Ethereum and Bitcoin market dominance through the last two bear markets

I noticed something looking at charts for the first time in a long time today. The market dominance of Bitcoin and Ethereum have changed pretty significantly over the past two bear markets.

Ethereum

ETH started 2018 on a high having pumped with most other alts as money shifted to Alts after Bitcoin hit its peak in December 2017. It topped out at about 26% of the crypto market before falling steadily over the next two years, bottoming out at about 7% of the crypto market in Jan 2020. Since then it rose in dominance as a bull market took over.

Here’s where it gets interesting: when the market turned bearish yet again in late 2021, ETH did not fall in market dominance this time, holding between about 18-20% of the crypto market (aside from a dip to ~15% in summer 2022). This seems to suggest that people have more long term faith in ETH after the switch to POS and genesis of L2s and are keeping their money there.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin on the other hand started 2018 at its lowest point in terms of market dominance at just 37%. Again this was due to traders moving their money to Alts as Bitcoin had stagnated after its then ATH in December 2017 and many alts were pumping at the time. However once the bear market set in traders moved their money back into the safest coin and Bitcoin’s market dominance rose back up to over 70% of the market by fall 2019.

This continued until spring 2021 when the bull market was in full swing and Bitcoin was near its ATH but had lost some market dominance when it fell back to about 40% of the total market. When the current bear started though it did not rise to its previous dominance of the past bear. It has mostly stayed between ~40-50% of the market since mid 2021.

What does this mean?

I’m not an analyst and don’t pretend to have any concrete conclusions on what this means. I mostly thought it was interesting and wanted to spark some discussion about the two largest coins and their dominance in the overall market. Bitcoin has lost market dominance, but that is pretty natural since it was over 95% of the crypto market until 2017. This bear market would seem to suggest though that traders are more willing to keep their money in other coins like ETH instead of just BTC.