Bitcoin dominance steadily declined in April 2024 to below ** percent, amid rumors of central banks halting or potentially lowering interest rates in the future. Within the crypto world, this so-called "dominance" ratio is one of the oldest and most investigated metrics available. It measures the coin's market cap relative to the overall crypto market — effectively showing how strong Bitcoin compared to all the other cryptocurrencies that are not BTC, called "altcoins". Why dominance matters is because market caps of any crypto can change relatively quickly, either due to sudden price changes or a change of recorded trading volume. Essentially, the figure somewhat resembles a trading sentiment, revealing whether Bitcoin investors are responding to certain events or whether Bitcoin is losing out on functions offered by, for example, stablecoins or NFT tokens. "Dominance" criticism: Ethereum and stablecoin The interpretation of the Bitcoin metric is not without its criticism. When first conceived, Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to be created and had a substantial market share within all cryptocurrencies? The overall share of stablecoins, such as Tether, as well as Ethereum increasingly start to resemble that of Bitcoin, however. Some analysts argue against this comparison. For one, they point towards the large influence of trading activity between Bitcoin and Ethereum in the dominance metric. Second, they argue that stablecoins can be traded in for Bitcoin and Ethereum, essentially showing how much investors are willing to engage with "regular" cryptocurrency. A rally around Bitcoin in late 2023? By December 2023, the Bitcoin price reached roughly 41,000 U.S. dollars — the first time in 20 months such a value was reached. A weaker U.S. dollar, speculation on decreasing interest rates, and a potential Bitcoin ETF approval are believed to be at the heart of this price increase. Whether this will hold in 2024 is unclear: The monthly interest rate from the U.S. Fed is speculated to decrease in 2024, despite a vow of "higher for longer". In December 2023, the thought of decreasing interest rates and the potential of a Bitcoin ETF fuelled market sentiment towards riskier assets.

Analysis of ‘Crypto Fear and Greed Index’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/adelsondias/crypto-fear-and-greed-index on 13 February 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Crypto Fear and Greed Index

Each day, the website https://alternative.me/crypto/fear-and-greed-index/ publishes this index based on analysis of emotions and sentiments from different sources crunched into one simple number: The Fear & Greed Index for Bitcoin and other large cryptocurrencies.

Why Measure Fear and Greed?

The crypto market behaviour is very emotional. People tend to get greedy when the market is rising which results in FOMO (Fear of missing out). Also, people often sell their coins in irrational reaction of seeing red numbers. With our Fear and Greed Index, we try to save you from your own emotional overreactions. There are two simple assumptions:

• Extreme fear can be a sign that investors are too worried. That could be a buying opportunity.
• When Investors are getting too greedy, that means the market is due for a correction.

Therefore, we analyze the current sentiment of the Bitcoin market and crunch the numbers into a simple meter from 0 to 100. Zero means "Extreme Fear", while 100 means "Extreme Greed". See below for further information on our data sources.

Data Sources

We are gathering data from the five following sources. Each data point is valued the same as the day before in order to visualize a meaningful progress in sentiment change of the crypto market.

First of all, the current index is for bitcoin only (we offer separate indices for large alt coins soon), because a big part of it is the volatility of the coin price.

But let’s list all the different factors we’re including in the current index:

Volatility (25 %)

We’re measuring the current volatility and max. drawdowns of bitcoin and compare it with the corresponding average values of the last 30 days and 90 days. We argue that an unusual rise in volatility is a sign of a fearful market.

Market Momentum/Volume (25%)

Also, we’re measuring the current volume and market momentum (again in comparison with the last 30/90 day average values) and put those two values together. Generally, when we see high buying volumes in a positive market on a daily basis, we conclude that the market acts overly greedy / too bullish.

Social Media (15%)

While our reddit sentiment analysis is still not in the live index (we’re still experimenting some market-related key words in the text processing algorithm), our twitter analysis is running. There, we gather and count posts on various hashtags for each coin (publicly, we show only those for Bitcoin) and check how fast and how many interactions they receive in certain time frames). A unusual high interaction rate results in a grown public interest in the coin and in our eyes, corresponds to a greedy market behaviour.

Surveys (15%) currently paused

Together with strawpoll.com (disclaimer: we own this site, too), quite a large public polling platform, we’re conducting weekly crypto polls and ask people how they see the market. Usually, we’re seeing 2,000 - 3,000 votes on each poll, so we do get a picture of the sentiment of a group of crypto investors. We don’t give those results too much attention, but it was quite useful in the beginning of our studies. You can see some recent results here.

Dominance (10%)

The dominance of a coin resembles the market cap share of the whole crypto market. Especially for Bitcoin, we think that a rise in Bitcoin dominance is caused by a fear of (and thus a reduction of) too speculative alt-coin investments, since Bitcoin is becoming more and more the safe haven of crypto. On the other side, when Bitcoin dominance shrinks, people are getting more greedy by investing in more risky alt-coins, dreaming of their chance in next big bull run. Anyhow, analyzing the dominance for a coin other than Bitcoin, you could argue the other way round, since more interest in an alt-coin may conclude a bullish/greedy behaviour for that specific coin.

Trends (10%)

We pull Google Trends data for various Bitcoin related search queries and crunch those numbers, especially the change of search volumes as well as recommended other currently popular searches. For example, if you check Google Trends for "Bitcoin", you can’t get much information from the search volume. But currently, you can see that there is currently a +1,550% rise of the query „bitcoin price manipulation“ in the box of related search queries (as of 05/29/2018). This is clearly a sign of fear in the market, and we use that for our index.

There's a story behind every dataset and here's your opportunity to share yours.

Copyright disclaimer

This dataset is produced and maintained by the administrators of https://alternative.me/crypto/fear-and-greed-index/.

This published version is an unofficial copy of their data, which can be also collected using their API (e.g., GET https://api.alternative.me/fng/?limit=10&format=csv&date_format=us).

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

It is estimated that the cumulative market cap of cryptocurrencies increased in early 2023 after the downfall in November 2022 due to FTX. That value declined in the summer of 2023, however, as international uncertainty grew over a potential recession. Bitcoin's market cap comprised the majority of the overall market capitalization. What is market cap? Market capitalization is a financial measure typically used for publicly traded firms, computed by multiplying the share price by the number of outstanding shares. However, cryptocurrency analysts calculate it as the price of the virtual currencies times the number of coins in the market. This gives cryptocurrency investors an idea of the overall market size, and watching the evolution of the measure tells how much money is flowing in or out of each cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency as an investment The price of Bitcoin has been erratic, and most other cryptocurrencies follow its larger price swings. This volatility attracts investors who hope to buy when the price is low and sell at its peak, turning a profit. However, this does little for price stability. As such, few firms accept payment in cryptocurrencies. As of June 25, 2025, the cumulative market cap of cryptocurrencies reached a value of ******.

Note: This version simply updates the dataset with a new Readme - Supplementary Material file.

The paper describing this dataset can be cited as:

Zilius, K., Spiliotopoulos, T., & van Moorsel, A. (2023). A Dataset of Coordinated Cryptocurrency-Related Social Media Campaigns. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 17(1), 1112-1121. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v17i1.22219

Abstract

The rise in adoption of cryptoassets has brought many new and inexperienced investors in the cryptocurrency space. These investors can be disproportionally influenced by information they receive online, and particularly from social media. This paper presents a dataset of crypto-related bounty events and the users that participate in them. These events coordinate social media campaigns to create artificial "hype" around a crypto project in order to influence the price of its token. The dataset consists of information about 15.8K cross-media bounty events, 185K participants, 10M forum comments and 82M social media URLs collected from the Bounties(Altcoins) subforum of the BitcoinTalk online forum from May 2014 to December 2022. We describe the data collection and the data processing methods employed and we present a basic characterization of the dataset. Furthermore, we discuss potential research opportunities afforded by the dataset across many disciplines and we highlight potential novel insights into how the cryptocurrency industry operates and how it interacts with its audience.