Dominance
Market cap is 'price × circulating supply' — a measure of how much money sits in a coin. Dominance treats the whole crypto market as one pie and measures how big a given coin's slice is. Bitcoin's slice of the pie is Bitcoin dominance.
The key point: dominance is a ratio, not a price. Bitcoin's price can sit perfectly still, but if altcoins surge and the whole pie grows from $4 trillion to $5 trillion, Bitcoin dominance falls from 60% to 48%. Conversely, in a marketwide crash where altcoins fall harder, dominance rises even though Bitcoin's price dropped.
People watch dominance anyway because they want a read on where the market's money is flowing. The folklore goes: when markets get scary, money huddles into Bitcoin — the biggest, oldest coin (dominance rises); when markets heat up, money spreads into altcoins chasing bigger gains (dominance falls).
That's where the famous line 'when dominance rolls over, altseason begins' comes from — the expectation that money piled into Bitcoin will flow out into altcoins and lift them all at once. Such periods genuinely existed in the past, which is why the folklore spread. Some also watch stablecoin dominance (coins pegged to the dollar) alongside it, to gauge how much money has fled to cash.
But ratio indicators always carry a trap. A single move in dominance blends together completely different situations: 'Bitcoin rose,' 'alts fell,' 'both fell but alts fell harder.' From dominance alone you can't even tell whether the market is going up or down.
What the data actually shows
Barobara's verification method is to count 'when this indicator did X, what actually followed in the past.' Dominance deserves the same question — plenty of people have heard 'when dominance rolls over, alts rally,' but very few have ever counted it. When Barobara counted Bitcoin chart signals this way, most came out close to a coin flip afterward (you can check signal by signal in the setup catalog). Being famous and having predictive power are two different things, and dominance folklore earns no exemption from verification.Common misconceptions
'Falling dominance means altseason is coming' — a few past occurrences don't make a law. Dominance can fall because alts are surging or simply because Bitcoin is weak on its own, and those two situations produce completely different outcomes for an altcoin investor.
'Rising dominance = rising Bitcoin price' — dominance is a ratio. If the whole market is falling and altcoins are falling harder, dominance rises anyway. Rising dominance doesn't mean Bitcoin holders are making money.
FAQ
Q. Where can I check Bitcoin dominance?
It's free on TradingView (ticker BTC.D), CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, and similar sites. Note that each site aggregates a slightly different universe of coins, so the numbers differ a bit. It's best used for the trend rather than the absolute value.
Q. Below what percentage of dominance is it altseason?
There is no verified threshold. Numbers like 40% or 50% get passed around, but no basis for them has ever been confirmed — and with the market's structure itself constantly shifting (like the growing stablecoin share), yesterday's threshold can't simply be reused today.