After the Terra LUNA Fallout, Bitcoin Dominance Climbs Higher While Ethereum's Valuation Shrinks

Following the Terra LUNA and UST fallout, digital currency markets have dropped in value as the crypto economy dropped 6.93% from $1.356 trillion on May 22, to today’s $1.262 trillion. Amid the market carnage, bitcoin’s market dominance has increased to 43.8%, reaching the highest value since October 30, 2021. Moreover, ethereum’s market dominance has slid from 19.56% on April 16, to today’s 17.1%.

Bitcoin Dominance Reaps Rewards from Terra’s Demise

• Bitcoin (BTC) dominance among the 13,445 crypto market caps in existence today is 43.8%, the highest it has been in roughly 209 days, since October 30, 2021. The rise in market dominance follows the recent Terra blockchain fiasco that caused a significant amount of value to leave the crypto economy.
• For example, amid LUNA’s and UST’s death spiral and the crypto market carnage on May 10, 2022, archived data indicates BTC dominance was 39.4%, while ethereum (ETH) dominance was 18.4%. On that day, BTC was changing hands for $30,118 and ETH was swapping for $2,225 per unit.

• The spike on October 30, 2021 was a brief BTC dominance rise to 44%, as dominance hit a low of 40% a month prior, during the first week of September 2021. Prior to the October 30 BTC dominance level, August 21, 2022 was the last time BTC was in the same range in terms of dominance among the 13,445 crypto market caps.
• In terms of dominance, BTC beats ETH in not only market capitalization today, but also daily trade volume and 24-hour mining reward revenue.
• Bitcoin transaction fees are also much lower as the cost per average BTC transfer is 0.000068 BTC or $1.98 per transaction, while the average ETH transaction fee is 0.0045 ETH or $8.06 per transfer.
• While ETH’s median transaction fee is 0.0022 ETH or $3.84 today, BTC’s median-sized transfer cost is 0.000026 BTC or $0.753 per transaction.

• As ETH dominance sinks and BTC dominance rises, a number of other alternative assets have faltered in value and have lost significant market cap dominance.
• For example, on September 4, 2021, XRP’s dominance was 2.53% and today XRP dominance is only 1.51%. One alternative crypto asset that has seen its dominance rise is tether (USDT) as USDT’s market valuation dominance was above 3% on September 4, 2021, and today it’s 5.78%.