How to read Bitcoin dominance
Dominance is a relative measure: it tells you who is winning, not whether the market is going up. That is why it is only useful next to Bitcoin's own trend. DanioX reads it the same way every time:
- BTC.D rising — Bitcoin outperforms and alts bleed against it. This feeds the Bitcoin Season score.
- BTC.D falling while BTC holds above its 50-day EMA — capital is rotating into alts without Bitcoin breaking down. This is the classic alt-season condition and feeds the Alt Season score.
- BTC.D falling while BTC is weak — usually a flight into stablecoins, which raises their share of the market. Not a healthy rotation.
Where the numbers come from
The current dominance value comes from CoinGecko's global market data. CoinGecko only publishes today's shares on its free endpoint, so the 7-day and 30-day changes are modelled: each large coin's market cap on past days is estimated from its Binance price, stablecoins are held flat, staked ETH follows ETH and the long tail follows an equal-weight basket of about 40 alts. Supply changes are ignored, so treat the chart as a trend indicator and the headline number as the reference value. A deadband of ±0.05 percentage points stops tiny moves from flipping the signal.
Dominance in the bigger picture
Dominance sits in the middle of the macro chain. Gold and the US dollar tend to move first, then stocks, then Bitcoin, and only after that does money spread into alts. So a dominance top usually needs support from outside crypto: a softer dollar index, stable yields and a rising ETH/BTC ratio. When those line up and the altcoin season index climbs toward 75, the rotation is broad.
Nothing on this page is a trade recommendation. Dominance can stay high for months, and alt rallies inside a rising-dominance market are common and short. See the methodology for the exact weights.