Only six altcoins in the top 50 have outperformed Bitcoin this year

Only six altcoins among the top 50 tokens by market cap have managed to outperform Bitcoin (BTC $65,093) so far this year, as Bitcoin dominance reached a three-year high over the weekend. 

The memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE $0.16) stands as the best-performing altcoin in the top 50, having posted year-to-date gains of just over 77% — climbing from $0.09 on Jan. 1 to $0.15 at the time of publication, per TradingView data.

Included in the remaining outperformers are fellow memecoin Shiba Inu (SHIB $0.000022), Bitcoin smart contract network Stacks (STX $2.65), Binance’s BNB (BNB $567), Ethereum layer-2 network Mantle (MNT, and GPU-sharing blockchain network Render (RNDR).

Bitcoin has grown from a price of $44,100 on Jan. 1 to $65,000 at the time of publication, a year-to-date gain of 54%.

Many have pegged the price rise to consistent institutional inflows into the 10 U.S.-traded spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) approved in January this year, generating more than $12 billion in cumulative net inflows, per Farside Investors data.

Notably, Bitcoin dominance pushed to a new year three-year high of 56.5% on April 13, as the cryptocurrency bounced back sharply from a marketwide sell-off sparked by escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.

Bitcoin dominance reached its highest level on April 14. Source: TradingView

The Bitcoin dominance metric refers to the ratio of Bitcoin’s market cap compared to the cumulative market cap of all other cryptocurrencies.

While Bitcoin recovered ground in the following days, the majority of smaller altcoins failed to find their footing and tumbled significantly in price.

Alternative layer-1 network Aptos (APT $9.27) and decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap (UNI $7.46) led the decline among the top tokens 50 by market cap, posting losses of 35% and 31%, respectively, in the last seven days.

In an April 14 investment note viewed by Cointelegraph, IG Market analyst Tony Sycamore said Bitcoin appears to be on track for its fourth weekly decline, with the expectations of no further Fed rate weighing on crypto investing sentiment.

Despite the current negative-leaning sentiment toward risk assets, Sycamore predicted that Bitcoin would gradually climb to around $80,000 in the coming months — depending on whether or not it can hold above its key support mark.

“Providing Bitcoin remains above the [$60,000/$58,000] support zone, we expect the uptrend to resume towards $80k,” Sycamore wrote.