Bitcoin dominance increases in January
The cryptocurrency market has long been talked about in terms of dominance of the Queen Bitcoin and in second order of Ethereum on those that are instead considered as altcoins. Until a few years ago, the prevalence of Bitcoin’s capitalization over the others was over 60% and that of Ethereum was approaching 30%.
How the dominance of Bitcoin and Ethereum has changed
According to the research and analysis company Statesman from 2011 to 2021 the dominance of altcoins grew by almost 30 percentage points, carrying that of Bitcoin below 40% e the one of Ethereum below 20%.
Again according to a recent Statista report Bitcoin’s dominance on January 17 reached with the 39.4% its lowest point since May 2018. Singular then drop in Ethereum dominance to 17.7%, also thanks to the respective increase in the dominance of cryptocurrencies, such as Solana, Cardano and Polkadot, which together reach about 6% and which are among its fiercest competitors.
But in the past two weeks the dominance of Bitcoin seems to be recovering slightly, with the passing of the level of 40%, on January 19th.
“Bitcoin’s dominance continues to decline and recently reached its lowest level in just over three and a half years. This is largely due to the fact that bitcoin’s correlation with the S&P 500 is now more prevalent, suggesting that investors trade bitcoin and stocks together as risky assets. ”
he stated in an interview a few days ago Jon Ovadia, CEO of the cryptographic company OVEX.
The data concerning the stablecoins that, with 170 billion dollars of total value, represent approximately 9% of the entire market capitalization to over 2 trillion dollars and that of smart contract platforms, with over 738 billion dollars, which instead represent almost 35%.
Finally, the data concerning the capitalization of the market for meme coin, as Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, that now they account for over 2% of the entire cryptocurrency market.
Non-Bitcoin digital payments on the rise
But the fact that the importance of Bitcoin is becoming less predominant in the cryptographic ecosystem it is also certified by a report of Bitpay Inc, one of the largest companies for payments in digital currencies.
According to report, consumers and businesses would be starting to more and more use digital tokens other than Bitcoin for purchases, while the CEO of the same digital payment company, Stephen Pair, in 2019 stated that beyond the 95% of payments were made with Bitcoin.
Last year, however, the use of Bitcoin at merchants using BitPay is dropped to about 65% of payments processed, down from 92 percent in 2020, the company said in a recent statement to Bloomberg news agency.
As for the other cryptocurrencies used with Bitpay, purchases with Ether represented 15% of the total, stablecoins 13% and the new coins added to BitPay in 2021, such as Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Litecoin, represented around 3%.