Bitcoin has had a favorable year in 2021 but the altcoins have dominated the market. The advent of the alt seasons this year had seen multiple altcoins rally towards new highs even when market-mover bitcoin had remained stagnant at times. This move, coupled with the growth and adoption that rocked the crypto space this year, has proven that the altcoins dominated the market on a large scale.
Altcoins Rule 2021
So many new things came out of the altcoin industry this year and have found success at the same time. Basically, the year 2021 has been one long alt season when we look at the performance of some of these assets.
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A lot of this growth has been driven by decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, and most recently, the metaverse gaining popularity among investors. These have brought to the forefront some interesting projects that have had their tokens rally because of it. Most of the time, they followed the growth of bitcoin. While at other times, these assets broke free and rallied on their own accord.
Altcoins market cap at $1.32 trillion | Source: Altcoins Total Market Cap on TradingView.com
This has led to bitcoin losing a significant portion of its market dominance 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. Ethereum was, as always, leading this charge as it took the largest chunk of the market share.
Memecoins also found favor in the market this year. 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 always showed out in the indexes with triple-digit gains for the year. Bitcoin which had a tremendous run of it this year still recorded the lowest gains being the only index that returned double-digit gains. All other indexes, the small, mid, and large cap indexes enjoyed the majority of the gains.
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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 records highest returns of 2021 | Source: Arcane Research
The Large Cap Index saw the second-lowest returns with 179%, but even it saw returns over 100% higher than that of bitcoin. The Small Cap Index made a splash with returns reaching as high as 485% for the year.
Finally, the Mid Cap Index came out as the winner for 2021 marking returns of 830%. This index consists mostly of Layer 1 tokens which had seen some of the most gains for the year, outperforming even ethereum despite its massive 485% returns for the year.
Featured image from Investment U, charts from Arcane Research and TradingView.com
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