Bitcoin dominance on the rise: Are altcoins struggling to keep up?

At the time of writing, most altcoins are following Bitcoin in an upwards direction. Still, there’s much room for improvement for a great deal of cryptocurrencies that are still lagging behind their all-time highs, allowing Bitcoin to push for more market domination.

A clear exception has been Binance Coin, which has been able to sustain strong growth past its peak price, and I argue it will most likely not slow down.

Will other altcoins continue to follow Bitcoin? Or will the market suddenly shift momentum?

Bitcoin’s dominance consolidating

Bitcoin dominance reached around 60% in December 2018. This subsequently dropped, and up until April 2019, BTC was struggling to get past 55%. However, we then experienced a major push in Bitcoin prices, sending its market dominance through the roof and allowing BTC to reclaim a great chunk of the market – about 10% to be precise – between April and May.

Looking at the EMAs, we can clearly see Bitcoin is on a path to even greater domination.

My medium-term analysis is that Bitcoin will move to around 70% domination of the market to break its record highs. After that, we should expect the altcoin market to explode and retake about 20-30% of the market share, as this is similar to what has happened in previous years. Volumes usually don’t lie, and we’re clearly on an uptrend.

On the other hand, in case investors decide to be more risky, we could see altcoins keeping up with Bitcoin during the bull-trend without losing much of their cap. However, I would assign a lower probability to this hypothesis.

EOS struggling with centralisation

EOS’ decline on Sunday was consistent with the broader cryptocurrency market. Most of the top-ten coins were down by at least 2%. The overall market capitalisation of all cryptocurrencies has fallen to around $248 billion – nearly $40 billion lower than the yearly high.

Despite the pullback, the long-term view on EOS remains bullish following the successful breach of $6.00 back in May. This resistance-turned-support provides a solid base for further gains.

However, Weiss Ratings – the first ratings agency to publicly evaluate blockchain projects – has downgraded EOS due to “serious problems with centralisation”. The rating agency said Block.one, the company behind EOS, failed to address these concerns at its most recent industry conference in Washington DC, where it announced plans to launch a new social media platform instead.

EOS’ problem with centralisation is a multi-faceted one. The platform caps block producers at 21 and has some control over the manner in which coins are distributed. As Forbes pointed out last August, “EOS is in almost every way more centralised than Ethereum.”

To put things into perspective, while EOS currently has about 200 nodes operating and validating transactions, Ethereum has about 8,300 nodes doing the same tasks. That means Ethereum has around 40x more nodes securing the network.

How do you think EOS will be able to compete in terms of decentralisation?

Vertcoin making a comeback?

As per Vertcoin’s June development update, the project was recently given a revamp and more focus was given to marketing and advertising. After previously having zero marketing presence on Google and YouTube due to the crypto ad bans, a test ad campaign has since been successfully launched on both platforms after the bans were relaxed. The update states:

“With most ad systems now allowing some form of crypto/software ads, we are testing the waters. We started running ads on May 13th and are going to do a solid 30 days before we revisit and adjust the campaigns accordingly.”

The results of the ad campaign as of June 5 show 26,000 impressions across all platforms. Those impressions garnered 3,800 interactions, equating to around a 15% engagement rate. The vast majority of interactions came from mobile devices (77%).

Notably, the adverts that directed users towards the Vertcoin website did much better than video-focused ads. One set of results shows over 1,000 clicks going through to the website and just 11 clicks on a Vertcoin intro video in the same time period.

At the same time, VTC jumped about 63%, making it one of the weekend’s winners.

I’m not sure if the news was a bit over-hyped, but it’s great to see Vertcoin making a move upwards. Hopefully, it’ll continue to work on new releases targeting GPU-based machine users, which will help in increasing adoption rates.

Binance Coin on the rise

Unlike all other altcoins, BNB has been trading quite positively against Bitcoin, most likely due to the recent IEO launch successes on Binance Launchpad.

As Binance consolidates its position as the most important exchange for crypto-to-crypto trading, it’s also taking a large chunk of Ethereum’s market, as it enables projects to release their own tokens through its limited blockchain.

In essence, with IEOs, Binance has made itself the new gatekeeper for most new projects, with the idea of helping investors to make better decisions.

Clearly, CZ’s strategy is working: BNB has been showing signs of great strength not only against the USD, but also against BTC, its major trading pair.

I’m of the opinion this bull cycle will take BNB to stratospheric levels, assuming the project continues to attract more and more cryptocurrency users.