Only 9 of the Top 50 Altcoins Have Beaten Bitcoin Since Its Peak: Picking the Winners Is Brutal

For years and years, the promise of investing in altcoins has been pretty straightforward: accept additional risk in exchange for returns that Bitcoin can no longer deliver as the market leader. That’s the theoretical part, at least.

In reality, though, identifying the handful of alts that can actually outperform BTC over a longer timeframe remains remarkably difficult.

Fresh data from Glassnode illustrates the issue: only 9 of the 50 largest alts at the time of BTC’s peak last October have since generated returns better than bitcoin’s. 9 Out of 50 The winner is quite obvious: Zcash (ZEC).

The privacy token stands comfortably at the top, delivering almost 14.5 times BTC’s return over the period. HYPE, which is second in line, stands far behind with gains of around 2.9x. XMR and NEAR have produced increases of 2.6x and 2.1x, respectively, compared to BTC.