What Is Bitcoin Dominance?

Just before 6pm Singapore time on 13 October 2026, three big crypto data sites gave three different answers to the same question. CoinGecko's public data feed said bitcoin made up 59.8% of the crypto market. CoinMarketCap said 59.9%, and TradingView's chart put it at 60.4%.

Nobody had made a mistake. Each site was dividing by a different total, and that one detail is most of what there is to know about bitcoin dominance once the definition is out of the way. What follows is for education and is not financial advice.

The sum, with real numbers

Bitcoin dominance is bitcoin's market capitalisation as a share of the combined market capitalisation of every coin a data provider tracks. Market cap is price multiplied by the coins in circulation, so both halves of the fraction change every few seconds.

Using CoinGecko's figures from that snapshot, bitcoin was worth about $1.68 trillion and the whole market about $2.81 trillion. Divide the first by the second and you get 0.598, which is 59.8%.

Ether came next at 10.9%, and in third place sat USDT, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, at 6.6%. Hold on to that last number.

All three sites run exactly the same division, and where they differ is in what goes underneath the line.

Why two sites never quite agree

The top half of the fraction causes little argument, because everyone counts roughly the same number of bitcoin at roughly the same price.

The bottom half is where they part company: TradingView's index, listed as CRYPTOCAP:BTC.D, divides by the combined market cap of the top 125 coins and nothing else. CoinMarketCap listed 8,145 active cryptocurrencies that day, and CoinGecko's global total drew on more than 21,000 tracked coins. Cut off the long tail and bitcoin's slice of a smaller pie gets bigger, which fits TradingView showing the highest of the three readings. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap were a fraction of a point apart that evening, so most of the disagreement sat between them and TradingView.

Copies cause a second split, because wrapped bitcoin, bridged tokens and liquid staking tokens are claims on coins that already sit in the total once, so counting them again inflates the denominator. CoinGecko says it leaves wrapped, bridged and staked tokens out of its global market cap for that reason.

The working rule follows: only compare dominance figures from the same source, because a 2018 reading from one site set against a 2026 reading from another can show a move that never happened.

Stablecoins drag the number down

A stablecoin is built to hold its price at $1. Its market cap grows when more tokens are issued, not when anybody bids it up. Yet in the standard calculation it sits in the denominator next to everything else.

Picture the 13 October market with $50 billion of new stablecoins minted overnight and every price frozen. Bitcoin's $1.68 trillion would then be divided by $2.86 trillion, and its dominance would drop from 59.8% to just under 59% without anyone buying or selling a single bitcoin.

Real issuance has been far larger, with DefiLlama's stablecoin tracker putting the supply of dollar-pegged coins at about $27.4 billion on 1 January 2021 and about $311 billion on 13 October 2026, more than eleven times as much. With everything else held equal, every extra dollar of that nudged bitcoin's percentage lower. CoinMarketCap's own stablecoin tally was smaller that day, at about $283 billion, one more boundary the trackers draw in different places.

Remove just USDT and USDC from CoinGecko's 13 October numbers and bitcoin's share of what is left rises from 59.8% to about 66%. That gap is why at least one TradingView community indicator strips those two coins out, so that bitcoin is measured against coins whose prices actually move.

Thirteen years of the chart

CoinMarketCap's daily records go back to late April 2013, when bitcoin was 94.2% of a market worth about $1.6 billion. For almost four years it hardly mattered what else existed: between May 2013 and the end of February 2017, dominance was above 80% in 1,272 of 1,400 daily readings.

Then the ICO boom arrived. Dominance began 2017 at 87.3%, slipped under 80% on 14 March and was down to 45.7% by 1 June, as ether and XRP surged and tokens sold through initial coin offerings poured into the totals.

The bottom came on 14 January 2018, when bitcoin's share fell to 32.4% with the whole market valued at about $744 billion, and that is still the lowest daily figure in CoinMarketCap's history. In just over a year the total market had grown from about $17.7 billion to $744 billion, and more than two-thirds of that new value sat in coins other than bitcoin.

Later cycles never went that far: dominance was 39.3% on 19 May 2021 and dipped to 37.7% on 9 September 2022.

A long climb followed, which crossed 60% in November 2024 and peaked at 65.1% on 27 June 2025, its highest reading since January 2021. The total market at that peak was about $3.27 trillion, more than four times its size at the 2018 low. So far in 2026 it has stayed in a narrow band, from 57.3% on 4 June to 60.6% on 5 May.

Alternative.me's Crypto Fear and Greed Index, a bitcoin-only sentiment gauge, gives dominance a 10% weight and reads a rising share as a sign of fear.

What the ratio cannot tell you

Dominance is a fraction, and fractions hide direction. Bitcoin can lose value and still gain share, as long as everything else loses more.

2018 shows it plainly. Between 14 January and 15 December that year, bitcoin's market cap on CoinMarketCap fell from about $241 billion to about $57 billion, a drop of more than three-quarters. Over the same months its dominance climbed from 32.4% to 55.2%. Anyone reading only the percentage would have seen strength.

Early 2021 ran the other way, as between 1 January and 14 April bitcoin's market cap more than doubled, from about $539 billion to about $1.19 trillion, yet its dominance fell from 70.5% to 54.0% because the rest of the market rose faster still.

Nor does the number explain itself. A rising share might mean money moving into bitcoin, or it might equally mean other coins shrinking faster, or stablecoin issuers redeeming more tokens than they mint in a given month, and the line on the chart looks identical either way. It is silent about size too, because 94.2% of a $1.6 billion market in 2013 and 59.8% of a $2.81 trillion market in 2026 get described with exactly the same word.

It gets quoted as an altcoin signal, but all it records is relative size after the fact.