Bitcoin Dominates Crypto Market Rally as Altcoins Lag

Bitcoin is trading near $79,000, up roughly 24% over the past week and on pace for its best run since 2023. Altcoins, the rest of the crypto market after Bitcoin, are supposed to be the more volatile side of the trade, swinging harder than Bitcoin in both directions. This week, that didn't happen—the broader market grew, just not enough to catch up.

Ethereum led the alt basket, climbing about 30% over the same week to above $2,500. But Total3, the index that strips out both Bitcoin and Ethereum to isolate the rest of the market, cooled after an early burst and now sits around $753 billion—down for the week even as Bitcoin pushed toward $80,000.

Total2, which tracks the full altcoin market, told a similar story. It jumped more than 24% between August 19 and 22 as the initial rally spread beyond Bitcoin, pushing it back above $1 trillion. Since then it's given some of that back, trading near $1.05 trillion and down over the past two days while Bitcoin kept climbing.

That pattern shows up most clearly in a metric called Bitcoin dominance—Bitcoin's share of the entire crypto market. If altcoins were truly outperforming, dominance would fall as money spread into smaller coins; instead it climbed to around 61% this week before correcting to about 59%, near its highest level of the year.

The CoinMarketCap Altcoin Season Index backs that up. It tracks how many of the top 100 coins have beaten Bitcoin's price over the trailing 90 days, on a scale where a reading above 75 signals altcoin season and near 25 signals Bitcoin season. At 46, most altcoins are still losing that race.

What's actually driving Bitcoin

The move traces to last Wednesday, when the U.S. Treasury said it would double its long-bond buybacks—purchases of the government's own debt meant to prop up demand and ease borrowing costs—from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation starting September 9. That weakened the dollar and pushed investors toward bitcoin as an inflation hedge, the same trade that has helped push gold to records this year.

President Donald Trump added pressure two days later, meeting crypto executives at the White House and pushing Congress to pass the Clarity Act, a bill that would settle which U.S. regulator oversees which crypto assets.

As Bitcoin broke through $70,000, traders who had bet against it were forced to buy back in at a loss to close those bets—a short squeeze—and Bitget Wallet research analyst Lacie Zhang estimated more than $4 billion in crypto shorts got liquidated over two to three days.

A sustained break above $80,000 could open a path toward $82,000 to $87,000, with $75,000 to $76,000 acting as the main pullback zone. The Senate is scheduled to take up the Clarity Act again in mid-September.