Are Altcoins Really Beating Bitcoin? This Test Says No

The data suggests recent altcoin strength may be concentrated in a few tokens rather than spread across the broader market.

A crypto trader has challenged the idea that altcoins are broadly outperforming Bitcoin after comparing prices on August 22 and September 9, when BTC was near the same level on both dates.

The comparison found that most large altcoins had barely moved, while a smaller group posted clearer gains.

Analyst Tests Altcoin Performance Against Bitcoin

Denis Liu, who goes by “VirtualBacon” on X, said in a post on September 9 that claims of widespread altcoin outperformance often come with a long list of examples, but that a simpler test gives a different picture.

The trader compared altcoin prices on two dates when Bitcoin was trading at almost the same level. The OG cryptocurrency was at $78,313 on August 22 and $78,440 on September 9, leaving it almost unchanged over the 17-day period.

Against that baseline, Ethereum (ETH) was down 1%, Ripple’s XRP fell 2%, Dogecoin (DOGE) declined 2%, Tron lost 1%, and Cardano (ADA) was down 3%. Avalanche (AVAX) was the exception among the larger names, gaining 2%.

VirtualBacon pointed out that six of the nine largest altcoins were within a few percentage points of their August 22 levels, with the argument being that these tokens moved higher when Bitcoin rose, then gave back much of those gains when BTC stalled.

“A coin that only moves louder than Bitcoin is still following Bitcoin,” the trader added.

However, he noted there were exceptions, with Solana gaining 10% across the comparison, BNB rising 9%, and Chainlink climbing 5%.

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Still, those gains came with a catch, with the market watcher arguing that traders needed to have owned those coins before the narratives became widely discussed. Waiting for the story to spread can mean entering after much of the move has already happened. That is why Liu said he was holding BTC rather than chasing the stronger-performing altcoins.

“I’m sitting in Bitcoin and waiting,” he wrote. “Not because altcoins are finished, I do not think that at all. It is because ‘altcoins are outperforming’ turned out to mean two or three of them did.”

The Bullish Case Still Making the Rounds

The pushback comes as a competitive narrative is circulating, including from analyst Matthew Hyland, who claims more than 100 top altcoins are outperforming Bitcoin across multiple timeframes.

He kicked things off in July, arguing that altcoins are set up for years of outperformance because macro-risk indicators are turning bullish for the first time since the 2016-2017 and 2020-2021 cycles.

Additionally, he flagged several altcoin gauges, including Total 2, Total 3, and OTHERS, breaking multi-year downtrends, and floated the idea that the “largest altcoin bull run of all time” was loading, with altcoin perpetual futures open interest overtaking Bitcoin’s for the first time since December 2024.

Whether that setup plays out is a separate question from what VirtualBacon’s price check actually shows: over a flat two and a half weeks for Bitcoin, most of the market’s biggest alts barely moved at all.