2019 has so far been a lot better for cryptocurrencies compared to 2018. In the three short months since the start of the year, Since January 1st, the entire cryptocurrency market has gained upwards of $10 billion in capitalization.
What’s more interesting, however, is that more than half of it is coming from altcoins. Bitcoin, traditionally being the forerunner of the market, has also had a good year. The cryptocurrency gained around $3.7 billion in capitalization. In other words, over 60 percent of the market gains can be attributed to altcoins.
And if there’s one thing that’s certain it’s that the last three months saw a lot of mid-cap altcoins surge in price, causing many to maintain that we’ve definitively entered this year’s altseason.
An altcoins season, or “altseason”, is a popular term which is generally used through cryptocurrency-oriented online communities on various social media. It’s used to describe a period in the market cycle when altcoins tend to experience serious spikes in their value against Bitcoin (BTC), which usually also tends to spike the coin’s USD value.
So why have we entered an altseason? For once, the majority of the gains accumulated by the cryptocurrency market so far in 2019 are attributed to gains in alt coins, as we mentioned above.
One more indicator to keep an eye out for is user interest. Google trends, as pointed out by Mati Greenspan, senior market analyst at etoro, make it quite clear that people’s interest in altcoins has recently been skyrocketing.
Another strong indicator is the so-called Bitcoin dominance metric. It’s used to measure Bitcoin’s relative share in the entire cryptocurrency market. At the time of this writing, data from CoinMarketCap reveals that it’s 50.9 percent, which marks a decline upwards of 4 percent throughout the last three months, further cementing the claim that the altseason is here.
Despite being a particularly hot topic at this time, alt coins don’t generate nearly as much interest as they used to back in late 2017 and at the beginning of 2018.
One of the top performing altcoins since the beginning of 2019 is Binance Coin (BNB). It’s currently the 7th largest cryptocurrency by means of market capitalization and it’s trading at $15.25 according to CoinMarketCap. In the time since the beginning of the year, the cryptocurrency has more than doubled in value.
