Bitcoin dominance waned in July after gaining ground the previous month, CoinDesk Indices Head of Research Todd Groth told"First Mover" TV hosts on Tuesday.
Groth tied the trend reversal to an absence of the sort of catalysts that drove bitcoin's price dramatically higher in June, and Ripple's partial win last month in an ongoing court case with the Securities and Exchange Commission that buoyed altcoin investors. The decision in U.S. federal court found that the sale of Ripple’s XRP tokens on exchanges and through algorithms did not constitute investment contracts and raised hopes that the SEC could not deem other tokens as securities.
"What it basically did was allowed for a lot of the altcoins to catch up with where bitcoin was, and even Etherium relative to the small cap universe," Groth said. In the days following the ruling, Coinbase, Kraken and other exchanges re-listed or announced plans to reopen trading of XRP and trading of the token mushroomed. Meanwhile, bitcoin slogged steadily downward to finish July off 5%, the second monthly decline in an otherwise upbeat year. The BTC dominance rate in July sank below 49% in July after rising over 52% near the end of June. The CoinDesk Market Index was off only about 1%.
"That was really driven by computing sector, DeFi and digitalization , which have the small tokens relative to currency and smart contract platforms where bitcoin and Etherium reside," Groth said.