (RNDR), a GPU-sharing blockchain network.
Bitcoin itself has grown from $44,100 to $65,000 since the beginning of the year, marking a gain of 54%.
The rise in Bitcoin’s price has been attributed to the consistent inflow of institutional investments into the 10 US-traded spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that were approved in January. These ETFs have generated over $12 billion in cumulative net inflows, according to Farside Investors data.
Notably, Bitcoin dominance reached a new three-year high of 56.5% on April 13th, as the cryptocurrency rebounded strongly from a marketwide sell-off triggered by escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.
While Bitcoin recovered from the sell-off, most smaller altcoins have struggled to regain their footing and have experienced significant price declines.
Among the top 50 tokens by market cap, Aptos (APT), an alternative layer-1 network, and Uniswap (UNI), a decentralized crypto exchange, have suffered the biggest losses in the past seven days, dropping by 35% and 31% respectively.
According to IG Market analyst Tony Sycamore, Bitcoin is on track for its fourth consecutive weekly decline, with the lack of any further Federal Reserve rate weighing on investor sentiment in the crypto market. However, Sycamore predicts that Bitcoin will gradually climb to around $80,000 in the coming months, as long as it remains above its key support level of $60,000 to $58,000.
Despite the current negative sentiment towards risk assets, Sycamore remains optimistic about Bitcoin’s future performance.