Rationale

The biggest discrepancies in the current data landscape come from different definitions of the total crypto market cap. TradingView is the most referenced bitcoin dominance calculation, since it's ubiquitous for technical analysis.

Although TradingView advertises that Bitcoin dominance is calculated by dividing the Bitcoin market cap by the overall market cap of the top 125 coins, we found this to be incorrect. TradingView doesn't publish which provider it uses for the top 125 coins, but we could not reproduce their dominance numbers with any combination of top 125 data from CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, CoinPaprika or LunarCrush. We believe that TradingView took a snapshot of the top 125 coins when they first created their BTC.D feed and have been using it ever since. Since the top 125 coins fluctuate daily, we believe a dynamic approach is superior.

Methodology

After consulting backdata and running standard deviation discrepancy tests, we concluded that using the total market capitalization of the top 200 cryptocurrencies leads to the most uniform data.

To calculate the dominance of a particular cryptocurrency, we find:

Per-provider Dominance calculation

$$X\ dominance = \frac{X\ market\ cap}{\sum top\ 200\ market\ caps}$$

Provider & Exclusions

We currently source market caps from CoinGecko. We exclude the following tokens from our calculations:

• Tokens with <$1000 volume in the last 24 hours
• Wrapped or staked tokens