Bitcoin (BTC) could be getting ready to make a big surge to the upside, surmounting its all-time high, and heading into price discovery. Altcoins are not going to be left behind, and signs are that some of the top alts could be about to outperform.
Higher lows for altcoins, but previous bull market high must be surpassed
Source: TradingView
The weekly chart for Total2 (combined market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies excluding $BTC) shows a series of higher lows since the bull market began in early January 2023. This has not been broken, even during the big 49% correction from December 2024 through to April 2025.
An ascending trendline has also continued to be respected throughout this bull market, and big horizontal support levels are doing their job thus far.
Be that as it may, the current altcoin bull market has still not equaled the highs of the last bull market that topped in November 2021. That $1.7 trillion top will need to be surpassed if the altcoins are going to continue to climb higher in successive bull markets.
That said, perhaps things will begin to change now. In all probability, at least 99% of the current crop of altcoins are likely to go to zero, given the real lack of proper use cases.
Bitcoin dominance just keeps going up
Source: TradingView
The Bitcoin dominance chart (BTC.D) illustrates just how difficult things have been for the altcoins, even from before the start of the bull market. An inexorable rise in Bitcoin dominance was only punctuated by one big 11% swing back to the altcoins in November 2024. Other than that, the trend has been upward. 68% and then 70% dominance levels could be next.
Some of the best altcoins will outperform
With all this said, there are very likely going to be certain altcoins that will not only have their boats floated by the rising tide of Bitcoin, but they may outperform the king of the cryptocurrencies into the bargain. Why could they do this? The main reason is the vastly inferior market caps compared with $BTC.
The $ETH market cap is around 7x less, while the $SOL market cap is only $79 billion, compared with $BTC’s $2.12 trillion. Other layer 1s and fundamentally good altcoins have an even greater disparity compared with Bitcoin. Therefore, the cream of the altcoins (perhaps with some of the hot air memecoins) could make much bigger percentage gains than Bitcoin, going into this potentially last stage of the bull market.
In order to take advantage of these outperformers, it’s not about watching how they perform against a weakening USD pair, it’s about carefully measuring how they square up to their BTC pairs. Look for breaks of trend against BTC, and bounces from strong support levels. If your particular altcoins are not beating $BTC, they just aren’t worth holding on to.
