Altcoin dominance has been at its highest point since June of 2018 after the price of Bitcoin took a tumble over the weekend. At press time, BTC dominance was sitting at 39.98%. ETH held the second-highest share of the market, with roughly 20 percent dominance; Binance Coin, DogeCoin, Cardano, Tether and XRP followed.
While BTC is still up roughly 55 percent since January 1st, the price of BTC has declined significantly over the past several days.
A number of analysts are pointing the finger at Tesla Founder, Elon Musk, who abruptly announced that the company would be halting the acceptance of Bitcoin payments. Additionally, Musk seemed to hint that Tesla may be offloading some of its BTC holdings but later clarified that Tesla has not sold any of its Bitcoins.
Is This an “Alt Season”?
However, beyond Elon Musk analysts have been noticing a trend toward an “alt season” for several months.
In early May, Chad Steinglass, Head of Trading at CrossTower, told Finance Magnates that: “as BTC has been struggling to find direction for weeks, ETH and many other altcoins have taken over traders’ attention.”
Indeed, while Bitcoin’s performance has gotten much positive coverage this year, it has paled in comparison to that of Ether (ETH) and other altcoins.
Still, Steinglass said, Bitcoin bulls were hoping for some good news; “After consolidation in BTC towards the end of April, bulls got their hopes up for an announcement of another company adding BTC to currency reserves during the heart of tech earnings season,” he said.
CrossTower’s Chad Steinglass.
“However, earnings reports came and went with no mention of BTC, and in fact, of the major companies that had already been involved, TSLA trimmed their holdings somewhat and Microstrategy (MSTR) did not add during the recent dip.”
Indeed, some crypto analysts believed that Tesla’s initial entry into Bitcoin would inspire other corporations to do the same, but the public entry of other large companies into Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies has failed to materialize in a meaningful way.
Now that Tesla is taking a step back from Bitcoin, it seems the opposite could happen. When the announcement was made, Elon also said that Tesla would be exploring other cryptocurrencies with lower environmental impacts. However, the communities of these possible 'other cryptocurrencies' have had mixed responses.
