Altcoins looking up again
After materially underperforming BTC in 2019, altcoins have seen a massive run-up so far in 2020. Bucking the previous bull trends in which BTC’s price rose upwards and altcoins traded sideways, altcoins have outperformed BTC over the past month or so. Moreover, BTC dominance fell below the 63% mark for the first time since Sep’19. Despite the current rally, a majority of altcoins are still 60-80% off their all-time highs in late 2017 and early 2018. Among altcoins, privacy coins such as XMR, DASH, and ZEC have outperformed BTC by >50%.
Privacy coins had materially underperformed BTC over the past 18 months due to the lack of a truly viable privacy-focused value proposition, increased regulatory scrutiny, and BTC’s growing stature as the preferred SoV and MoE for crypto transactions. Barring the near transactional anonymity offered by privacy coins, BTC outperforms privacy coins in almost all other aspects such as developer funding, institutional interest and mindshare. That being said, the US Fed chairman recently commented on the importance of privacy and how private crypto transactions will aid in global crypto adoption, sparking a bullish sentiment for privacy coins.