Bitcoin Dominance

Data to 2026-09-18. On-chain metrics are fetched on a rotation, so this can trail the build by a few days.

How to read it

Bitcoin dominance is Bitcoin's share of total crypto market capitalisation. Rising dominance means capital is concentrating in Bitcoin; falling dominance usually means speculative appetite has moved further out the risk curve into smaller assets.

How it's calculated

Bitcoin's market cap divided by the market cap of all crypto assets.

What it did in past cycles

The full range is wide: 99.1% on 2013-05-29, when there was barely anything else to own, down to an all-time low of 32.1% on 2018-01-13 at the height of the ICO mania.

Cycle anchors: 88.1% (2013-12-04), 54.5% (2017-12-16), 41.4% (2021-11-08), 57.1% (2025-10-06). The 2025 reading breaks the downtrend — the first cycle top at which Bitcoin's share was higher than at the previous one.

The January 2018 low is the sharper observation. It arrived four weeks after Bitcoin's December 2017 top, not before it: the altcoin blow-off outlasted Bitcoin's own peak by a month. Dominance troughs are a late signal for Bitcoin, not a leading one.

What it doesn't tell you

The denominator is the problem. Anyone can create a token and assign it a nominal market cap, and thousands have — so dominance falls partly because the measured universe keeps expanding. Stablecoins, whose supply tracks demand for dollars rather than speculation, are usually included too.

Both effects push the same way, which means part of the 88% → 32% decline was definitional rather than economic. A token that trades a thousand dollars a day against a nominal multi-billion valuation counts in full.

Stablecoins deserve their own mention, because they now account for a large share of the denominator and behave nothing like the rest of it. Their supply expands with demand for dollars on-chain, so a surge in stablecoin issuance mechanically lowers Bitcoin dominance while telling you nothing about appetite for risk. Readings that treat dominance as a risk-appetite gauge are reading a number that partly measures demand for the opposite.

Reading it with other metrics

Fear & Greed uses dominance as one of its own inputs, so the two are not independent readings.

Market cap is the numerator on its own — worth checking alongside, because dominance can rise either from Bitcoin gaining or from everything else falling faster, and those are very different markets.

The forks page is the same question asked at its most brutal: what happened to the assets that split from Bitcoin and competed with it directly.