The Bitcoin and crypto market cap figures that we get from CoinMarketCap, whilst being infinitely more reliable than its data on daily volumes, just tell us how much of each particular cryptocurrency is out there.
But with vast swathes of these tokens being held by early adopters, whales, exchange wallets, or just forever lost, it doesn’t answer the question. Just which cryptocurrencies are investors actually holding in their portfolios?
Market Cap vs Dominance and Popularity
Fortunately, the team behind the Shrimpy Portfolio Management app has dug into their extensive sample data to give us a snapshot.
Ignoring market cap, we will instead look at the dominance of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies within portfolios and their popularity.
The dominance indicates the average weighting of a cryptocurrency within the portfolios. This ignores the relative values of the portfolios. So a $100 million portfolio containing 25% BTC and a $10k portfolio containing 75% Bitcoin, would still average out at 50% BTC.
Popularity measured what percentage of the sample portfolios hold a particular token, ignoring the relative proportion in each. So if each of 10 portfolios contained 5% ETH, then ETH would have a popularity of 100%.
The Popular Kids In School: Bitcoin, Ethereum and…
Obviously there is likely to be some overlap between Bitcoin, crypto market cap, and our dominance and popularity metrics. Let’s consider popularity.
Shrimpy found that unsurprisingly, Bitcoin was the most popular token, appearing in 72.4% of portfolios. However, Ether was also held by more than half (54.5%) of investors.
Other popular cryptocurrencies were Binance Coin (40.1%), XRP (38.7%), Litecoin (37.7%), Stellar (32%), EOS (27%), Cardano (26.3%), Bitcoin Cash (24.5%) and Monero (21.4%).
The Heavyweights
Bitcoin again unsurprisingly comes top in the dominance metric, making up an average of 26% of the portfolios sampled. However, Ether has an average weighting of 7.4%, far more than might be expected from its market cap.
Other cryptocurrencies with significant dominance figures are Tether (4%), XRP (3.9%), Binance Coin (3.6%), Litecoin (3%), Cardano (2.2%), Stellar (1.8%) and EOS (1.6%)
Key Points To Take Away
While Bitcoin SV ranks number 6 in market cap, it was neither popular nor dominant in the portfolios used as the sample for this analysis.
Binance Coin over-performs in both popularity and dominance considering its market cap, while Bitcoin Cash underperforms in both of these measures.
Tether has a relatively high dominance, but is not particularly popular, suggesting that the portfolios which do hold Tether hold a large proportion of it.
Shrimpy also recently published a report trying to ascertain the actual number of trades processed by exchanges daily.
Does your crypto portfolio consist primarily of Bitcoin? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Image via Shutterstock
Bitcoin 
Ethereum 
Tether 
BNB 
USD Coin 
XRP 
Binance USD 
Cardano 
Solana 
Dogecoin