Altcoin Underdogs Outperform Bitcoin To Kick Off 2022

Keshav Verma

Last Updated: June 11, 2024 7:43 am

3 mins read

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Altcoins have started the year 2022 with an overperformance over Bitcoin. Out of all the various indexes, the mid-cap coins seem to have accumulated the most gains so far.

Bitcoin Starts The Year Underperforming The Altcoins

As per the latest weekly report from Arcane Research, Bitcoin’s 2022 has started with the coin underperforming in front of various altcoins.

Throughout 2021, most of the altcoins managed to beat BTC in terms of overall gains. And it looks like this year also hasn’t been any different so far.

Here is a chart that shows how the various altcoins have compared with Bitcoin since the start of this year:

Looks like every index has beaten BTC so far in the year | Source: The Arcane Research Weekly Update - Week 52

In the above graph, all the altcoins have been separated into different “indexes” based on their market capitalization.

The three categories include the large-cap index, the mid-cap index, and the small-cap index. The various coins fall into these divisions depending on where their market cap stands, and their gains as a whole are considered in the chart.

As you can see in the graph, Bitcoin seems to have lagged behind the rest of the indexes, with the crypto dipping 3% into losses since the start of the year.

The mid-cap altcoins have performed the best so far, managing profits of around 8% since the start of January. Their success is thanks to the great performance of layer-1 tokens like Cosmos.

The large and small-cap indexes are also in the green, amassing 3% and 4% gains, respectively, since the new year.

A consequence of Bitcoin’s underperformance has been that the cryptocurrency’s dominance has been dropping recently.

The below table shows how the market share of the top coins has changed in the past week.

USDT seems to have gained the most market share in the last seven days | Source: The Arcane Research Weekly Update - Week 52

Bitcoin’s market share is now around 39.5%, which is the lowest it has been in almost three years. It now remains to be seen whether the crypto’s underperformance will come to an end soon, or if 2022 is going to be like 2021 all over again, with altcoins thriving.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $46.2k, down 3% in the last seven days. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 6% in value.

Here is a chart that shows the trend in the price of the crypto in the last five days:

BTC's sideways movement seems to have carried on into 2022 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Arcane Research

Keshav Verma

Keshav is currently a senior writer at NewsBTC and has been attached to the website since June 14, 2021.

Keshav has been writing for many years, first as a hobbyist and later as a freelancer. He has experience working in a variety of niches, even fiction at one point, but the cryptocurrency industry has been the longest he has been attached to.

In terms of official educational qualifications, Keshav holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from one of the premier institutes of India, the University of Delhi (DU). He started the degree with an aim of eventually making a career in Physics, but the onset of COVID led to a shift in plans. The virus meant that the college classes had to be delivered in the online-mode and with it came free time for him to explore other passions.

Initially only seeking to make some beer money, Keshav unexpectedly landed clients offering real projects, after which there was no looking back. Writing was something he had always enjoyed and to be able to do it for a living was like a dream come true.

Keshav completed his Physics degree in 2022 and has been focusing on his writing career since, but that doesn’t mean his passion for Physics has ended. He eventually plans to re-enter university to obtain a masters degree in the same field, but perhaps only to satiate his own interest rather than for using it as a means to find employment..

Keshav has found blockchain and its concepts fascinating ever since he started going down the rabbit-hole back in 2020. On-chain analysis in particular has been something he likes to research more about, which is why his NewsBTC pieces tend to involve it in some form.

Being of the science background, Keshav likes if concepts are clear and consistent, so he generally explains the indicators he talks about in a bit of detail so that the readers can perhaps come out having understood and learnt something new.

As for hobbies, Keshav is super into football, anime, and videogames. He enjoys football not only as a watcher, but also as a player. For games, Keshav generally tends towards enjoying singleplayer adventures, with EA FC (formerly FIFA) being the only online game he is active in. Though, perhaps due to being ultra-focused on the game, he is today a semi-pro on the EA FC scene, regularly participating in tournaments and sometimes even taking back prize money.

Because of his enthusiasm for anime and games, he also self-learned Japanese along the way to consume some of the untranslated gems out there. The skill didn’t merely remain as just a hobby, either, as he put it to productive use during his exploration for small-time gigs at the start of COVID, fulfilling a couple of Japanese-to-English translation jobs.

Keshav is also big into fitness, with agility and acceleration-related workouts making a big part of his program due to the relevance they have in football. On top of that, he also has a more traditional strength based program for the gym, which he does to maintain an overall fitness level of his body.

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