Altcoin Indices Outperform Bitcoin, Small Caps Lead the Market

Data shows that all altcoin indices have outperformed Bitcoin over the past month, with small-caps emerging as market leaders.

The last 30 days were green for both Bitcoin and Altcoins

According to the latest weekly report from Arcane Research, all indices post positive returns in the 27-31% range over the last month. “Altcoin indices” here refer to groups of altcoins divided based on their market capitalizations. The benefit of creating crypto indices is that it makes it easy to assess the performance of different market segments against each other in this way.

There are three main altcoin indices: the “small caps”, the “mid caps” and the “large caps”. As is clear from their names, each of them covers coins of different sizes.

Now, here’s a chart showing how these three indices have performed against each other, as well as against Bitcoin, over the past month:

It seems that all these indices have experienced a strong increase in the last few days | Source: Ahead of the Curve by Arcane Research – Jan 17

As shown in the chart above, both altcoins and Bitcoin saw very little price action in the last third of December, as their returns were close to 0%. However, this trend began to change a couple of weeks ago, as a bullish price action finally returned to the market after what was a full year of mostly bearish movement in 2022.

In the period since then, the entire market has seen a significant increase, as all segments of the market are making major gains now. The winner over the past 30 days has been the small cap, which is currently 31% in the green.

An interesting aspect to note is that small caps suffered the most at the end of 2022, ending the year significantly below the water level than the other indices (as can be seen in the chart). . This makes them turn around and outperform the rest of the market even more impressive.

Both large-cap and mid-cap investors are earning returns of 28% each at the moment, not far behind the performance of small-caps. Bitcoin has also seen positive returns very close to 27% over the past month, but clearly, altcoins have managed to outperform the pioneering crypto during this period.

As for Ethereum’s performance over this same period, the asset with the second-largest market capitalization in the sector has seen gains of more than 32% in the last month, meaning that on its own it has outperformed the peers. indices.

The report notes that the main reason behind the outperformance of alts is because these indices saw a deeper drop than Bitcoin during the period after the FTX debacle in November last year.