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.