Bitcoin Price Fails to Paint ATH as Crypto Market Slides $40 Billion (Market Watch)

Bitcoin came about $1,000 away from painting a new all-time high record, but the subsequent rejection drove the asset down below $56,000. Nevertheless, minor retracements among the altcoins have enabled BTC to recover some of its recently lost market dominance.

Bitcoin Came Less than 2% Away from its Record

The past several days have been quite bullish for the primary cryptocurrency after it recovered from the latest dip to $47,000. However, as institutional interest only intensified, bitcoin’s price headed north.

This led to reconquering $50,000, but the bulls didn’t stop there and pushed the cryptocurrency to a new two-week high above $57,000. According to data from Bitstamp, BTC’s daily high yesterday was at around $57,400.

To put this amount into perspective, it was just $1,000 (or 1.75%) shy of reaching the all-time high record of $58,400 marked in mid-February. Although BTC failed to breach it and has retraced slightly and it currently trades around $44,600.

What’s arguably more notable to point out is that bitcoin’s market capitalization has remained well above the coveted $1 trillion mark.

Stalling Alts Increase BTC’s Dominance

Most alternative coins spiked in value with their leader lately, which led to Ethereum adding approximately $400 in days and surging past $1,800. However, ETH has declined slightly since yesterday and has dipped beneath that particular level.

Cardano (-5%), Polkadot (-5%), Ripple (-5.2%), Chainlink (-5.8%), and Uniswap (-5%) have lost some steam in the past 24 hours.

Binance Coin and Litecoin have remained relatively still and continue to trade around $275 and near $195, respectively.

Cryptocurrency Heatmap. Source: Coin360

Somewhat expectedly, the situation within the lower- and mid-cap altcoins is significantly more volatile. Theta Fuel (50%) leads the surging pack, followed by Hedera Hashgraph (25%), THETA (19%), Basic Attention Token (15%), Zilliqa (12%), and Bitcoin Gold (11%).

In contrast, Polygon has lost the most value since yesterday with a 10% drop. Avalanche (-9%), Decentraland (-9%), Fantom (-6.5%), and PancakeSwap (-6%) are next.

The stalling larger-cap altcoins have inadvertently assisted bitcoin in regaining some ground in terms of market dominance. The metric comparing BTC’s market cap with the rest of the alts has expanded above 61% after struggling to stay north of 60% just a few days ago.